My teaching context is an Arabic L1 country in an English-medium of instruction university. This means that the English level of students are often mixed, ranging from CER level B1 to C2.

In a previous role, I taught on a foundation course, English for Academic Purposes. For several semesters, this program focused on the Sydney School of genre pedagogy. The purpose of this approach is to support lower achieving students and consolidate higher achieving students. The process follows a reading to learn Opens in a new tab process using 2 types of texts; genre examples and reading on the concepts. The process includes a highly scaffolded lesson approach that supports learning in meaning making and allows them to create their own text first collaboratively in a joint construction and then individual construction.

This genre approach reminds me of Goodman's (1996) whole text approach. The genre approach allows learners to "learn to write by reading." Students are exposed to exemplars, these are deconstructed in order to notice whole text design features, organisational features, linguistic conventions of the genre such as common sentence stems, grammar forms and vocabulary.

A second concept that comes to mind is the idea of constrained ability (Dougherty Stahl, 2011). Considering a specific genre of writing, such as an academic research article, this idea could be used to provide students with a set of multimodal design elements that should be used when writing an article in order for it to meet academic conventions. These might include stages such as title, abstract, introduction, literature review. Are tables or diagrams necessary? Should links be included. Knowledge of these genre conventions are constrained abilities.

A third and final concept that comes to mind from the Sydney school of pedagogy is accelerated literacy teaching strategies (Cowey, n.d.) This approach seems to apply a critical analysis approach that is structured and systematic. This is similar to a text deconstruction task. This task is structured because it works through a text from a whole text view, working through a text with set questions that students would soon become familiar with, cognitively modeling an approach that students can use independently when doing their own genre analysis moving forward.