Changing Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom - Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

Changing
Practices _
C l a s n a e e l Es sa y
Changing Moving
Practices Beyond
for the the Five-

L2 Writing Paragraph
Classroom Essay
Edited by
Nigel A. Caplan
and Ann M. Johns
University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2019
All rights reserved
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ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03732-2 (print)

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INTRODUCTION
PART 1: Understanding the Five-Paragraph Essay

1: Have We Always Taught the Five-Paragraph Essay?
NigelA. Caplan
2: Is the Five-Paragraph Essay a Genre? 24

Christine M. Tardy
3: Does Everyone Write the Five-Paragraph Essay? 42

Ulla M. Connor and Estela Ene
PART 2: Writing Practices Beyond the 64

Five-Paragraph Essay
4: Interactions with and around Texts: Writing in 65
Elementary Schools
Luciana C. de Oliveira and Sharon L. Smith
5: Rethinking the Five-Paragraph Essay as a Scaffold 89

in Secondary School
Christina Ortmeier-Hooper
6: Transferable Principles and Processes in 116

Undergraduate Writing
Dana Ferris and Hogan Hayes
7: Writing in the Interstices: Assisting Novice 133

Undergraduates in Analyzing Authentic Writing Tasks
Ann M. Johns
iv ConTENTS
8: Preparing Students to Write in the Disciplines 150

Silvia Pessoa and Thomas D. Mitchell
9: Writing for Disciplinary Communities 178

Christine B. Feak
PART 3: Issues Beyond the Classroom 200

10: Standardized Testing Pressures and the Temptation 201
of the Five-Paragraph Essay
Deborah Crusan and Todd Ruecker
CONCLUSION: Where Do We Go from Here? 221

Contributor Bios 234
Index 239
MLL Lc |Nn tro d U ct |O Nn
NIGEL A. CAPLAN AND ANN M. JOHNS
At the 2017 TESOL Convention, Nigel, as chair of the

Second Language Writing Interest Section, organized a panel for
which Ann was a respondent to address the underlying myths that
we believe lead to the persistence of the five-paragraph essay in
both first (L1) and second language (L2) writing classrooms. The
room was packed, which was both flattering and alarming: At the
largest annual gathering of ESL/EFL teachers and in this day and
age, the five-paragraph essay still needs debunking.
This volume grew out of that conference presentation and
includes chapters by all the original speakers as well as other writ-
ing specialists. The goal in expanding those brief talks into a book
is to make the case for changes in L2 writing practices away from
the five-paragraph essay toward purposeful, meaningful writing
instruction. If you have already rejected the five-paragraph essay,
we offer validation and classroom-tested alternatives. If you are
new to teaching L2 writing, we introduce critical issues you will
need to consider as you plan your lessons and as you read the text-
books and handbooks that continue to promote the teaching of the
five-paragraph essay. If you need ammunition to present to col-
leagues and administrators, we present theory, research, and peda-
gogy that will benefit students from elementary to graduate school.
If you are skeptical about our claims, we invite you to review the
research presented here and consider what your students could do
beyond writing a five-paragraph essay if you enacted these changes
in practice.
*
vi INTRODUCTION
First, though, we need to establish a definition of the five-para-

graph essay. We want to be clear from the outset that the number
of paragraphs is unimportant: What defines the five-paragraph
essay is not the magical trinity of body paragraphs but rather an
approach to writing that is insensitive to context, rhetorical situa-
tion, audience, or communicative purpose. Instead, the “five-para-
graph essay” presents a single, prescriptive, and specific form for all
student writing. Underlying this approach is the mistaken belief
that any writing task is a problem that can be solved by applying
the same formula—that simply by putting prefabricated chunks
together, a satisfactory product will automatically emerge.
In the canonical five-paragraph essay, the first paragraph is an
inverted-triangular introduction starting with a “hook” and ending
with a “thesis statement” that lists two or three ideas. The next two
or three paragraphs are the “body” paragraphs that each expand
on one of those ideas and may begin with a transition word (first,
next, finally) followed by a “topic sentence,” a fixed number of
“supporting sentences,” and usually a “concluding sentence.” The
last paragraph is a conclusion that repeats everything the reader
already knows from the previous paragraphs. While five-paragraph
essays are often mistakenly applied to all types of student writing
(narratives, descriptions, expositions, and so on), they are always
thesis-driven arguments at heart, even though not everything is
really an argument, in education or anywhere else (see, for example,
de Oliveira & Smith’s discussion of the U.S. Common Core State
Standards, Chapter 4).’The defining feature of the five-paragraph
essay is thus its inflexible predictability of form. Sure, it can be
contracted to three or four paragraphs, expanded to six or seven
paragraphs, or even encapsulated in a single paragraph, but it can-
not adapt, evolve, or create. It can only limit, narrow, and simplify.
We argue, therefore, that the central limitation of the five-para-
graph essay is that it is a formulaic template for school writing;
thus, a number of the authors here use the term formulaic writing
or writing template synonymously with the “five-paragraph essay.”
This is not to deny that good writing in many contexts follows pat-
terns of organization, which some scholars call moves (e.g., Feak,
Introduction Vii
Chapter 9) or stages (e.g., de Oliveira & Smith, Pessoa & Mitch-

