To appear in Current trends in the development of the four language skills, edited by Ester Usó Juan and Alica Martinez (Universitat Juame I, Castellón, Spain), Mouton de Gruyter, Publisher. (2006?)

Research and L2 Writing Instruction

Ann M. Johns
San Diego State University

PRE-READING QUESTIONS

1. What areas of writing research have you already explored, formally or informally? What did you learn from this exploration?
2. What questions now arise about writing as you prepare your curricula, teach your classes, and assess your students?

3. How might you use these questions in a research project for a thesis or dissertation--- or just to increase your knowledge?
4. After you have developed a research question, how will you discover how this question or topic is being discussed in the research and teaching literature? That is, how can you understand, and enter, a “conversation” in the literature about the teaching, learning, and assessing of writing?

1. Introduction
Pedagogies tend to lag behind theory and research---and perhaps they should---until consensus is reached or a major paradigm shift occurs. However, as time passes, second/foreign language writing teachers are influenced by current trends in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, technical writing, and rhetoric, to name a few of the research areas that support our work.

For this chapter, I have selected six issues that are destined to be an integral part of teacher education and academic literacy study in the coming years. These issues fall into two categories: one focusing on past research and the other upon directions for future research. There are features that all topics discussed here have in common: this research will enhance—but also complicate---our work. Busy literacy teachers, many of whom are part-time and underpaid, and busy students, many of whom are enrolled in several classes, work, and/or have families, do not want complications. Busy people want answers, and the answers suggested by the topics discussed here are increasingly messy and complex.

The purposes for this chapter, then, are to explore past writing-related research and look to the future, particularly as it relates to teaching. First, I will delve into the past, using three publications, rich in content, that classify and review recent studies. In this first discussion, arguments in three publications will be outlined (Matsuda & Silva, 2005; Polio, 2003, Silva & Brice, 2004), using the categories suggested by Polio (2003: 37) :
• Research into writers’ texts,
• Studies focusing on writers’ processes,
• Research into participants in the learning and teaching processes, and
• Studies that are concerned with the contexts of writing, both inside and outside of the classroom.
This initial discussion will be followed by comments on some of the directions for future research that may influence L2 writing teaching: studies of corpus linguistics, discourse communities and their genres, and situated texts and their domains.

2. Recent research
2.1. Writers’ Texts
Though a glance through prominent L2 publications such as Journal of Second Language Writing or TESOL Quarterly might cause one to conclude that most of the recent research has dealt with writers’ processes, Silva and Brice argue (2004: 72) that studies of texts, not writers’ processes, continue to dominate the literature. These textual studies have a long tradition, beginning with the 1950s/1960s “Current-Traditional” era when text structure and accuracy were the focus of writing classes (see Johns, 1997: 6-8; Silva, 1990) and continuing into the current era when the study of genres is in vogue. Though research into local, bottom-up features of texts, such as concentrations of grammatical items, is still important, especially in languages for specific purposes contexts, a number of recent projects have dealt with text-related issues that are fully as central to teaching but more difficult to operationalize. Silva and Brice (2004) speak of work which attempts to measure writer genre awareness (within texts) as well as studies that measure the textual features related to individualism and collectivism. New research is also emerging that investigates “intertextuality,” (Bakhtin, 1981), that is, how the writer draws from other “texts” and personal and cultural experiences to construct her own.
In current research contexts, analyses of texts are often combined with other approaches to research, e.g., interviews. In his “Digging up texts and transcripts: Confessions of a discourse analyst,” Hyland (2005) provides a useful description of such text and interview integrations.

