The impact of genre-based instruction on Thai EFL university students’ performance and genre awareness in academic writing

The study comprised mixed-method research conducted to investigate the impact of genre-based instruction on EFL university students’ academic writing performance. In addition, the study aimed to explore the extent to which genre-based instruction raises students’ awareness of the genre, along with their attitudes toward the instruction. The study involved fifty-six undergraduate Engineering students in a Thai public university. The students were divided into two groups. Twenty-eight students were in the control group, and the experimental group consisted of twenty-eight students. The study took place over fifteen weeks in the second semester of the 2020 academic year. To track the students’ academic writing abilities, a pretest and posttest essay were utilized. Genre-based instruction was implemented three times following the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC). The three target essay types were a descriptive essay, a compare and contrast essay, and a cause and effect essay. During the implementation of the genre-based instruction, the students composed three pieces of academic essay writing of at least 250 words in length. The students’ writing, including pretest and posttest were rated by three raters using a scoring rubric. Scores were analyzed and presented using descriptive statistics. Paired sample t-tests were used to compare the means of the same group’s pretest and posttest. The independent-sample t-test was used to analyze the means of the two different groups receiving different types of instruction. To explore the students’ awareness of genre after the intervention, a student reflection and interviews were employed. The total number of reflections was 84. Furthermore, interviews were carried out at the end of the course. Nine students participated in individual interviews. The recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. Information retrieved from the interviews and student reflections were coded to investigate how the target students improved their genre awareness and their attitudes toward the instruction. The pretest results showed that the students in the control and experimental groups had equal writing abilities. However, the students in the experimental group significantly outperformed the students in the control group in all types of academic writing, namely the descriptive essay, the compare and contrast essay, the cause and effect essay, and the posttest. The findings also revealed that the target students improved their genre awareness in four ways, i.e., audience awareness and writer’s roles, purpose awareness, appropriate content, and textual features. In addition, the students held positive attitudes towards genre-based instruction and were satisfied with the instruction. This study provides a guideline for teachers and practitioners to incorporate genre-based instruction into teaching writing so as to improve students’ writing proficiency.