Enhancing review writing through explicit genre-based instruction: A quasi-experimental study on graduate students’ News & Views writing

The ability to evaluate scholarly work is an important aspect of graduate students’ academic development. One way to foster this ability is by learning how evaluations are constructed in published reviews. Nature’ s News & Views (N&V) articles, which summarize and evaluate individual research articles, provide valuable models for academic review writing. Although previous studies have identified the rhetorical move structure of N&V articles, little empirical research has examined how these genre features can be taught effectively in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts. This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of explicit genre-based writing instruction (GBWI) in improving graduate students’ N&V writing. Seventy students from two intact classes were assigned to either an experimental group (n = 35) or a comparison group (n = 35). The experimental group received explicit instruction on N&V move–step structure and evaluative language supported by examples drawn from a mini-corpus of published N&V articles, whereas the comparison group independently analyzed model texts to identify rhetorical and linguistic features. Results showed that explicit GBWI significantly improved students’ use of N&V move structures and overall writing performance. Students in the experimental group also used evaluative language more frequently than those in the comparison group, although the two groups did not differ significantly in the accuracy of evaluative language use. These findings provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of explicit GBWI in teaching N&V writing and offer pedagogical implications for implementing GBWI in EAP writing courses.