Genre exploration : a frame for understanding and teaching social work writing in Botswana

In Botswana, social workers are trained via a Bachelor’s degree or a Diploma in social work taught at the university (Osei-Hwedie et al. 2006). Their training includes professional writing and yet both new social workers and their managers report that new social workers experience significant difficulties when writing professional documents. This study looks at the issue from two perspectives. Firstly, it offers a detailed description of some of the texts which professional social workers in Botswana write, and the circumstances in which they do so. It finds that the documents studied are highly intertextual; that they exhibit certain regularities in terms of pragmatic moves through which they achieve a communicative purpose; and that language choices indicate a variety of positions which the social worker may adopt towards the client. Based on our description, we then discuss a pedagogic approach designed to help social work students gain their own critical understanding of the texts which they will write, and so be better prepared for the demands of the professional writing practices of which the texts form a part