Question: This is the question I will be addressing during the session, stated in two ways:
What should be the focus of our writing classes? Or, what should students remember and be able to do (well) when they complete our classes---and approach new rhetorical situations in the future?

Background: Many writing classes are organized in predictable ways:
• Around a required textbook for the class, generally with a process focus,
• Around a theme and readings, e.g., “The Destruction of the Environment,”
• Around issues of argumentation (“All texts are arguments.”),
• Around text types or “rhetorical modes” such as comparison/contrast and cause and effect., and/or
• Around the essay as primary genre.
As busy writing teachers, we tend to work through the curriculum in standard ways, particularly because in many ESL/EFL/ELL situations, there is an all-important exam at the end of the term---and we want our students to pass.

In the scenario described above, the purpose for the class is to get the students ready for the examination by, or in addition to, following the textbook.

But is this really what we’re trying to accomplish? Is the be and end all of our classes the production of an adequate five paragraph essay to be evaluated by the examiners?

At one level, the answer is “yes.” If the students don’t pass, they can’t go on.
At another, deeper level, the answer is “no.” Instead, we should assist students to cope, negotiate, and interrogate a variety of literacy demands in a variety of contexts.

Why? Never again (I’ll wager) will the students write an English class essay after they have completed their English requirements. Instead, they’ll be doing some writing (see Leki, 2003; Melzer, 2001), mostly in-class and timed---but the major academic skills they’ll need are reading and note-taking.

Recap: So back to the enduring question: What should be our writing classroom goals?
I would argue after almost 40 years of literacy teaching that our goals should be the following:
• To provide students with the tools to be literacy researchers: approaches to assessing a context and to reading and writing appropriately for that context,
• To assist them to negotiate literacy events so that their purposes can be served, and
• To encourage them to be flexible readers and writers, with the ability to adapt to new, and ever-changing, literacy situations.
For, as Bartholomae said about academic classrooms (1985):
Every time students sit down to write, they have to invent the university for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or economics, or anthropology or English. They have to learn
to speak the language, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting,
evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of
that community (p. 134).

Course curricula: Given these goals, I would argue that the following should be central to our curricula:
• Introduction and practice for reading and writing in a variety of written genres, not just the English class essay,
• Activities that encourage genre analysis: research into the text and the context of the genre, into genre conventions as well as situational variation,
• Literacy critique: a recognition of genre hegemony and of ways to negotiate genres with contexts,
• Exposure to a variety of non-textual genres: visual, literary, scientific, musical---drawing from the students’ prior knowledge as well as from academic and professional contexts,
• Assessment based upon student genre research skills and flexibility as well as upon a variety of processes and written products.

Evaluation of this argument: Can we do it? No doubt, a paradigm shift will be difficult, particularly since English Departments (and Colleges of Education, not incidentally) have a hammer-lock on literacies. But it already has been done in a variety of ways. See the references below:

References:
Cope, Bill & Mary Kalantzis (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.
Drawn from the work of outstanding literacy theorists in the New London Group, this volume reminds teachers of the multiliterate nature of our students’ experiences. Authors speak of six “design factors” in the meaning-making process: Linguistic Meaning, Visual Meaning, Audio Meaning, Gestural Meaning, Spatial Meaning, and the Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five to each other. They make curricular suggestions that take these meanings, and the cross-national nature of literacy, into consideration.

Devitt, Amy, Mary Jo Reiff, and Anis Bawarshi (2004). Scenes of writing: Strategies for composing with genres. New York: Pearson-Longman.
This is a theoretically modern and accessible textbook, written by experts in The New Rhetoric. The writers begin with contexts (“scenes”) and the take scenes of writing seriously throughout. They explode some of the common myths held in our classrooms. For example, “…just as there are many kinds of writing and many kinds of writing situations and scenes, there are many kinds of writing processes.”

Feez, Susan, with Helen Joyce (1998). Text-based syllabus design. Sydney, Australia: National Center for English Language Teaching and Research.
The Australians (“Sydney School”) have been very successful in bringing theory to classroom practice, and this is one of the best teachers’ books on their approach. Like most Australian curricula, the focus is on written texts, and context is not as thoroughly emphasized as in The New Rhetoric. But this is the reason why the teachers I work with love it: it is explicit and practical.

