How do we play the genre game in preparing students at the advanced undergraduate level for research writing?

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Teaching in Higher Education on 18 November 2009 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13562517.2011.530755.The study described in this article sets out to understand the barriers and affordances to successful completion of the short research thesis required in many advanced undergraduate courses or Honours programmes. In the study, the genre features of students' research projects and the criteria used to assess them were analysed and both students and supervisors were interviewed. The article focuses on one particular student from the case study and the findings provide in-depth insights into the complexities of genre acquisition in one particular department at a South African university, where writing and knowledge of the genre are often not taught, but must be acquired through a form of apprenticeship. The article concludes by raising some questions about how research genres can best be mediated in developmental contexts, where the teaching of writing may not be valued