Vol. 3. No. 3 A-2 September 1998
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Increasing students' awareness of genre through text transformation exercises: An old classroom activity revisited

Tim Caudery
University of Aarhus, Denmark
<elgu@post3.tele.dk>

Abstract

Students learning to write in L2 need to be aware of text genres: not simply of generic conventions, but of genre in the wider sense of communicative events or acts. This article claims that transforming texts from one genre to another, using information and ideas in the source text to create new texts for different audiences and purposes, helps students to become aware of and take into account genre-related features such as writer-reader relationship, purpose of writing, and medium. As well as discussing the advantages and drawbacks of using text transformation tasks on a writing course, both from theoretical and practical viewpoints, the article outlines how work on such tasks may be organised, and gives examples of task types. However, text transformation is a very flexible type of exercise, adaptable to different approaches to teaching writing, and to classes of different levels and with different writing goals.
Keywords: writing, genres, EFL

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