ell, Chapters 4 and 8). Clearly, it is easy to find sets of texts that
are highly predictable in structure and language, such as commit-
tee resolutions, proclamations, fairy tales, and wedding invitations
(although see Tardy, 2016, and Johns, 1997, for some variations).
However, it is more accurate to say that these genres have strict
conventions. As Tardy (Chapter 2) explains, these conventions are
tied to the rhetorical situation. What we call formulaic writing, by
contrast, applies the same template regardless of purpose, genre,
or context, giving rise to the frustratingly resilient five-paragraph
essay. We note in passing here that by criticizing formulaic writ-
ing, we are in no way dismissing the importance of lexical bundles,
micro-level formulae, or multi-word phrases, which are ubiquitous
in academic writing and valuable to learners at all levels (see, for
example, Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008).
Appropriately enough, this volume consists of an introduction,
three body sections, and a conclusion. In Part 1, three chapters
discuss what the five-paragraph essay is not: it is not a very old,
established form of writing (Caplan); it is not a genre (Tardy); and
it is not universal (Connor & Ene). Once these common myths
have been dispelled, it is easier to see the five-paragraph essay for
what it is: a recent and often contested expediency that emerged in
North America as a reductive way to simplify the task of teaching
and producing pedagogical writing. The reality, as these chapters
argue, is that writing is complex, a “thinking tool” (Tardy, p. 30)
that responds flexibly to rhetorical situations. By pretending that
academic writing is as simple as a five-paragraph formula, even
with the best of intentions, teachers deny students access to the
writing skills they will actually need.
Part 2 looks at writing across the educational spectrum, from
schools to universities to graduate degrees. The five-paragraph
essay is often justified as preparation for the next stage in a stu-
dent’s education, but in fact, the five-paragraph essay is inadequate
for effective writing in elementary schools (de Oliveira & Smith),
secondary schools (Ortmeier-Hooper), first-year college writ-
ing classes (Johns), university writing courses (Ferris & Hayes),
Vili INTRODUCTION
undergraduate classes across the disciplines (Pessoa & Mitchell),

and graduate school (Feak). Two themes connect these chapters:
(1) the five-paragraph essay is not a support or scaffold for future
writing, and (2) the lessons learned from writing five-paragraph
essays will not transfer to “real” writing in the future. In response,
we show that clinging to the five-paragraph essay is actually an
obstacle to students’ progress, especially that of English learners,
because it forces writing into a structure that is not, in fact, useful.
Part 3 looks beyond the classroom as Crusan and Ruecker
explore the use of the five-paragraph essay in assessment. We rec-
ognize, of course, that the five-paragraph essay has spread around
the world largely because of perceived requirements of standard-
ized tests. However, the major tests do not all explicitly require
five-paragraph essays, and they assess skills that must be demon-
strated in other ways. As Crusan and Ruecker point out, percep-
tions of the test as favoring the five-paragraph essay should not
“wash back” into curriculum design.
The volume’s Conclusion takes up this question of curriculum
design by stepping back and asking some of the big questions that
the volume raises: What is good writing? What do good writers
do? What should writing teachers be doing in the classroom if they
are not teaching the five-paragraph essay? We also discuss ques-
tions we cannot fully answer, citing other works about genre theory,
curriculum and lesson design, textbooks, and teacher training.
At the end of each chapter, the authors suggest changes to teach-
ing practices they recommend based on their theoretical approach
and classroom experience. Broadly, we all advocate teaching writ-
ing through genres or as responses to specific disciplinary prompts
rather than as modes crammed into the five-paragraph form of an
“essay” (descriptive essay, compare/contrast essay, analytic essay, etc.).
Several chapters present assignment sequences that follow similar
progressions of text and prompt analysis, modeling and collaborative
writing, and meaningful independent writing. Some chapters recom-
mend a rhetorical approach to genres, while others take a more lin-
guistic line, but we all agree that students at all ages and levels need a
deep toolbox, a wide repertoire, and a high level of genre awareness.
Introduction ix
While we do not all define the problem in the same ways or

