Exploring consciousness-raising impacts of a genre-based pedagogy in the context of an Iranian university students’ academic writing.

Abstract

This paper explores the consciousness-raising impact of a genre-based pedagogy which was deployed in the context of undergraduate EFL students at Tabriz as a means of improving students’ argumentative writing. The consciousness-raising impact was explored from the linguistic perspective only: generic structures at the level of genre and grammatical metaphor (GM) at the level of lexico-grammar. The communicative impact of GM deployment in making ‘a reasoned argument’ and its qualitative and quantitative complementarities with the generic structures and the type of genre were explored across the students’ texts, respectively. This study was carried out at three stages of pre-test, exposition and discussion genres. The pre-test examined the students’ level of English language proficiency without any feedback or the teaching and learning activities. In the exposition and discussion genres a cyclical way of teaching and learning which was mainly based on modelling of text, joint construction of text, and independent construction of text (Martin and Rose 2007; Feez 1998; Christie 1999; Knapp and Watkins 2005) were deployed. The key findings from the analysis of generic structures revealed that the selected samples indicated major reflection of the recruited genres in the post-test texts. That is, the introduction of genre-based pedagogy in this context has enabled the students to deploy the generic structures appropriately in comparison with the pre-test texts. Therefore, diverse execution of generic structures was found across the three stages of the pre-test, exposition and discussion text-types. While in the pre-test texts only some of the students’ texts complied with the Sydney genre school convention, in the exposition and discussion text-types nearly all of the students employed these features. In addition, some of the pre-test samples indicated a kind of rejection of topic in which they developed their own stories and shifted away from arguing to offering advice as an evident deviation from the standard structures in the literature. However, after the application of pedagogy the kind and frequency of rejection decreased in the post-test texts. The analysis of GM was carried out quantitatively and qualitatively. In quantitative analysis, three distinct but interrelated statistical analyses were carried out across the selected samples. In the first step the analysis was based on Ravelli’s (1985, 1999) categorisation of GM. All of the selected texts were analysed according to this model. The second step was the analysis of subcategories of nominalisation in the pre-test, exposition and discussion genres. The last step devoted to the statistical analysis of complex processes construed as Things. It was found that nominalisation is the major kind of GM and its subcategory in the form of complex processes construed as Things co-varies with the type of genres. The qualitative analysis was based on Halliday (1998) and Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2006) notion of realisation of GM at syntagmatic orders: element, figure, and sequence. The analysis of elemental metaphors according to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2006) taxonomy of types of Things revealed that the students have largely developed ‘macro things’ over ‘simple things’ across the post-test texts. This finding which indicated the complexity of students’ post-test texts was also compatible with Ravelli’s (1985, 1999) distinction of ‘Macro’ metaphors. The analysis of figure and sequence also indicated the development across the students’ texts. More specifically, through the deployment of these features the students shifted the “intraclause” reasoning in the congruent realisation of figures and sequences to “inter-clause” reasoning in the metaphorical forms. This in turn enabled the students to develop ‘buried reasoning’ in their post-test texts and gain better control over the causality relationship and making arguments which correlated with the generic structures at the level of genre. However, there were also cases where the students showed the lack of control in nominalising, particularly in substituting unrelated derivational morphemes, post-positioning modifiers, using unrelated epithets and leaning back into word-to-word literal translation as an indication of the mother tongue interference.