Beyond academic writing: the transformative potential of multi-genre tasks

Other conference contribution, 2025

Scholars are increasingly expected to communicate their research beyond the academy and to the wider community through genres such as blogs, debate articles, press releases and so forth. This emphasis on non-academic ‘outreach’ genres requires doctoral students to develop refined and flexible communicative skills, well beyond the ability to produce a thesis or research article. Yet, over the years, genre pedagogy – and our practice as EAP teachers - has almost exclusively targeted academic writing. This is problematic in that we have very little evidence that students are able to transfer the genre knowledge acquired in academic writing classes to writing these new, outreach genres. Our project tackles this issue head on: we designed and tested a new approach to writing task design that incorporates working with academic and popular genres together. Our aim was to promote transfer between genres (academic and outreach) and doctoral writers’ ability to utilize their emergent genre knowledge flexibly. In this presentation, we will present some tasks from the project and discuss preliminary data that points to the affordances of what we term ‘multi-genre pedagogy’