Exploratory Practice and Genre Instruction : Advancing Nutrition Students' English Proficiency

SFL provides explicit instruction on the structure of disciplinary texts, such as procedural texts in nutrition, and the language features that characterize these texts.The intersection of EP and SFL provides a comprehensive approach to academic literacy.EP encourages students to engage in collaborative inquiry to explore their learning challenges, such as understanding complex technical English in nutrition texts, while genre-based instruction provides a structure to navigate the linguistic and rhetorical features of these texts.This integration helps students not only identify the challenges they face in understanding nutrition-related texts but also equips them with the language tools to effectively engage with these texts.Ultimately, the combination of EP and SFL helps students to deepen their understanding of both the academic language of their discipline and their own learning processes.The collaborative nature of EP encourages student agency, while SFL-based genre instruction offered by SFL provides structured instruction, empowering students to communicate competently in the academic context of nutrition. Methodology ContextThis study was conducted as part of a 15-week English for Nutritionists course at a public Indonesian university.The course was compulsory for first-year nutrition students, who had to pass it in order to continue their major, although they were not English majors.While the teacher (first author) followed a standard curriculum, there was flexibility in selecting methods and materials.In consultation with the students, three class sessions (Weeks 4, 14, and 15), each lasting 90 minutes, were dedicated to Exploratory Practice (EP) activities, while the remaining sessions focused on typical English for nutritionist's content using genre-based pedagogy grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).The university is situated in an urban area, serving a diverse student body, many of whom are first-generation college students, influencing their engagement with academic English.This setting presents distinct challenges compared to more urbanized or international institutions and reflects the context of non-English major students.