Last time on RWTL…
This is my final post in a series of three on how explicit grammar instruction is part of different ways of teaching writing. I’ve written about self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) and The Writing Revolution (TWR): two approaches that involve teaching grammar for sentence-level writing as a foundation for higher-order writing skills and processes. In these approaches, students receive important but limited explicit grammar instruction to help them write and combine grammatically accurate sentences with increasing fluency, which sets them up to engage in everything else these approaches have to offer. This post focuses on genre-based pedagogy, arguably the default way of teaching writing in Australia, which focuses instead on teaching grammar as choice for writing.
In this post, I’ll introduce genre-based pedagogy, mention how and why it got started in Australia, outline some of its main grammar-related ideas, and suggest how it differs from SRSD and TWR. To help write this post, I’ve drawn on information from my newly edited book (Teaching and learning primary English) and a PETAA short course I’m currently completing designed by Deb Myhill (Going Meta – Enabling rich talk about writing).
What was it like to learn to write in Australia in the 1980s?
In the 1980s, the Australian literacy environment was “basically one in which writing was not taught” (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 7). At that time, teaching practices in many countries, including Australia, were dominated by the whole language movement, which promoted child-centered ways of teaching and learning about writing (Rose, 2009). The teacher’s role was to encourage students’ self-directed learning as they wrote about personal experience. It was believed that teachers shouldn’t explicitly teach text creation processes or the linguistic and structural features of different written genres because learning to write would occur naturally under the right conditions (Derewianka, 2015).
As you might expect, this meant children from middle-class families, whose home literacy practices were similar to those valued at school, could expand on these practices over time to create a variety of written genres and get through school without too many issues. On the other hand, children with less exposure to these valued literate practices at home were stuck writing the same basic texts at school, usually observations and recounts (Rose, 2009). Many of these children went to school in lower socioeconomic areas. Unfortunately for them, the writing demands of secondary school and university require much more than basic observation and recount writing, so these children were unlikely to experience much success at school or to engage in higher education (whether they wanted to or not).
Even if their teachers were keen to offer more explicit guidance, most teachers didn’t have a way of talking about the language in written texts, or a metalanguage, to do so, which meant many students in the 1980s were never taught to write beyond basic texts about everyday experience.
It’s kind of criminal, now that you think about it.
Introducing genre-based pedagogy
In the same way that science of reading and systematic synthetic phonics advocates have spent decades pushing back against whole language on the reading side of the literacy coin, Australian educational linguists have promoted an explicit approach to teaching writing since the 1980s known as genre-based pedagogy.
Back then, Australian educational linguists including Jim Martin, Joan Rothery, and Mary Macken-Horarik used a model of language known as systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to investigate the types of writing done in schools. They discovered that primary school children were only writing a few basic genres and that teachers referred to most written texts as stories (even when these texts were written for different purposes and had many different features) (Martin & Rose, 2008).
Drawing on SFL, the linguists put together descriptions of important written genres that should be mastered throughout the primary school years if students were to meet the writing demands of the school curriculum, including recounts, narratives, descriptions, reports, procedures, explanations, expositions, and more (Derewianka, 2015, Rose & Martin, 2012). These descriptions were mass-produced and distributed to Australian teachers as part of influential projects including The Writing Project (early-mid-1980s), The Language and Social Power Project (mid-to-late-1980s), and The Write it Right Project (1990s), especially in New South Wales.
For the first time, Australian teachers were able to name a wide variety of written genres linked to different social purposes (for example, procedures are written to instruct readers on how to perform a task), as well as the typical stages the genres include (e.g., procedures typically start with an aim, followed by a list of equipment, and a series of steps for readers to follow). Such ideas are commonplace in Australian schools now, but in the 1980s and 1990s, this revolutionised the teaching of writing.
What ideas underpin genre-based pedagogy?
