Beyond academic writing: task development with hybrid genres in a doctoral course

Other conference contribution, 2024

Recent research shows an increasing variation in the types of communication genres that researchers are expected to produce (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019; Perez-Llantada, 2021; Negretti et al, 2022), such as blogs, debate articles, press releases and so forth. The emergence of these new hierarchies of genres as well as the hybridization spurred by social media effectively require that academics, and especially scientists, develop refined and flexible communicative skills, well beyond the ability to produce a scientific research paper (Reid, 2019). Yet, over the years, genre pedagogy has almost exclusively targeted academic writing, and Swales’ (1990) question as “to what extent and under what conditions skills acquired with one genre are transferable to another” (p. 233), as “a highly significant investigative issue” (p. 234), is still relevant. This presentation connects to a project under development, with Lisa McGrath and Christine Feak: we aim to promote transfer between genres and doctoral writers’ ability to utilize their emergent genre knowledge flexibly, beyond academic genres. Specifically, we test a new approach to task development that incorporates both academic and popularization/hybrid genres, arguing for its potential to train doctoral students in adapting their communication for different readers, increasing their metacognitive awareness of the rhetorical and linguistic strategies at their disposal. We adopt the framework for effective task development proposed by Swales & Feak (2023), and here I present an example of a reformulation task (Swales, 1990) with a hybrid genre—a popular description of a funded research project. This task integrates both a metacognitive component (Negretti, 2021) and a language play component (Tardy, 2021).