| Genre knowledge,as one of the most important indicators of academic writing competence,is crucial for the development of writing expertise(Hyland,2003;Negretti&Mcgrath,2018;Snow&Uccelli,2009;Tardy,2009,2019;Tardy et al.,2020).For EFL academic writing learners,genre knowledge plays an especially important role in the development of EFL academic writing competence because it can help them understand genre conventions and variations and write flexibly and effectively in different rhetorical contexts.Taking the sociocultural perspective,this longitudinal case study explored three EFL undergraduates’ genre knowledge development in academic writing in a period of 18 months.By collecting multiple sources of data,including observations,interviews and various types of documents,the study described the overall genre knowledge development in three students’ academic learning process and analyzed the mechanism of their genre knowledge development and how such mechanism was influenced by social/cultural affordances.Three major findings are reported in the study.First,four categories of genrespecific knowledge and genre awareness developed to different scales and at different rates,with formal knowledge and subject-matter knowledge developing relatively fast and sufficiently at an early stage and rhetorical knowledge and process knowledge developing relatively slowly and insufficiently.The development of EFL academic writing expertise began with an understanding of formal features of a genre,which gradually developed into a more sophisticated and nuanced awareness of how these formal features are shaped by their rhetorical purposes,contexts,interactions with the readers,and related disciplinary practices.This means that the development of EFL academic writing expertise is characterized as the parallel process of building and integrating various genre knowledge domains.Second,mediation is at the core of the mechanism of students’ genre knowledge development.The process of students’ genre knowledge development was substantiated in their participation in academic writing practices which are sociocultural in nature,and the mechanism which facilitated the development was the mediation of the academic writing activities,scientific concepts and high-quality intensive dialogic interactions between the instructor and the students.In this process,genre knowledge related symbolic tools were internalized by the students as psychological tools to self-regulate their own academic writing.The mutual mediation among different categories of genre knowledge facilitated an integrated development.Last but not the least,social/cultural affordances influenced the role which the mediational mechanism played in three students’ genre knowledge development,during which process,three students perceived and interpreted different social/cultural affordances in the academic writing learning contexts,and they took different learning actions.Students’ perceptions and interpretations of the social/cultural affordances were influenced by their academic writing learning motivation and goals,which were further influenced by their prior learning or academic writing experiences,significant others(mainly their parents),the curriculum design and the requirements of the academic writing course,their need to write graduation thesis,their beliefs about learning,their beliefs and intrinsic interests about academic research and academic writing,and their future plans of academia or career.The study is of theoretical significance in the following three aspects.First,this study reconceptualizes the EFL academic writing genre knowledge development and its mechanism.Different from the tradition of exploring genre knowledge development from the sociocognitive perspective,this study is the first study which has adopted a sociocultural perspective to systematically explore genre knowledge development in academic writing in the Chinese context and propose a theoretical framework of genre knowledge development in academic writing.Research from the sociocognitive perspective mainly focuses on the cognitive process of learners’ genre knowledge development,and the role which the sociocultural practices play in learners’ genre knowledge development is overlooked.This study fills this research gap and greatly facilitates the theoretical and practical innovation in the research on genre knowledge development.Second,this study combines the concept of social/cultural affordance with the sociocultural theory and effectively illustrates the influences of the social/cultural affordances on the mediational mechanism,which captures the complex and dynamic nature of mediation and makes the sociocultural theory more powerful in explaining the sociocultural mechanism of three students’genre knowledge development.Last but not the least,this study enriches the connotations of the sociocultural theory by explaining the mutual influence of the development of higher mental functions and the academic learning culture.From the sociocultural perspective,as a type of higher mental functions,the development of genre knowledge in academic writing originates in three students’ prolonged participation in the academic writing sociocultural practices.This study reveals that there is a unique academic learning culture in the Chinese context,which has influenced three students’ genre knowledge development,mainly by influencing their perception of and participation in the sociocultural practices.The development of genre knowledge can change the way of students’ perceptions of and participation in the sociocultural practices,which has the potential to change the academic learning culture.This study has important implications for the instruction of academic writing in China.First,genre knowledge development originates in the sustained participation in academic writing sociocultural practices.Thus,the instruction of the relevant genre knowledge directed at students’ academic writing practices and the design of the goaldirected academic instructional activities which can facilitate students’ participation are extremely important for their genre knowledge development in academic writing,which has great implications for the curriculum reform of academic writing instruction in China.Second,academic writing course designers and teachers need to pay attention to individual learners.They should know students’academic writing learning motivation and goals and both of the design of the academic writing course and the instruction should be based on students’ learning needs.Moreover,academic writing teachers should provide their students with strategic mediation,which will help the students better use the mediating tools to mediate their genre knowledge development.This is necessary although it means the increase of the cost of instruction.Last but not the least,the academic learning culture can influence learners’ way of perception of and participation in academic writing sociocultural practices,which will further influence learners’ genre knowledge development.Therefore,academic writing teachers should know the positive or negative influences of learners’ academic learning culture on their academic writing learning. |
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