Genre-Based Approaches and the International Baccalaureate Diploma English Exam Paper 2

There are relatively few examples of genre-related text analysis on academic high-stakes English written exams. Of those that are written, discourse analysis and corpus studies are often used as tools to measure genre-related discourse awareness and textual patterns. In Genre Analysis, John Swale’s used text analysis from a rhetorical and linguistic background to come up with a theory of genre based on shared communicative purposes. To large extent genre scholars since then have ignored student reports of how they understand and deal with the rhetorical organization and textual patterns in high-stakes English exams. Furthermore, these concerns have not been studied in the International Baccalaureate English Language and Literature Exam Paper 2. Building on genre traditions in ESP research and New Rhetoric research, this dissertation explores how students report to make sense of high-stakes English exams in upper secondary school. This dissertation aims at identifying some of the approaches that students report to use when engaged in writing expository comparative literary essays. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, artifact analysis and surveys of student rhetorical moves, this study seeks to bridge genre studies traditions that have largely ignored social contexts of high-stakes exams as socially situated phenomena. Findings here suggest that social context plays a significant role in rhetorical development in academic writing. Some findings point out that inter-clausal contexts reflect rhetorical intentions unnoticed in previous studies, and must be considered before quantitative summaries of rhetorical modes can be validated in studies that measure argumentative rhetorical modes. This paper argues that schematic organization of longer expository writing within the overall rhetorical purpose of argumentation needs further examination when considered against task-related influences