Abstract:

The Academic Language and Literacy department at Zayed University, Dubai, reviewed the curriculum in the pre-sessional program. The aim was to shift focus from English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) to a genre-based curriculum providing academic language and literacy support for learners in their academic studies. Students struggled with the writing assignments in their majors because they were not given discipline-specific academic language and literacy support at the pre-sessional program. There was a need to design a curriculum to prepare learners for their first-year courses. Genre pedagogy prepares students for the written discourse in their respective disciplines (Hyland, 2007). This curriculum review was based on a need to support learners with the core writing assignments in the Freshmen year of colleges.  
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The curriculum review was based on Nesi and Gardner’s (2012) research on the classification of students’ writing assignments in a university context and their model genre analysis.  This model contains four stages in the analysis and production of each genre. The first stage (Building the Field) provides reading, listening and vocabulary materials about the selected genre text to provide background knowledge to help learners with content. The second stage (Deconstruction) provides a model text and activities to familiarize students with the content, organization of the content and lexico-grammatical features. The third stage (Joint Construction) and the fourth stage (Independent Construction) include activities for collaborative and individual writing practice.
 
This presentation aims to showcase the genre framework and genre-specific documents like genre overview, genre staging, graphic organizer, and genre checklist. Finally, a sample genre unit on ‘How to Write an Art Critique’ will be presented with some examples of materials from each of the four stages. 

References:
[1] Hyland, K., (2007). Genre pedagogy: Language, literacy and L2 writing instruction. Journal Of Second Language Writing, 16(3), 148-164. doi: 10.1016/j.jslw.2007.07.005
[2] Nesi, H., & Gardner, S., (2012). Genres across the disciplines. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.

Keywords:

Genre-based, academic writing, reading for EAP.