2.2. Writer processes
Due to the centrality of the Process Movement to the teaching of writing (see Johns, 1997: 8-13 & Silva, 1990), studies of writing processes are still important to research, as well. In process studies, researchers analyze the ways in which writers plan, draft, revise, and edit their texts. Initially, these studies encompassed the entire writing process, generally within a classroom context (see, e.g., Zamel, 1983). However, more recently, researchers have been investigating student writer sub-processes such as revising, reviewing and annotating texts, backtracking, idea generation, and task representation. Processes of expert writers are also subject to study (see, e.g., Flowerdew, 2005), and research approaches have become increasingly complex (see, e.g., Manchón, Murphy, and Roca de Larios 2005). Silva and Brice (2004) note that context has entered the studies of process, particularly in English as a Foreign language (EFL) environments.
Polio (2003: 44) points out that one of the important and controversial features of process research has been the methodology: capturing what the writer does through a variety of methods such as stimulated recall, interviews, text analysis, observation, and think-aloud protocols.
Since the process movement has revolutionized the teaching of writing, it continues to influence all types of research. For example, genre researchers often refer to the socially-constructed processes that writers undergo as they attempt to produce texts within a complex context (e.g., Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Paré ,1999).

2.3. Participants in the teaching and processes
Learners’ processes have been central---but also studied is the work of teachers, the other major participants in pedagogies. Polio (2003: 50) notes that most of the teacher-centered studies have been qualitative, focusing on issues such as their views and practices in writing, how their views change over time or as they encountered new student populations, and teacher responses to student texts. Students have also been the studied beyond their writing processes, as researchers have delved into their educational experiences in writing classes or content courses, their attitudes toward writing, and the effects of their first languages upon their second language texts. One recent development in studies of students involves the concepts of “voice” and “identity” as student and expert writers interact through text with their academic discourse communities (Silva & Brice, 2004: 75), a topic discussed later in this chapter.

2.4. Contexts for writing
The recent emphases upon the social nature of writing and genre (Hyland, 2003; Swales, 1990) has brought context or (“writing situation”) into the research limelight, an issue that is central throughout this chapter. Polio writes about studies that investigate the goals of programs and writing classes, the tasks characteristic of academic writing classes, and the ways in which features of text interact with the values of a discipline. As all teachers know, assessment is often the major context variable that influences the way in which writing it taught. Silva and Brice (2004, p. 73) report on studies in Europe and Asia, in particular, where teachers’ ratings of student work have been identified and analyzed.
However, research into the influences of context upon writing is still in its infancy. Much more could be accomplished in investigating how writers vary their genres for specific situations, the influences of technology upon texts, particularly how e-mail and the Internet have affected student prose (Silva & Brice, 2004: 75-78), texts and writers’ first cultures, and situated writing in third and fourth languages, among other topics.

I cannot do justice to the reviews of the literature (Polio, 2003, Matsuda & Silva, 2005; Silva & Brice, 2004) from which I have drawn this brief overview. The reader will need to access the original texts for citations and depth of analysis. Instead, I am devoting the remainder of this chapter to speculation, to considering what might be the principal influences upon future research and teaching in second/foreign language writing.

3. The future
3.1. Corpus linguistics
Despite the increasing number of studies in corpus linguistics coming out of Northern Arizona University, University of Michigan, and elsewhere in North America, research in this area has not permeated most of the textbooks and curricula on this continent, either at the teacher education level or at the ESL/EFL student level. In contrast, corpus studies and related pedagogical tools (one only needs to consider the COBUILD series) have been integral to research and curricula in other parts of the world for several years.

Why is this? Why have educators in North America, which produces so many textbooks, been slow to embrace corpus studies? Simpson and Swales (2001: 2) provide us with an answer: in the United States, the influence of Noam Chomsky and his followers “has privileged language structure rather than language use….” Thus, most North American applied linguistics programs and classrooms emphasize grammar over other features of language. In these programs, there are discrete separations among syntax, semantics, and discourse; and language acquisition is generally discussed as a purely cognitive phenomenon. In Europe and in other parts of the world, on the other hand,

…the prime link for linguistics has been between language and social life, and in consequence, there has been a greater interest in usage, in the co-occurrence of certain vocabulary with certain grammatical forms, and in an accounting for linguistic expressions that incorporate social, ideological and emotional factors as well as purely cognitive ones (Simpson & Swales, 2001: 3).

