INVESTIGATING A GENRE-BASED APPROACH TO WRITING IN AN ELEMENTARY SPANISH PROGRAM

The present study investigated the implementation of a genre-based approach to the instruction of writing in a fourth grade Spanish classroom. The instructional intervention explicitly taught students the ways of meaning in the touristic landmark description genre. Statistical analyses of students’ writing scores revealed that students’ writing performance significantly improved in terms of genre-specific features from the pretest to the posttest. In addition, findings revealed that a genre-based scoring instrument captured more change in students' writing than a performance-based rubric. Close descriptive analysis of the pretest and posttest writing of three students corroborated the statistical data and further depicted the linguistic variation in student writing in the study. A three-item student survey was administered at the end of the study. Student responses revealed that levels of genre awareness varied according to writing performance. Through interviews and fieldnotes, the teacher’s experience with the approach was described. The effect of the genre-based intervention was evident in her heightened awareness of the role of genre in developing students’ academic literacy in Spanish and in her planning and delivery of instruction in other classes. In addition, the teacher highlighted that target language use was a challenge in the novel approach. However, examination of her use of Spanish revealed that the use of English occurred in moments when 1) a task was new to the students, 2) the teacher was co-constructing a text in Spanish with students, and 3) the teacher was assessing student knowledge. The present study demonstrates that explicit instruction in the ways of meaning in a particular genre positively influenced the quality of students’ writing in that genre. In other words, genre matters in the development of academic literacy in the foreign language classroom. Given this importance of genre, approaches to instruction and assessment that expand the goals articulated in the National Standards (2006) and explicitly deconstruct the linguistic features of genre in an interactive way are discussed. Future research on genre based instruction and assessment in K-12 foreign language education is explored