The effectiveness of genre-based pedagogy with collaborative writing on students’ genre awareness

<p dir="ltr">The study investigated learners’ genre awareness through collaborative writing, informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and a genre-based teaching and learning cycle, with Google Docs as a supporting tool over a six-week period. The participants were 33 Vietnamese English majors at an intermediate proficiency level in a public university in Vietnam. The main instruments included pre- and post-surveys measuring genre awareness and pre- and post-writing tasks focusing on the exposition genre. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and repeated measures ANOVA were employed to examine mean changes in general understanding, content, organization, and style before and after instruction. The pre- and post-writing texts of outliers were also analyzed using functional language analysis strategies. Quantitative results revealed a statistically significant increase in learners’ genre awareness scores following the instruction. Participants showed considerable improvements in general understanding, with subsequent gains in organization, content, and style. The analysis of texts from outliers indicated substantial improvements in content features (process types and nominal groups), as well as organizational patterns (reiteration and zig-zag thematic progression). However, enhancements in stylistic aspects, such as grammatical accuracy, language formality, and lexical density, were limited. These findings offer valuable implications for second language writing instruction and student writing assessment.</p>