Examining the Effects of Genre-Based Instruction on Japanese EFL Students’ Request Email Writing

抄録

The present study attempted to design genre-based writing instruction to develop Japanese university EFL students’ skills in writing email requests and to examine the effects of the instruction on their actual production of emails where they asked for an appointment with an unknown professor. The instruction was devised based on Feez’s Teaching Learning Cycle (2002) consisting of different instructional stages. The students’ pre- and post-instructional emails were analyzed in terms of two kinds of move structures (i.e., framing moves and content moves) and two types of language choices (i.e., language forms to realize the request content moves and syntactic/lexical modifiers). The results of the analysis revealed that the instruction helped the students produce formal request emails equipped with the move structures and language features expected in this genre. The subsequent sample analysis demonstrated the actual positive changes detected between the students’ pre- and post-instructional emails.