Taking the high road: how multi-genre pedagogy promotes genre knowledge and high-road transfer among academic and non-academic genres

How academic writing expertise might transfer across genres and contexts has been an open question in the field of EAP and genre pedagogy for decades. Yet we know little about whether and how genre pedagogy develops academic writers' capacity to transfer their writing expertise beyond the specific genres they have been taught. This is a significant gap considering how academic communication has evolved; today, academics and students are required to communicate their research to a much wider range of audiences and via an ever-evolving suite of genres. In light of this issue, the aim of this study was to design and trial an innovative approach to genre-pedagogy, which we term Multi-Genre Pedagogy (MGP). Unlike traditional approaches to teaching academic genres, MGP orients instruction towards writing across genres rather than teaching specific genres. An MGP task sequence was trialled with 9 social science doctoral students. Crucially, students worked with three different genres – an abstract, a blog post, and a ‘News and Views’ article – within the same workshop. The dataset comprises students' written texts, classroom audio (analysed as genre-related episodes), and post-workshop interviews. The qualitative analysis revealed that the task sequence promoted high-road transfer, genre specific knowledge and genre awareness. Further, the sequence heightened students' metacognitive awareness of strategies, their perceptions of themselves as writers, and gaps in their genre knowledge. The study advances our understanding of the effects of working with multiple and diverse genres concurrently and underscores the potential of MGP as a model of academic writing instruction.