Teaching EFL writing through Process, Genre, and Multimodal Pedagogies: A study of student perceptions
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Abstract
Writing instruction in most EFL contexts typically focuses on the teaching of five-paragraph essay writing, rather than genre-based writing that has relevance to real-life communication. While teaching essay writing has certain learning outcomes, it inarguably fails to help students develop lifelong writing skills that they can transfer across diverse social contexts. This study examines the viability of process, genre, and digital multimodal composition pedagogies in teaching socially situated genre-based writing to undergraduate EFL learners at a small public university in Türkiye. Specifically, it explores the implementation of these approaches through students’ perceptions drawing on qualitative survey data. Results demonstrate the pedagogical value of these approaches in developing students’ process-oriented writing skills and genre awareness, which enables students to write across varied genres, adapting prior skills to new contexts. Results further establish that students find genre-based and multimodal writing practices engaging and beneficial to their learning, while some challenges have been reported in the learning process. Implications include integrating a broader range of genres and digital technologies into EFL writing education to better align classroom writing with writing beyond school contexts, while locally adopting pedagogical practices to meet students’ learning needs.
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