Moving on from Genre Analysis: An update and tasks for the transitional student

•Concepts of genre and task have evolved.•Communicative purpose and text prototypicality more complex.•GA tasks relate to context.•Genre awareness encourages rhetorical flexibility.•Pre-writing tasks continue throughout the process.

The author first discusses the evolution of two major concepts in Genre Analysis, “genre”, particularly as it relates to purpose and text prototypicality, and “task”, particularly as it relates to context. Then, she draws from evolving understandings of these concepts, the work of Swales and Feak, 2012a and Swales and Feak, 2012b and of Rhetorical Genre Studies scholars ( Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010 and Prior, 2001), to describe pre-writing tasks completed by transitional bilingual (Spanish/English) secondary school students as they prepared responses to prompts for a college application essay, The Personal Statement, a challenging, seemingly anomalous, genre.