Freedman, Aviva & Peter Medway [Eds.]. (1994). Learning and teaching genre.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.
This is an important volume, compiled by two well-known Canadian scholars
who are important to understanding The New Rhetoric, especially issues of
genre hegemony and writer resistance. Like my edited volume (below), it contains a chapter by one of the best New Rhetoric practitioners, Richard M. Coe.

Hyland, Ken (2003a). Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process.
Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 17-29.
Want a quick introduction to genre and teaching? Hyland does an excellent job
explaining the approach here.

Hyland, Ken (2003). Second language writing. New York: Cambridge.
Hyland is one of the more prolific and talented of the genre theorists. His research has informed the work of applied linguists and rhetoricians throughout the world. This is an intelligent book for teachers on how to plan a writing class while taking genre theories seriously. And don’t miss the references to Hyland’s own work in the back of the volume!

Johns, Ann M. (in process). (Re)discovering genres. Under contract with Houghton-Mifflin.
This is my attempt to produce a literacy (reading and writing) textbook for undergraduate students that exemplifies the classroom goals that I embrace. Drafting is going very slowly…

Johns, Ann M. (2003). Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
There are at least three theoretical (and pedagogical) approaches to genre (Hyon 1996): The Sydney School, English for Specific Purposes, and the New Rhetoric. This volume includes contributions from proponents of all three views and emphasizes somewhat disparate implications for the classroom.

Johns, Ann M. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies.
New York: Cambridge.
This volume is my first public attempt to define genre and discourse community---and to illustrate my goals for students in our campus classrooms. It is a composite of genre approaches, perhaps most closely allied to English for Specific Purposes.

Leki, Ilona (2003). A challenge to second language writing professionals: Is writing overrated? In Barbara Kroll (Ed.). Exploring the dynamics of second language writing.
(pp. 315-332). New York: Cambridge University Press.
In this wonderful piece at the end of a very useful volume (check it out!), Leki
argues that our writing classes (and exams) may not be very important in to our ESL/ELL/EFL students, “whose life agendas may or may not ever again include writing in English.”

Lunsford, Andrea A, John J. Ruszkiewicz, & Keith Walters (2001). Everything’s an argument. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Argumentation across the genres is one of the most important themes in the teaching of reading and writing. This textbook for students educates us all to the aims of argumentation, argumentation structure, use of figurative language, visual argumentation, and arguments in electronic environments.

Melzer, Dan (December, 2002). Assignments across the curriculum: A survey of college writing. Language and Learning across the Disciplines, 6, 86-110. (Free, on-line: http://wac.colostate.edu/)
In an extensive study of 787 writing assignments from forty-eight institutions of higher learning the United States, Melzer found, as have other researchers, that much of college writing occurs under test conditions in classroom short-answer and essay responses. He did find assignments in which students explore an idea or classroom concept (15% of the data); however, “students have almost no chance to use writing to explore their own ideas in deeply personal ways for an expressive aim or to shape language creatively for poetic purposes” (p. 105).
How do we respond as writing teachers to these findings?

Paltridge, Brian (2001). Genre in the language learning classroom. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Paltridge draws from his considerable teaching and research experiences and from the ESP and the Sydney Schools to present a very readable argument for teaching through genre. The volume is filled with examples and exercises, particularly for
the university students.

Swales, John M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
This is the classic Swales volume, quoted as gospel throughout the world. Swales
has written much more since this was published (one of my favorites:
Other floors, other voices…, an Erlbaum publication), and he continues to be
a prominent figure in genre theory and practice.

Swales, John M. & Christine Feak (1994). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
This textbook, one of two, contains the best classroom activities for genre practice
that I have ever seen. And I am not alone: one of my Japanese graduate students
held the book up in my class and said, “This has changed my life!”
Unfortunately, the exercises are for graduate students who are already
deeply into research and study in their major. Different kinds of exercises are
necessary for secondary students and undergraduates.