But the tide must turn eventually, even in North America, because corpus linguistics provides avenues for study that are rich, integrated, and contextual. We cannot continue to present separate linguistic topics in our classrooms because, as Graddol (2004) points out, the human brain does not store this information in separate places:

No one has ever successfully produced a comprehensive and accurate grammar of any language… for as Edward Sapir pointed out in the early 20th century, “all grammars leak” (p.8)… It seems that much of what we have expected of grammars can be better explained by focusing on words and the complex way they keep each other’s company… The human brain is able to store experience of how words pattern, what kinds of text they appear in, what kinds of rhetorical structure will follow them. This is the new science of collocation and colligation that illuminates how texts work (p. 1331).

Corpus linguistics acknowledges and plays upon this leakage, revealing not only the incidence of an item but “how words pattern, what kinds of text they appear in, and what rhetorical structures follow them.” Researchers and students in a classroom can now correlate form and meaning and validate the patterns and variations in authentic discourses, something we have been working toward in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) for many years.

Thus, corpus linguistics can radically change our classrooms. By selecting the corpora from targeted genres, teachers can assist students in completing their own research about how language operates: the ways in which form, meaning, discourse and pragmatic factors interact. As a result, the classroom can become more individualized and student-centered, a great service to teachers who know that all classrooms are, by nature, heterogeneous. As Tognini-Bonelli (2001: 41) notes, “What students can derive from corpus work is qualitatively different from descriptive statements found in traditional grammars…students can formulate their own hypotheses and rules inductively from the corpora they select.”

By its very nature, then, corpus linguistics revises the classroom dynamic and establishes the learner as researcher, as Tim Johns, the father of data-driven learning points out: “The task of the learner is to discover the foreign language […] and the task of the language teacher is to provide a context in which [the learner] can learn how to learn” (T. Johns, 1991).

It is possible that corpus linguistics will finally bury the notion of the “ideal speaker/hearer,” for there is none, and the fully absurd notion of ”general English” or a general version of any language?

3.2. Discourse communities and their valued genres
Corpus linguistics is only one leg of the table, one step on the ladder leading to curriculum renovation and research, however. Though valuable for its inductive, empirical base and student-centered approaches, it remains a bottom up research strategy, an approach to patterned uses and immediate, textual contexts of words and phrases. Thus, though corpus studies will help students to analyze a text, it will not give them all the tools they need to read or write one.

So in addition to understanding of language systems that corpus linguistics offers, our students must also have a top-down and context-driven view of text, so that they can better understand writer’s purposes, the context, the argument, and, not incidentally, the discourse community (also called the “community of practice” in the literature) that validates a genre and its ideologies.

This brings us to that ambiguous concept, “discourse community,” that is so much a part of the English for Academic Purposes literature. Since 1990, many of us in EAP have been influenced by John Swales’ much-quoted definition, which is:

1. [A discourse community] has a broadly agreed upon set of common public goals.
2. It has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
3. It utilizes, and thus possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its goals.
4. It uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
5. In addition to owning genre, it has acquired some specific lexis.
6. It has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (Swales, 1990: 24-27).

When this definition appeared in Genre analysis in 1990, we understood that our job as researchers and teachers was to study the “owned genres” and lexis of identified communities in order to assist our students to attain a “threshold level” of acceptance among the community initiated.

After years of working with faculty across the disciplines, I do not doubt that the concept of community (or discipline) is salient among academics. However, as EAP teachers, we confront at least two problems with essentializing “discourse community” within a classroom:

1. The first is that we cannot fully define communities of any type, since they are evolving, fuzzy, and difficult to pin down. John Gumperz (1997), the great anthropologist, has this to say about community definition:
… with the ever increasing pace of change…and large scale population migrations, sociologists as well as anthropologists have all but given up attempts to find empirical ways of defining the bounds of community (Gumperz, 1997: 188).

2. Even if we could essentialize a community at any one moment in time, we know that academic communities continue to change and even die—and in most cases, their major means of communication, e.g., journals, evolve as paradigms shift in the discipline and new journal editors take over (see e.g., Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995). Prior (1998) makes important contributions to this argument when he notes the instability of disciplinary communities and the highly dependent and contextualized process of community initiation.

