Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students' Antecedent Genre Knowledge

Abstract

This article explores the role of students' prior, or antecedent, genre knowledge in relation to their developing disciplinary genre competence by drawing on an illustrative example of an engineering genre-competence assessment. The initial outcomes of this diagnostic assessment suggest that student ability to successfully identify and characterize rhetorical and textual features of a genre does not guarantee their successful writing performance in the genre. Although previous active participation in genre production (writing) seems to have a defining influence on student ability to write in the genre, such participation appears to be a necessary but insufficient precondition for genre competence development. The authors discuss the usefulness of probing student antecedent genre knowledge early in communication courses as a potential source for macrolevel curriculum decisions and microlevel pedagogical adjustments in course design, and they propose directions for future research.Key words: antecedent genre, diagnostic assessment, disciplinary genre, engineering communication, genre awareness, genre competence, New Rhetoric genre theory, prior genre knowledge, rhetorical genre studies, targeted instruction