As Deb Myhill explains in the Going meta short course, three main theoretical perspectives on writing are cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic. Approaches based on the cognitive perspective focus on the thinking processes writers engage in while they write (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing). Approaches based on the sociocultural perspective focus on exploring the kinds of writing practices that are valued in different social contexts. And approaches based on the linguistic perspective focus on the mastery of language features in texts. In other words, cognitive approaches are writer-focused, sociocultural approaches are social context-focused, and linguistic approaches are text-focused.
Importantly, most popular ways of teaching writing take ideas from more than one of these perspectives. I have argued, for example, that SRSD and TWR are both sociocognitive, in that they combine ideas from the sociocultural and the cognitive to emphasise cognitive processes AND the writing of different genres that serve many social purposes. What these approaches are missing is a focus on the linguistic features of texts (beyond the select grammatical resources promoted for sentence-level writing).
By contrast, genre-based pedagogy can be described as a sociolinguistic approach. It involves explicitly teaching students about the many grammatical and structural features of written genres, which develops their metalinguistic understanding (i.e., their awareness of how language is used in writing). This means you can show them two pieces of writing and they can explain to you how the authors used different choices to achieve different effects. Want to make a character or a setting in a narrative seem scary? There are choices you can make to achieve this. Want to present logical arguments that build to a climax or arguments that tug at the reader’s heartstrings? There are other choices for that. Want to provide a set of instructions that are easy to follow? There are even more choices for that. In fact, the choices a writer can make in writing are essentially limitless. Teachers who follow genre-based pedagogy aim to explicitly teach their students about these choices so that they can: (1) analyse and understand how other writers achieve different effects in writing, and (2) be intentional about what and how they write.
Key ideas about genre-based pedagogy
In genre-based pedagogy, written genres are clustered into three broad families, referred to as genres that engage (e.g., recounts, narratives), genres that inform (e.g., explanations, reports), and genres that evaluate (e.g., arguments and responses) (Rose & Martin, 2012). Genres are distinguished by their structural and linguistic features, which contribute to meeting their social purposes.
Structural features
The main structural features taught in genre-based pedagogy are text stages and text phases. Briefly, stages are the relatively fixed parts or sections of a text. A basic narrative, for example, includes an orientation stage, then a complication, then a resolution. Phases are the more flexible structural units that make up stages. Within the orientation stage of a narrative, a writer may choose to begin with a characters phase, a settings phase, a foregrounding of the problem phase, or several other options.
To use an argumentative/persuasive writing example, analytical expositions typically begin with a thesis stage, followed by a series of argument stages, and conclude with a reinforcement of the thesis stage. We can zoom further into the text’s structure by looking at the phases that make up these stages. For instance, each argument stage is often made up by phases that make the well-known PEEL acronym (i.e., Point, Elaboration, Evidence, and Linking statement). As an aside, the mnemonics taught through the SRSD approach are often focused on this phase level of genres.
Most Australian primary school teachers have access to genre-based pedagogy resources that make clear the stages and phases of the most important written genres of schooling. Taking this approach involves teachers and students investigating how and why written genres are structured in particular ways as they identify the stages and phases that make up and enable texts to achieve their social purposes (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).
Linguistic features
But that’s enough about structural features; what we’re really here for is learning about the place of grammar in genre-based pedagogy. Space does not permit me to give a full account of the many grammatical features taught through genre-based pedagogy, but I will introduce three ideas that allow you to do quite a lot.