How about the valued genres that discourse communities that “possess in the communicative furtherance of their goals”? (Swales, 1990, p. 26) Again, we run into instability and evolution of texts augmented by the situated nature of literacies. Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), borrowing from Bakhtin (1981), note the centripetal forces that contribute to the prototypicality of genres across situations but the centrifugal forces that require that a genre be revised for a specific rhetorical situation.

3.3. Situated texts and their domains (activity systems)
Therefore, though valued genres and discourse communities may, in fact, be highly salient to disciplinary faculty, it is the specific situation in which a genre appears that determines how it will be successfully written and interpreted. In a new volume on the rhetoric of everyday life, Nystrand and Duffy (2003: vii) discuss the importance of this situatedness:
… the leading edge of research on writing, reading, and literacy these days is defined by its intersection with sociocultural, historical, political, disciplinary, instrumental and everyday context---each situated and domain-specific.

In each situation, writers draw from community genre knowledge and domain and revise texts to serve their own purposes within a rhetorical site. To give a personal example: though I wrote many acceptance and rejection letters (each of which was somewhat different) in my years as co-editor of the journal, English for Specific Purposes, my more recent letters in the same genre written as guest editor of a special issue of Across the Disciplines are varied to meet the requirements of that journal and the particular context and audience with which I am working. What can I borrow from my accumulated genre knowledge? Certain forms of politeness and format----and not much else.

Each situation for writing is highly complex, of course, for it embodies the values and genres of the discourse community and their interactions, writer purposes, the physical attributes of the context, and other factors. How can we theorize a literacy site, then? David Russell (1997), drawing from theories developed by Cole and Engeström (1993), posits that activity theory may provide explanatory adequacy. The key term in activity theory is “system.” There is an activity system (such as a laboratory) in which a variety of texts appear, are developed, and interact. Participants “use certain genres but not others at certain times but not others” so there is also a genre system within the context. And, of course, there is a group of people with different roles (also a system) who are involved in meaningful and productive activities in the site. Russell (1997: 520) uses the activity system of the classroom to show how participants interact through texts:

The teacher writes the assignments; the students write responses in classroom genres. The administrators write the grade for; the teacher fills it out. The parents or government officials write the checks; the administrators write the receipts and send out the transcripts.
It is through this microstructural circulation of texts and other tools in genres, these regularized shared expectations for tool use within and among systems of purposeful interaction that macrosocial structure is (re-)created. At the same time in the same fundamental way, the identities of individuals and groups and subgroups are (re-) created.

Russell (1997: 522) points out that an activity system is both temporarily stabilized and evolving, that the genres that appear at any moment in time are only stabilized-for-now. Thus “genres predict—but do not determine—[the text] structure”.

We teachers are very familiar with classroom contexts. However, different systems operate in other literacy sites. Windsor (2000: 164), studying an engineering firm, discovered complex, overlapping systems and a hierarchical writing process during which the technicians’ work “disappeared into the work of the engineers” (p. 164). She concludes that “being in a powerful position may allow one to use the knowledge someone else has generated, but being able to use that knowledge is one of the things that generates the powerful position.” In her research, the systems interact and the writing of technicians is buried as engineers produce the valued genres. Mathison (2004), studying engineering in an academic setting, found that the “texts” central to journal articles and grants are, not surprisingly, visual and numerical, thus influencing that particular activity system.

What can we say, then, to the teachers, and their students, who are looking for answers, who want researchers to inform them about what the experts in their disciplines know and how to read and write successfully in a number of contexts? How can we make the complex nature of writer purpose, activity system, and “stabilized for now” genres accessible to students? If we even understood the activity systems in which our students will be working, could we replicate them, and their genres, for the classroom? Freedman and Medway (1994: 11), North American New Rhetoricians (see Johns, 2002, for a discussion of their theories and research.) claim that we cannot import students’ authentic literacy experiences into our EAP classrooms. However, Coe, another New Rhetorician, claims that an appropriate use of the term “genre” opens the door to student discovery. He (1994) claims that “Genre epitomizes the significance of approaching reading and writing as social processes in which individuals participate without necessarily being entirely conscious of what the social processes are” (p. 159). Coe continues by arguing that we need to raise students’ consciousness of the complex and social nature of texts within academic and professional settings.

