ESP Writing for Tourism: A Genre-based Approach in Teaching Writing to Iranian University Students

This article aims at investigating the effectiveness of using a genre-based approach in teaching ESP writing to the Iranian intermediate learners. To achieve its objectives, this research benefited from 60 sophomore female university volunteers who were then categorized into two groups of experimental (genre) and control (non-genre). During the instruction process which lasted 16 teaching hours, the experimental group received a genre-based teaching approach. In this condition, the participants were to evaluate six authentic tourist information texts which lasted for six successive sessions. They were encouraged to find out the major constituent moves previously discussed in class. At last the ESP learners had the opportunities for producing texts of the same genre following the rhetorical structure of the tourism texts extracted from brochures already analyzed in class. With regard to the non-genre group, a common teaching approach was applied in which the participants received the same six authentic texts. The activities included cloze exercises, sentence joining activities and error-correction exercises. No attention, either explicit or implicit, was allocated to the kind of genre and its constituent moves. The participants in this group had also opportunities to compose pieces of writing by making use of the six authentic texts. The design of the study considered two major variables: a) move index and b) texture index in relation to method variable. Move index investigated how well the participants performed on the use of appropriate move structures. The texturing index examined how well the writing assignments were textured. Taking the two groups into consideration, and in order to discover if general writing proficiency improves through using a genre based teaching, a two-way ANOVA was used to measure these variables in the participants' pretest and posttest. The results obtained from this study revealed that the participants in the genre group outperformed the non-genre group in their use of allowable move structures and texturing criteria. It was revealed that making use of the genre-based approach is beneficial in developing ESP writing skill of intermediate students. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2s1p47