While the model of language that underpins genre-based pedagogy (SFL) allows you to pinpoint the grammatical form and function of any word in a text, it’s often more useful to focus on how words function together in groups to express processes (what’s happening in a clause), participants (who or what is taking part in a process), or circumstances (when, where, how, or why a process occurs). Processes, participants, and circumstances are introduced in the Australian Curriculum: English in Year 1. In the following simple sentence…
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
… we can see examples of a process (jumped), a participant (The quick brown fox), and a circumstance (over the lazy dog). A clause will usually only involve one process, and I know ‘jumped’ is the process in this sentence because it’s the word that functions to tell me ‘the happening’. When pointing this out to children, teachers followed genre-based pedagogy would highlight or write it green (as is the custom in this approach). I know that ‘The quick brown fox’ is a participant because it functions to tell me ‘what’ jumped over the lazy dog, and any ‘who’ or ‘what’ will be a participant. This word group (and any other participant) would be highlighted red. And I know that ‘over the lazy dog’ is a circumstance because it tells me ‘where’ the quick brown fox jumped. Any ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’, or ‘why’ will be a circumstance. This would be highlighted blue.
The great thing about this functional grammar is that it’s based on the meanings contributed by words and word groups in a clause, rather than the arbitrary names of traditional grammatical forms. But the functions also help us to work out grammatical forms when we need to. For instance, every word group that functions as a process will be realised by a verb group. Participants are usually noun groups (as in the above example), but they can also be realised by adjectives (as in, The fox was crafty). And circumstances are almost always realised by either prepositional phrases (if they include a preposition (e.g., over) followed by a noun group (e.g., the lazy dog)) or an adverb (e.g., slowly).
It’s your turn to have a go now with the following example:
The platypus swam in the quiet stream.
The first thing to do is to find the process/verb group at the heart of the clause. We can find it by asking the question, “What word tells me the happening?” As I hope you would agree, the thing that’s happening here is swimming, so I can highlight the word ‘swam’ green.
The platypus swam in the quiet stream.
Next, I can look at the other words and consider what they’re telling me about ‘swam’. If they tell me ‘who’ or ‘what’ swam, they will be a participant. If they tell me ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how’, or ‘why’ this swimming occurred, they will be a circumstance.
Assuming you’ve had a quick go, we can say that ‘The platypus’ tells me ‘what’ swam, so this word group (a noun group) is functioning as a participant and can be highlighted red. Lucky last, ‘in the quiet stream’ tells me ‘where’ the platypus swam, so it’s functioning as a circumstance of place and can be highlighted blue.
The platypus swam in the quiet stream.
Once these word groups have been identified and highlighted, it’s possible to think and talk about the choices that have been made by the writer, in terms of what they’ve included in the word groups and the order or sequence of word groups in the sentence. This is where you should consider what type of text you’re writing and the intended audience. Let’s imagine this is part of a narrative text, which has the social purpose of entertaining readers. To give them more insight into this platypus character, it would be a useful choice to expand the noun group. I might decide to do this by adding two adjectives before the noun, one functioning as an evaluative describer (cheeky) and one as a factual describer (young), like so:
The cheeky young platypus swam in the quiet stream.
This already sounds better to me, but there are still other choices I could make to improve this sentence for the purpose of narrative writing. For instance, I might like to add more circumstantial detail by writing ‘how’ the platypus swam. To achieve this, I could add in an adverb after ‘swam’, functioning as a circumstance of manner:
The cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream.
What else might I want to add to this sentence to more effectively entertain readers? How about telling readers ‘when’ this swimming happened? I could achieve this by adding another prepositional phrase, this time functioning as a circumstance of time. I’ll add it to the start:
After a morning sleep, the cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream.
Depending on the phase and stage of the text I’m writing, it might make sense to write a longer sentence like this, but at other times, I might not want to add in quite so much detail. I might think about whether starting with a prepositional phrase like this is the best choice, or if it might be better in this context to start another way. The sentence could be written several ways:
The cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream / after a morning sleep.
In the quiet stream, / after a morning sleep, the cheeky young platypus happily swam.
Happily the cheeky young platypus swam after a morning sleep / in the quiet stream.
None of these choices are necessarily right or wrong but they do achieve slightly different effects, and this should influence whether you make them or not while writing. Importantly, it’s only when the teacher and students have sufficient metalinguistic understanding (i.e., knowledge about how language works) and a shared metalanguage (i.e., a language for talking about language) that these kinds of choices can be talked about, understood, and justified explicitly.