For years, I have been working on this consciousness raising in my own first year university classroom (see e.g., Johns, 1997). Now, I am attempting to write a first year university textbook intended to be both appropriate to the research topics I have discussed here and accessible to busy teachers and students (Johns, in process). Needless to say, it is not an easy job; but others have already entered this field (see, e.g., Devitt, Reigg, & Bawarshi, 2004; Trimmer, 2001) and it is important for our pedagogical work to reflect research and theory.

3.4. Multi-modal environments
So far, I have not mentioned the activity systems that are central to most of our students’ lives, found on the Internet, Ipods, and in other technologies. Many of our (more privileged) students have grown up with technology; they use the Internet, the cell phone, the palm pilot and other tools frequently and for a variety of purposes. This dependence upon technology marks a truly significant departure from reliance upon print texts. In a recent discussion of the influences of computers upon writing, for example, Chartier (1995: 15) says:

…the substitution of the screen for codex is a far more radical transformation than that brought on by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press; it changes the methods of organization, structure, consultation, and even the appearance of the written word.

We see evidence for Chartier’s argument every day. By producing texts in these environments (e.g., web-logs/blogs), students can bring their personal lives to the world. They can write expressively in short, fragmented, and ungrammatical texts and be read immediately by often appreciative audiences. They can make links, use gestures, and impart visual information with technical ease. However, these technologies do not encourage extended, thoughtful, critical and well-argued texts. And that’s a problem for English for Academic Purposes writing classes.

In their landmark publication, Cope and Kalantzis (2000: 7) speak of six “design elements” in our current students’ meaning making processes:

Linguistic meaning (now, of course, complicated by the implications of corpus linguistics)
Audio meaning (noise is central to our students’ lives)
Visual meaning (in various media, including the Internet)
Gestural meaning (including “gestures” in texts)
Spacial meaning (again, the Internet provides significant possibilities)
The Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes to each other.

How do we bring these meanings into the EAP classroom? How can assist students in analyzing and critiquing their varied textual experiences? Here is a great opportunity to draw from what they know to lead them into information competence and visual literacy activities such as critiquing websites.
Also important to our teaching can be the technological tools, the many sources available to students on the Internet for their writing, in particular. I happen to be working with Houghton Mifflin on my textbook (Johns, in process), so I am most familiar with their tool, WriteSpace, which undoubtedly resembles other literacy tools of this type. WriteSpace is embedded within the Blackboard Classroom management system, providing modules for process writing, interactive exercises, an on-line handbook, real time tutoring and feedback. My editors tell me that they will be able to tailor a WriteSpace component to interact with my textbook, to use the Internet for a variety of approaches to understanding the complexity of genre and context.

Thus the new technologies offer challenges to EAP as students use it for quick chat and research. They also give us possibilities for out-of-class literacy assistance. We need to make full use of their potential in our academic literacy classrooms as we draw from students’ interests and knowledge.

3.5. The writer in the text: voice, persona, stance, and evaluation
Amidst this talk about context, genres, and technology, the writer still holds the pen (or manages the computer) and makes the final decisions about what is written. Silva and Brice (2004) find the concept of writer’s voice to be an emerging issue in second/foreign language research. I-chat and BLOGS are voiced, expressive, personal, and often direct, and our students love this immediate and personal contact. On the other hand, one of the many reasons why students believe that academic discourses are distant and foreign is because they view them as unvoiced, as “objective” and “factual” rather than encouraging the kinds of expressive writing with which they may be comfortable.

