Individualized engagement with genre in academic literacy tasks

The interaction between learner characteristics, including learners’ histories and goals of learning, and learners’ analysis and production of target genres remains a topic of continuing interest in the genre-based literacy framework. This case study documented an L2 graduate student’s individualized engagement with genre in both her reading and writing tasks in a genre-based academic writing course. The analysis of the student’s genre-analysis tasks, writing samples, text-based interviews, and literacy narrative reveals that the student’s familiarity with the overall research article move structure in her field may have accounted for her intensive focus on the incongruities between the generic features discussed in class and the generic features that she perceived to be unique to her field. Many features she pointed out in her genre-analysis tasks as dialogic responses to class discussions had also been incorporated into her own writing, thus showing that her individualized engagement with genre had not only scaffolded her reading of research articles in her field, but also her writing. The student’s meaningful re-mediation of her existing genre knowledge to generate a new understanding of texts extends our conceptualizations of genre-based teaching as a needs-based approach and what learning may entail in such an approach.