agree on the same solutions, one theme runs throughout the book:
The five-paragraph essay does a disservice to students and teach-
ers. Teaching the five-paragraph essay leads students in the wrong
directions, severely limiting their understanding of what writing
is—or should be. We believe our students deserve better.
REFERENCES
Biber, B., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). Ifyou look at ...: Lexical bundles
in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25, 371-405.
doi:10.1093/applin/25.3.371
Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation.
English for Specific Purposes, 27, 4-21. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.001
Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: Developing academic literacies. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Tardy, C. (2016). Beyond convention: Genre innovation in academic writing.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Have We Always Taught

the Five-Paragraph Essay’?
NIGEL A. CAPLAN
I grew up in England, where I did a lot of writing, but never

a five-paragraph essay. When my high school and university teach-
ers in the U.K. had given feedback on my writing, they took me
to task on my ideas, development, analyses, and diction. But other
than occasionally asking for more white space as a breather, they
didn't try to force my writing into a fixed number of paragraphs
or perpetuate the myth that all “academic” writing for all purposes
and all audiences must conform to a certain format. I did not hear
the terms shesis statement or topic sentences until years later when I
began teaching in the U.S.
When I was first presented with the five-paragraph essay as a
newly minted teacher, I readily bought into the myth that it was
a form of scaffolding, the first step in marshalling students’ natu-
ral proclivity for disorganized and underdeveloped thoughts into
a form valued in U.S. academic culture. So I dutifully, if joylessly,
marched my class of international university students through a
popular ESL writing textbook with its neat line art, prescriptive
2
1: Have We Always Taught It? 3
formulae, banal models, and vapid prompts. It was not a successful

semester.
I remember the dayI threw in the towel. A bright young Korean
woman was trying to understand my feedback and her low grade.
Her ideas were complex, her response subtle, her expression sophis-
ticated. But she was utterly unable to cram her writing into the
half-baked five-paragraph mold demanded by the textbook and
rubric. At first I tried to reason with her: “But this is how Ameri-
cans write,” even though I found such a justification specious. She
left the room in tears.
I was fortunate to be working at that time with two brilliant
writing teachers, Andrew McCullough and Ruelaine Stokes, at
Michigan State University. When I vented my frustration to them,
they not only sympathized but agreed to join me on a crusade to
break out from the five-paragraph straight-jacket. For several years,
we went around local and national conferences bemoaning for-
mulaic writing instruction and promoting the sort of “personal-
expressivist” approach to writing (Johns, 1997) propounded by
Elbow (1998) and others. Instead of focusing on structure and
academic argument, we argued, teachers should get out of students’
way, promote writing as self-expression, and use writing workshops
to help students find the shape and voice for their texts.
However, not everyone was convinced, and ultimately, neither
was I. After one such presentation at a Michigan TESOL confer-
ence, a colleague stopped us in our tracks by asking, if she didn't
teach the five-paragraph essay, what should she teach, and how?
The form had become so entrenched in teaching second language
writing that the less enthusiastic members of our audiences were
rightly reluctant to give up the familiar structure. Essentially, we
had been advocating only a slightly more structured version of Sar-
oyan’s writing process: “How do you write? You write, man, you
write, that’s how” (Saroyan, 2002). This wouldn't do: structure is
certainly important in writing successful texts.
I found myself in a bind: The five-paragraph essay entirely
ignores the context and purpose of writing—its situatedness—by
4 CHANGING PRACTICES
reducing writing to its form, but expressivist approaches are equally