What students do not see—and what we must show them—is how every text is voiced, though also constrained by an activity system, genre. and community. Fortunately, we have valuable new research and theory on this topic. For an overview, readers might examine, for example, the special issue of Journal of Second Language Writing devoted to voice (Vol. 10, 1, 2002). Here is Ivaniç and Camps’ (2002: 3) argument found in this issue:

All writing contains “voice”…which locates their users culturally and historically. Writers may, through the linguistic and other resources they choose to draw on in their writing, ventriloquate an environmentally aware voice, a progressive-educator voice, a sexist voice, a positivest voice, a self-assured voice, a progressive-educator voice, a committed-to-plain English voice, or a combination of an infinite number of voices.

But as noted, voice in all contexts, including I-chat and e-mail, is constrained by the genre, the context. and the community: to use our writing voices effectively we need to consider the immediate rhetorical situation. Here, the work by Hunston and Thompson (2000) discussing writer’s stance is useful. Using corpus linguistics to guide them, these authors argue that our voices in academic texts are found when we:

1. Express our opinions… that may reflect the value system of our community or the particular group within that community with whom we affiliate.
2. Construct and maintain relations between reader and writer. (Here, Hyland’s working on hedging (1998) is useful.)
3. Organize the discourse using metatextual features.

Hyland (2002), again using corpus studies, examines a more potentially face-threatening element of the author’s voice: the use of directives to the reader (e.g., “Look at this.”) within a variety of rhetorical contexts. So as academic writers, our students can maintain a voice, express their opinions, construct relationships with the reader through hedging and directives (and many other means), but they need help in how to accomplish their ends within the academic and professional genres with which they are unfamiliar.

3.6. Critical pedagogy: Ideology
By studying activity systems, genres, and writer and reader roles (or watching CNN), we have become acutely aware of the ideological thrust of every text and the ways in which multimodal factors interact to display these ideologies (see Silva and Brice, 2004, p. 81 on nascent commentary in this area). Critical pedagogy, based loosely upon Freire (1973), encourages students to challenge, or at least question, the standard ideologies (see Benesch, 2001) and to negotiate them within activity systems.
Benesch tells us that when we talk with students about genres and technology, we must also evoke issues of textual and visual hegemony; we must assist students to understand and resist society’s inequities, initially by encouraging them to question academic faculty and negotiate assignments in their classrooms, and later by questioning authority in general (see also Pennycook, 2000). Our EFL/ESL students are often fully aware of the inequities that surround them, and critical pedagogy assists them to develop effective critique and resistance. Particularly interesting to us as EAP teachers may be the growing work of second/foreign language scholars who are voicing their resistance (see Canagarjah, 1999; Sasaki, 2003) while writing within the English language community.

4. Conclusion
What the six topics discussed here have in common, of course, is the necessity for not separating one feature of academic literacy (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, or the text) from another within an activity system, for not removing genres from their linguistic and visual elements or from their contexts. The research here points to our responsibility for being more thoroughly rhetorical and analytical in our teaching, taking into consideration the immediate activity systems within which texts operate, the knowledge that texts are purposeful and that “speakers and writers have intentions or designs on readers and hearers” (Fahnestock & Secor, 2002: 177).
Many years ago, Widdowson (1981) reminded teachers that we should not confuse “authenticity” of texts (and now, literacy sites) with “relevance.” He said, quite wisely, that

…the language content of a course is selected not because it is representative of what the learner will have to deal with after the course is over but because it is likely to activate strategies for learning while the course is in progress (p. 5).

His advice is fully as relevant today. Our English for Academic Purposes students need to develop strategies for researching texts and rhetorical contexts, for adapting their reading and writing processes and voices to a variety of purposes and the rhetorical situation. And we, of course, need to continue our research.
In conclusion, what can we say about recent trends in EAP writing research and influences upon future curricula? Several things:
1. Writing is integrated: We cannot separate linguistic elements such as vocabulary, grammar, or discourse from writer purposes or rhetorical contexts.
2. Genres are social; they are used purposefully by individuals to get something done—even if that something is only to attain a good grade in a classroom.
3. Genres are intertextual and interactive; they are integral to the activity systems in which they are situated.
4. Texts from genres vary: the situation and writer’s purposes, in addition to the conventions of the genres, determine the resulting text.
Because the activity systems in which our students find themselves are highly complex, they need to develop their abilities to be researchers: to use corpus and other research methods to investigate genres and the activity systems in which they are found. They also need to use both investigation and critique to examine the visual and auditory influences upon their lives—and the technologies that influence thought and discourses.
We must conclude, then, that our responsibilities as EAP teachers and researchers are both comprehensive and complex as we attempt to prepare students for the demands of the 21st Century.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES
In a recent publication called Genre and the invention of the writer, Anis Bawarshi (2003) shows literacy teachers how they can enhance student writing processes while assisting them researching those factors that determine the success of a text within any activity system. I will not discuss Bawarshi at length, for he needs to be read in the original; however, I demonstrate below how I have translated Bawarshi, Widdowson, and my own 30+ years of teaching and research into a first year composition curriculum. Here is what happens in my classroom as students prepare to write:

