Genre pedagogy as a tool to learn the "Historial account" genre at a EFL tertiary level

Abstract

The present study investigates the implementation of the SFL genre-based pedagogy to the teaching of historical accounts (HAs) in an EFL tertiary educational context in Córdoba, Argentina. Twenty-four students, the teacher-researcher and one rater participated in this study. Twelve subjects served as the control group (CG) and the other twelve as the experimental group (EG). A pre-test and a post-test were designed to evaluate the students’ competence in writing HAs. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological tools of the ‘Sydney School’ (Martin & Rose, 2008; Rose & Martin, 2012), the main objective of the study was to find out whether or not SFL genre-based instruction enhances the HAs written productions of Spanish-speaking tertiary students with an intermediate level of proficiency in English in the context of an English Culture subject. To achieve this objective, the students’ written productions were compared and contrasted in terms of five variables, namely, sequencing of the information, processes, circumstances, Theme-Rheme and grammatical cohesion. The results support the hypothesis that SFL genre-based instruction is an effective pedagogical tool to teach HA writing to EFL tertiary students. This study is meant to be a contribution to existing research on genre-based pedagogy in general and to the teaching of HAs in a tertiary context in particular.