insufficient because they assume that clear, coherent, structured
writing will magically emerge in ways that are valued and effec-
tive for particular audiences in particular settings. Furthermore,
some academic and professional writing is clearly forumulaic in
the sense it follows more or less rigid conventions (Tardy, 2016;
Chapter 2) and uses recurrent phrases and language patterns
(Morley, 2018; Swales & Feak, 2012). As a result, often in frustra-
tion, teachers understandably fall back on what they know and see
in their textbooks and curricula—the five-paragraph essay, which
is presented not only as a writing formula but ¢he formula for all
academic writing in all places at all times. This book is an attempt
to answer question we heard at MITESOL: What should we be
teaching if we reject the extremes of the rigid form and the expres-
sive free-for-all?
In order to do that, I first want to challenge the mistaken belief
that we need to teach the five-paragraph essay because “We've
always done it this way.” By looking at most ESL textbooks and
curricula, one might easily conclude that writing has always and
only been taught in the form of an “essay” with three to five para-
graphs. The same formula is taught, it seems, to all ages, at all pro-
ficiency levels, and for all writing tasks. The only variation is the
visual metaphor used to illustrate the universal structure of writ-
ing: A quick internet search reveals a plethora of graphic images—
hourglasses, hamburgers, handprints, a dinosaur, and even an ice-
cream cone.
The attractions of the five-paragraph essay are clear: It is easy
to teach, learn, and grade, and its invariance suggests a universal-
ity that is comforting to students faced with the prospect of writ-
ing in new educational contexts. Since teachers are bombarded
with just this one formula through textbooks, course guides,
multiple well-meaning websites, and giant classroom posters, it
is tempting to accept the five-paragraph essay as “something we
teach and have always taught.” Momentum is a powerful force,
but even entrenched teaching practices must be questioned and
challenged.
In fact, the five-paragraph essay isn’t even all that old. We aven’t
always taught it, and we can't use history as an excuse for perpetu-
ating bad practices. In place of “We’ve always done it that way,”
we as educators, curriculum designers, and material writers need
to ask, “What should we be teaching when we teach writing?”—
a question we return to in the Conclusion.
The Research
To clarify why the five-paragraph essay feels so established, this sec-

tion reviews its history and explores why and how it became seen as
the standard of academic writing in the United States and elsewhere.
««w Gomposition in the Nineteenth Century

Composition gradually entered the school curriculum in the
United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century
(Schultz, 1999). Initially, students were required to memorize and
reproduce moralistic model texts written by the textbook authors
with titles like Justice, Pride, or Emulation and Sloth (Schultz, 1999,
p. 25-26). Around the middle of the nineteenth century, this peda-
gogy was challenged by the English theme, the ancestor of the
five-paragraph essay (Carr, Carr, & Schultz, 2005; Tremmel, 2011).
In many schools and colleges, students wrote themes regularly, as
one Harvard student, Walter Pritchard-Eaton, later reflected:
By training the daily theme eye, we watched for and found in the surround-
ings of our life, as it passed, a heightened picturesqueness, a constant wonder,
and added significance. (Pritchard-Eaton, 1907, quoted in Tremmel, 2011,
emphasis in original)
The English theme was clearly quite different from the hamburg-
ers and hourglasses of the present day, whose picturesqueness is
decidedly not heightened, and which rarely inspire any sort of won-
der. While some nineteenth century textbooks did indeed present
themes as fixed, even formulaic (Nunes, 2013), others promoted a

more expressivist pedagogy by training the “daily theme eye” and
seeking meaning “in the surroundings of our life” rather than emu-
lating models. The focus of composition had shifted somewhat
from memorization to expression.
The newly emerging composition textbooks in this period rec-
ognized several genres and encouraged students to write for dif-
ferent purposes. For example, there were two types of theme in
most textbooks with quite different goals: The plain theme was
descriptive, whereas the complex theme was argumentative. Only
the complex theme had a fixed structure, which presages the arrival
of the five-paragraph essay: “the proposition, the reason, the con-
firmation, the simile, the example, the testimony or quotation,
and the conclusion” (Carr et al., 2005, p. 173). However, there was
still in this period the understanding that writing has a purpose
that is reflected in the content, organization, and language of the
text.
«ww Enter the Five-Paragraph Essay
While the structure of a complex theme was non-negotiable, it