Step 1: Students begin with what the Australians suggest (see, e.g., Feez, 2002 and Macken-Horarik, 2002): several textual models from a genre which they analyze, asking these questions:
• Name: What is this genre called by those who value and use it? Who values these texts?
• Purpose(s): What purpose(s) does this genre serve? [And there may be several purposes.]
• Site(s): Where do texts from this genre appear? What systems operate in this context? [A little simple activity theory is presented here, using Russell’s classroom example.]
• Conventions: How do people recognize this genre? What are the features that seem to be repeated across texts? For example, does it have a recognizable discourse structure such as Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion (IMRD)? Are there repeated uses of visual information? Fonts? Are certain types of language common? [This is a good place to work with a simple corpus activity.]
• Intertextuality: What do the texts you are studying draw from? What are the sources for these texts? [Here, students might interview a text writer for how s/he integrated visual, auditory, textual—and discussions in the hall—into the text.]
• Situational variation: How has this genre been revised for different contexts? What writer, context, or other factors caused these changes to occur? [Here, we talk about the characteristics of a specific context that may lead to situational variation.]
• Writer’s voice: Who is the writer in this text? What does the language tell you about this writer? In what ways is the writer conforming to the genre and community, in your view? In what ways does the writer, as individual, shine through the text?

Step 2: Then, students discuss how they might read one of the texts studied for a number of academic or other purposes within a variety of contexts, e.g., for enjoyment, to summarize, to use as a source, to take notes. The students practice one, or several, approaches to exploiting the text for their purposes.
Step 3: Students then move to drafting a text from this genre for a known context, using an invention grid which becomes their guide throughout the writing process. Figure 2 shows one example of such an invention grid:

Figure 2. Invention Grid for Writing
Genre Features What I know What I don’t know How I’ll find out
Name
Conventions:
-visual appearance,
-form/structure
Language
Writer’s role (e.g., student), voice and stance
Writer’s purpose(s)
Audience or community (values and assessment practices)
Immediate context/situation

The topics relating to immediate context and situation are puzzling and difficult so I talk with the students about how we conduct research into academic situations: using writing mentors in the disciplines, finding sample texts and discussing them with experts, using sources for intertextuality and other approaches.
It soon becomes very clear to students that all elements of a text in a genre must be carefully thought through as writing and revising takes place. Since the most common type of academic writing for undergraduates in many countries is the in-class examination essay (see Melzer, 2002), we devote considerably more time in class using the grid to deconstruct different types of essay examination prompts and discussing how writers produce effective texts under pressure (see Kroll, this volume, for a more complete discussion of tasks and assignments.)
Then, our students’ in-class process (peer editing, revising, rewriting, etc.) is based upon the discussions remarked upon here, placing special emphasis upon the complexities of the activity system.

REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.) M. Holquist (Eds). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for academic purposes: Theory, politics, and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Berkenkotter, C. & T.N. Huckin (1995).Genre analysis in disciplinary communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Canagarjah, A. S. (1999). Resisting English imperialism in English language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chartier, R. (1995). Forms and meanings: Text, performances, and audiences from codex to computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Coe, R.M. (1994). Teaching genre as process. In A. Freedman & P. Medway [eds.].
Learning and teaching genre (pp. 157-171). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
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