Effects of Genre-Based Instruction on Students’ Writing Performance: The Case of Algerian Management Students

Faiza SEKKAL

Email: sekkalfaiza@yahoo.fr

Abstract

            Teaching low proficiency students to write whole texts is often fraught with difficulties. The latter has to create a text that is both rhetorically and linguistically appropriate. As a result, the teaching of writing tends to be taught in a way that focuses at the sentence level and these learners often have minimal, if any, awareness at the level of complete texts. Thus, in order to empower ESP students with the consciousness to recognise rhetorical and linguistic features that are used to construct and shape whole texts especially business related text-types, there has been a move towards explicit teaching of genres in many contexts. In this respect, the current study aims at investigating the impact of explicit instruction of the genre of job application letter on the written English performance of management students in the faculty of Economics and Management, Algeria. These students were exposed to a range of model-texts and they were involved in a range of learning activities that were related to discourse and language features of the target genre. Additionally, pre- and post-tests were conducted. Results indicate that the scores obtained by the students in the post-test showed improved performance in writing the target genre in comparison with the pre-test scores.

Key words: ESP, genre-based instruction, business writing, writing performance.

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