October 28's Readings and Reflection on Genre-Based Pedagogy


Hyland argues against the process approach to teaching writing and for a genres approach seen as more socially-situated and more purposeful. It seems to me that Hyland is implying that we, L2 writing teachers, are “blindly” adopting (e.g. process pedagogy) what is used and offered to us from L1 research despite the very little evidence of effectiveness. The social take the researcher has on the process approach is that writing in the process-oriented recursive composing process(es) is cognitively individualist, so to speak. However, we do not live in a vacuum, we are not solitary, decontextualized beings as cognitivists argue for and social-process proponents argue against.

If “good” cognitive processes make, let's say, Writer A a “good” writer and/or “good” problem solver, this does not mean that this “goodness” of processes are transferable to other writers B, C, D and so on. Different people just address and solve problems differently due to cultural, social, political, economic, even “ecological” factors. There no one-and-for-all recipe for becoming a “good” writer, I believe, though there are some techniques that are here and there. What is “good writing” after all? This is also perceived differently by different people. It seems that the first half of this article works as a critique of process pedagogy and the cognitive model of writing.

With this critique of process writing, Hyland argues for a genres-based approach that “appreciates” the individual, so to speak, not only from an individualist point of view but also and more importantly from a social, communal standpoint. According to Kress (1989), in a genres-oriented approach to writing, students will be, though individually, more socially and contextually oriented and “constrained”. Taking these social and contextual aspects into consideration, according to Bakhtin, a “dialogic” and dialectic relationship tends to surface and emerge between multiple-voices writers and their “active” readers. The homogeneity of process writing and the heterogeneity of genres-approached writing mark a very significant distinction as well between the two. In short, genre-based pedagogy sees writing as community-based, socially-oriented and interaction-based, unlike process pedagogy that sees the writer as solitary and disconnected from the social world.