Genre-Based Writing Instruction for Secondary School Students in an English as a Foreign Language Context: Facilitating Text Organization and Cohesion

In secondary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts, skill in argumentative writing is among the most important aspects for students’ academic success. However, EFL writing in secondary school remains largely unexplored in second language writing research, which seldom focuses on functional features of language, such as text structure and cohesion. This study investigates how a functional approach can help secondary school EFL students develop their ability to write argumentative texts. To accomplish this, a functional approach, Genre-Based Approach (GBA), was used as a teaching intervention to examine how it impacted 26 Japanese secondary school EFL students’ linguistic choices on essay writing tests. Using data from pre- and post-intervention essays, a quantitative analysis was conducted, showing a statistically significant difference in students’ task performance, text structure, and cohesion in argumentative writing. The results suggest that GBA had a meaningful impact on the students’ argumentative writing performance and that explicit instruction that connects language resources with a social context might help raise students’ genre awareness and improve their writing performance. These findings are expected to help secondary school EFL teachers better understand how text structure and cohesion should be taught in secondary school EFL contexts.