We can also compare the choices made in the platypus sentence above with the following sentence from a completely different written genre: a procedure.
Mix the wet and dry ingredients carefully.
See how this instruction begins with the verb ‘Mix’. This kind of grammatical choice makes good sense in a procedure because the social purpose is to instruct readers to achieve an outcome as efficiently as possible. The most important thing here is for them to know what to do next, so we typically start such instructions with a verb that tells us the action. By contrast, you would rarely see a verb starting a clause in a narrative text because it serves a different social purpose (i.e., entertaining readers). Every written genre taught through genre-based pedagogy has well-defined linguistic features that go far beyond the simple examples presented here.
When taught well, genre-based pedagogy allows teachers and students to investigate the linguistic and structural choices of texts valued in their context (e.g., award-winning picture books and novels, speeches, newspaper articles, etc.). By systematically unpacking how their favourite authors make writing choices that entertain, persuade, and/or inform, students comprehend and compose texts more effectively. Yet despite this promise, it’s important to consider a couple of challenges that have slowed the uptake of genre-based pedagogy in classrooms internationally.
The cost of admission: Personal knowledge about language
While teaching students to make more informed, intentional language choices when writing should sound appealing to any teacher, this requires teachers to have strong personal metalinguistic understandings of linguistic and structural features of whatever genre they wish to teach. As Matruglio (2019) explained, the very large and detailed architecture of language that underpins genre-based pedagogy (SFL) is both a benefit and a problem, since this impacts how accessible the approach is to teachers and students. Many teachers who are expected by curriculum documents like the Australian Curriculum: English to teach genre-based pedagogy have struggled to do so because they themselves never learnt about the many grammatical forms and functions in their own schooling or teacher training.
A number of projects have sought to develop teachers’ and students’ metalinguistic understandings (e.g., Humphrey & Macnaught, 2016; Macken-Horarik et al., 2011; Myhill et al., 2018) with encouraging outcomes. But since teachers come from unique backgrounds and have different preexisting knowledge bases and motivations, some have found it easier than others to pick up the nuances of genre-based pedagogy (Matruglio, 2020).
A further challenge relates to genre pedagogy’s complete lack of attention on cognitive processes (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, etc.). As found by Graham et al. (2018) and many others, the explicit teaching of writing processes is strongly associated with improved learning outcomes and attitudes about writing. Because genre-based pedagogy is a sociolinguistic approach, it is mainly focused with the products of writing that achieve social purposes in different contexts (this is why it’s important for all teachers to know about the three theoretical perspectives on writing and to consider how they underpin the different approaches used in classrooms every day).
There is yet to be a truly integrated, mainstream approach that combines ideas from the cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic perspectives in a relatively equal way. This means teachers need to deal with the limitations of the approaches that are currently available. Fortunately, teachers are very good at this kind of thing.
Comparing how SRSD, TWR, and genre-based pedagogy deal with grammar
| SRSD | TWR | Genre-based pedagogy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theoretical underpinning | Sociocognitive | Sociocognitive | Sociolinguistic |
| Focus for grammar | Sentence-level writing | Sentence-level writing | Choice for all writing |
| Explicitness about grammar | Low (need for greater clarity about the linguistic features to be taught) | Medium (select linguistic features promoted strongly) | High (comprehensive range of linguistic features taught) |
| Sequencing of grammar and genres | Grammar taught with genres from the start | Grammar taught for sentence writing first. Genres introduced once sentences are mastered | Grammar taught with genres from the start |
| Prerequisite teacher knowledge about language | Low | Low | High |
| Compatibility with Australian education policies (e.g., Aus Curric, NAPLAN) | Medium (focus on genres from the start is a good match, but lack of clarity about grammar may be problematic) | Low (singular focus on sentence-level writing in early-middle primary may work against Aus policy docs) | High (Aus policy docs specifically informed by this approach) |
In a sense, genre-based pedagogy says, give them the whole language toolkit, every possible grammatical and structural choice, pointing out when different choices help writers achieve the purposes of different genres. TWR replies, “The whole toolkit, are you serious? Don’t confuse the poor children; start at the sentence level and let their oral language skills do all the grammatical lifting without them realising it.” And then SRSD pipes up, “Well, you’re both kind of right and kind of wrong. We should focus on genres from the start, but grammar is only one small part of the writing picture.”
