English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Designing a genre-based lesson plan for an academic writing course

Volume 5 Number 3 December 2006

Handoyo Widodo (The English Program, Politeknik Negeri Jember (State Polytechnic of Jember))

Although much work in the area of EFL writing has been done, in this paper, I would like to propose a genre-based lesson plan for a writing course which I have used in an EFL classroom setting. This work is different from others in some instances. Firstly, in the stages of building knowledge of field (genre) and building knowledge of a similar field, I encourage students to seek for related information for their composition through CALL resources such as websites and email. These resources enable the students to work inside and outside class settings. Secondly, at the phase of exploring genre, I ask students to work cooperatively, and this activity ends with student-student and teacher-student conferences. Furthermore, before drafting, students are required to outline their composition using a recommended graphic organizer resulting from the student-student and teacher-student conferences. Lastly, I provide a cooperative writing task and end with student-student and teacher-student conferences to maximize students' ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development). In short, in the proposed lesson plan, I include cooperative and CALL principles to complement the genre-based approach to create more interactive writing tasks.  

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