did at least work through different rhetorical strategies for defend-
ing an argument, with each paragraph filling a different rhetori-
cal function. The “five-paragraphness” of the essay, with its largely
identical “body” paragraphs, did not become fully calcified until
long after Prichard-Eaton’s halcyon undergraduate days at Har-
vard (Tremmel, 2011). In the December 1959 issue of The English
Journal, a high school teacher from Richmond, California, Vic-
tor Pudlowski, bemoaned the “thoroughly unorganized” compo-
sitions of a certain Miss Trix’s sophomore English class: “Mary’s
dog Spot spent 1500 words chasing its tail. And he never caught
it. Tom ambled aimlessly through his boring summer. Alice’s cat,
on the other hand, had nine kittens.” In response to what he called
“these chaotic compositions,” Pudlowski announced that “we have
devised in our school a composition outline (we call it a formula).”
It was indeed the formulaic five-paragraph essay and, according
to Tremmel (2011), the earliest prescriptive statement of how a//

school writing should be done.
The five-paragraph essay has been defined from then on by the
unvarying rigidity of its form or, as Labaree (2018) neatly explains,
its “formalism.” The number of paragraphs is merely a convenience:
what defines the five-paragraph essay is the practice of reducing all
writing tasks to a singular, universal form. In Pudlowski’s (1959)
version, there are topic sentences that must be underlined and link-
ing words (however, moreover, furthermore) to be boxed. Each of the
three body paragraphs now has exactly the same structure, length,
and function, which was not the case with the earlier English theme.
“At first sight,” Pudlowski concedes, “this outline appears to be
rather restrictive. It may even seem to force students to repeat their
ideas over and over [...] but a few quick drills with Roget’s Thesau-
rus quickly teach young writers to express their ideas in a variety
of ways.” Sadly, this nonchalant acceptance that the five-paragraph
essay promotes form over meaning, that it results in tedious but
structured writing, and that it requires no more linguistic knowledge
than a few synonyms persists in many circles today.
Thus, while it is possible to trace individual elements of the five-
paragraph essay to the early nineteenth century, the form itself was
considered sufficiently new that it was “discovered” just a genera-
tion ago. In fact, it was so innovative that it was invented not only
in 1959 but again by Duane Nichols, an English professor at Kan-
sas State University, in a 1966 article also in The English Journal.
The fact that the formula (and Nichols even provides an algebraic
formula for conclusions!) was deemed worthy of publication not
once but twice in the same prestigious journal indicates that it was
still considered a novelty by many readers in the 1960s, both in
secondary and higher education.
wuu\Nhat Was New about the Five-Paragraph Essay?
Defenders of the five-paragraph essay have argued that it is the

successor to a much longer tradition of structured arguments
than is presented here, dating back even to the classical origins of
rhetoric (e.g., Nunes, 2013). They can thus conclude that the five-
paragraph essay is a tried-and-tested model for good writing and
feel comfortable teaching it today. After all, the broader concept of
essay writing has a long and venerable history. Most commentators
and the Oxford English Dictionary attribute the modern meaning
of the word essay to Michel de Montaigne, whose collection of
Essais was first published in 1580. In French, the meaning of essai
is closer to “attempt,” as seen in this definition of essay:
A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of

a subject; originally implying want of finish, ‘an irregular undigested piece’
(Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style,
though limited in range. (OED)
Arguably five paragraphs is indeed a “moderate length,” although