Where to find out more about genre-based pedagogy
When led by teachers who don’t have a strong personal knowledge about language, genre-based pedagogy can be overly formulaic and focused on simple text stages. Fortunately, there are many avenues for learning about grammar and genres in Australia and elsewhere.
As mentioned in a recent Twitter thread, I’m currently completing a short course through PETAA College and delivered by Deb Myhill on metalinguistic understanding. The course explains what is meant by metalinguistic understanding, and how to plan writing lessons that help students learn about language in existing texts and use it in their own writing. PETAA regularly offers similar short courses that can get you started if you wish to know and teach more about how language works in different kinds of written genres.
A chapter in Teaching and learning primary English I wrote with Sally Humphrey is dedicated to written genres. In it, we go over the stages and phases of several important school genres and explain when they should be taught (e.g., early, middle, or upper primary school). Sally and I also wrote another chapter dedicated to the fundamentals of functional and traditional grammar that every Australian primary school teacher is expected to teach from Year 1.
If you really want to take a deep dive into grammar, a great text I’ve used for a few years with pre-service teachers at the University of Tasmania is Grammar and meaning by Humphrey, Droga, and Feez. A similar text that has been popular in Australian schools for many years is Beverly Derwianka’s A new grammar companion, which is also a very useful, practical guide to grammar and genres.
Next time on RWTL
Well, that’s all I’m going to say about grammar for a little while. Next time, I’m going to shift gears quite dramatically to write a post in response to the recent Roaring back speech from Federal Minister for Education and Youth Alan Tudge. And I can promise it will have nothing to do with the draft history curriculum!
How important do you think it is for students and teachers to understand and talk about how grammar works in texts? If a student can write a narrative or persuasive text well, does it matter if they can’t explain why it’s effective, or why another text may be more or less effective? Should students be taught grammar explicitly, as the Australian Curriculum expects teachers to do from Year 1, or might this be an unnecessary part of becoming a writer? Join the discussion about this on Twitter or leave a comment below.
References
Derewianka, B. (2015). The contribution of genre theory to literacy education in Australia. In J. Turbill, G. Barton, & C. Brock (Eds.), Teaching writing in today’s classrooms: Looking back to look forward (69-86). ALEA.
Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2018). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch
Humphrey, S., & Macnaught, L. (2016). Developing teachers’ professional knowledge of language for discipline literacy instruction. In H. de Silva Joyce (Ed.), Language at work in social contexts: Analysing language use in work, educational, medical and museum contexts (pp. 68-87). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. Equinox.
Matruglio, E. (2019). Beating the bamboozle: Literacy pedagogy design and the technicality of SFL. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2018v44n4.1
Matruglio, E. (2020). What two teachers took up: Metalanguage, pedagogy and potentials for long-term change. Language and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2020.1825477
Myhill, D. S., Jones, S. M., & Lines, H. (2018). Supporting less proficient writers through linguistically aware teaching. Language and Education, 32(4), 333-349. https://www.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2018.1438468
Rose, D., & Martin, J. R. (2012). Learning to write, reading to learning: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney School. Equinox.
Rose, D. (2009). Writing as linguistic mastery: The development of genre-based literacy pedagogy. In D. Myhill, D. Beard, M. Nystrand & J. Riley (Eds.), Handbook of writing development (pp. 151-166). Sage.