Résumés
Abstract
Despite the best efforts of their instructors, first-year students often misinterpret or even ignore assignment sheets, leading to unmet learning outcomes and demoralising marks. Like academic writing as a whole, assignment sheets often contain conventions, terminology, and expectations that are unfamiliar to incoming undergraduates. In this paper, I propose an activity which calls students’ attention to assignment sheets as a genre, helping them meet the practical requirements of their assignment as well as develop their genre awareness. Students work in groups to rank the major goals of their current assignment as specified in the assignment sheet and use previous student responses to consider the diverse ways in which these goals can be fulfilled. Using this exercise, students can discover the close generic and rhetorical connection between the assignment sheet and the written responses it generates, as well as the variety of successful uptakes that are possible within the assigned genre.
Keywords:
- assignment sheets,
- genre,
- genre awareness,
- student uptake
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Bawarshi, A. S. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer: Reconsidering the place of invention in composition. Utah State University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nxp6
- Bawarshi, A. S., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research, and pedagogy. Parlor Press. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/referenceguides/bawarshi-reiff/
- Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts, genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp. 309-339). Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410609526
- Clark, I. (2005). A genre approach to writing assignments. Composition Forum 14(2). https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/14.2/clark-genre-writing.php
- Devitt, A., Reiff, M., & Bawarshi, A. (2004). Scenes of writing: Strategies for writing with genres. Longman. https://archive.org/details/scenesofwritings0000devi/page/44/mode/2up
- Formo, D., & Neary, K. R. (2020). Threshold concepts and FYC writing prompts: Helping students discover composition’s common knowledge with(in) assignment sheets. Teaching English in the Two-Year College 47(4), 336-364. https://doi.org/10.58680/tetyc202030647
- Freadman, A. (2002). Uptake. In R. M. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The rhetoric and ideology of genre: Strategies for stability and change (pp. 39-53). Hampton Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/4140672
- Hardy, J. A., Römer, U., & Roberson, A. (2015). The power of relevant models: Using a corpus of student writing to introduce disciplinary practices in a first year composition course. Across the Disciplines 12(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2015.12.1.01
- Hodgson, J. & Harris, A. (2013). “It is hard to know what you are being asked to do”: Deciphering codes, constructing schemas. English in Education 47(1), 6-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/eie.12001
- Jankens, A. (2019). Learning how to ask writing questions with rhetorical reflections. Composition Forum 41, 1-25. https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/41/rhetorical-reflections.php
- Johns, A. M. (2002). Destabilizing and enriching novice students’ genre theories. In A. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives (pp. 237-246). Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263104250045
- Tardy, C. M. (2017). The challenge of genre in the academic writing classroom. In J. Bitchener, N. Storch, & R. Wette (Eds.), Teaching writing for academic purposes to multilingual students: Instructional approaches (pp. 69-83). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269665-5
- Tardy, C. M., Buck, R. H., Jacobson, B., LaMance, R., Pawlowski, M., Slinkard, J. R., & Vogel, S. M. (2022). “It's complicated and nuanced”: Teaching genre awareness in English for general academic purposes. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 57, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101117
- Wardle, E. (2009). “Mutt Genres” and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write the genres of the university? College Composition and Communication 60(4), 765-789. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40593429
- Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2023). Writing about Writing (5th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s. https://www.macmillanlearning.com/ed/uk/product/Writing-about-Writing--5th-edition/p/1319527981