Montaigne’s own essays vary from tight, single-paragraph analy-
ses (“On the Parsimony of the Ancients”) to an 85-page disquisi-
tion called “On Experience.” “Je suis moi-méme la matiére de mon
livre” (“I myself am the subject of my book”), wrote Montaigne in
his preface, and his writing reflected his breadth of interests, from
cannibals to kings to the resemblance between children and their
fathers.
Montaigne’s essays were true essais: attempts to understand the
natural world, human nature, and above all, the writer himself.
In the sixteenth century, essays were unconstrained by length or
convention, freely crossed genres and registers, and were written
more to train the mind than for any formal educational purpose.
It is perhaps from these origins that instructors in ESL, first-year
writing, and disciplinary classes sometimes call any text with para-
graphs an “essay” (see Johns, Chapter 7). However, the fact that
the word essay has crept into the educational world to mean virtu-
ally any piece of student writing does not make the five-paragraph
essayist the modern incarnation of Montaigne.
It is worth taking seriously Pudlowski’s (1959) and Nichols’s
(1966) claims of innovation. If the modern essay were nothing
more than an evolution of a centuries-old tradition, these two
articles would make little sense. Clearly, they and the editors of
The English Journal felt that the five-paragraph essay was new, a
break from the writing paradigm of its time rather than a continu-
ation. In order to understand how we ended up with the five-para-
graph essay we know today, we need to ask what these innovations
were.
In a departure from Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, and other early
essayists, educators in the mid-twentieth century began to pres-
ent a highly rigid formulation of the essay as the sole measure of
good writing. The title of Pudlowski’s (1959) article is revealing:
“Compositions—Writing ‘em Right!” Anything that is not writ-
ten “right,” presumably, is wrong. And while defenders of the five-
paragraph essay such as Nichols (1966) claim that the structure
exists only as a framework to be shed when the writer has reached
mastery or become a “good writer,” it is never clear when that day
may come nor whether all writers can expect to lose their training
wheels (see Ortmeier-Hooper, Chapter 5). Absent from this defi-
nition of writing are voice, creativity, flexibility, audience awareness,
context, and purpose, all of which were present both in the original
meaning of the essai and even to some extent in the English theme.
This view of the five-paragraph essay as normative, the only way
to write, made the structure itself the focus of writing instruction,
a change from previous practice that should be seen as regression
rather than innovation.
The second development is the overextension of the five-para-
graph essay to all writing tasks. Nichols (1966) presents “a simpli-
fied breakdown of an essay—almost any essay” (p. 903). Suddenly,
everything is an essay, and every essay is a kind of thesis-driven
argument. Arguments are important in many disciplines, but not
every text should make one, and it’s not even clear that teaching
the five-paragraph essay is an effective way to teach academic argu-
mentation (see Pessoa & Mitchell, Chapter 8). The compositions
of which “Miss Trix” despaired were unsuccessful narratives, sto-
ries about students’ summer vacation and pets. But rather than help
students understand how to write a good narrative (or explanation
or description), Pudlowski’s (195 9) solution was to turn all student
writing into argumentative “essays” with theses, topic sentences,

and so on. Therefore, in many ways, the writing curriculum of
1870 was actually broader than many writing programs today; one
popular textbook of the period included “editorials, reviews, essays,
treatises, travels, history, fiction, and discourses” (Carr et al., 2005,
p. 197). Today’s L2 writing textbooks have largely lost this sense
of genre, audience, and purpose in favor of simplistic attention to
structure. It is precisely this loss of situatedness in writing that the
earliest advocates of the five-paragraph essay extolled and which
we should now regret.
«ue§<Response to Shifting Demographics

As this thumbnail history shows, the reduction of all writing
assignments to an invariant, usually argumentative, five-paragraph
essay is not really a long-standing precedent. It results in a nar-
rowing of the writing curriculum, limiting some students’ ability to
write the high-stakes genres they need (Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013)
(see also Chapters 5 and 8). Nichols (1966) admits as much: “The
kinds of essays we assign . .. are highly artificial things, the assign-
ments often arbitrary” (p. 908). Why, then, did this happen?
Some historians of rhetoric associate the evolution of the five-
paragraph essay with shifts in the demographics of education in
the United States, which can best be seen in the emergence of the
first-year Composition course, a one-to-two semester requirement
at most North American universities and a relatively recent addition
to the higher-education landscape. Although Composition was a
component of the college curriculum in the early nineteenth cen-
tury as we have seen, students at that time generally entered higher
education with well-developed writing skills since they had almost
all previously attended a “Latin” grammar school or worked with
a private tutor (Carr et al., 2005). The two inflection points pre-
viously described that gave us the five-paragraph essay coincided
with two major expansions of access to higher education: The first
was during the 1870s after the Civil War when there was an overall
increase in university enrollment that included the admission of

women; the second was in the mid-twentieth century when racial
segregation ended and the G.I. Bill was introduced.! These social
changes brought in students with more varied educational back-
grounds and levels of preparation, as well as part-time instructors
with little or no training in rhetoric (Berggren, 2008). Mandated
Composition classes emerged as a ready solution that would help
new student populations acculturate to university life by teach-
ing them the basics of college writing. It seems that the same
impulse has reinvigorated the five-paragraph essay more recently
at all levels of ESL writing, particularly in programs whose goal is
to prepare international and multilingual students for, or support
them through, English-medium universities. Although the five-
paragraph essay has been criticized by compositionists for almost
as long as it has been used in first-year writing classes (Iremmel,
2011; Wardle, 2009; White, 2008), it washed back into ESL pro-
grams and other developmental settings, where it has stagnated.
In short, each time the student body becomes broader, the five-
paragraph essay becomes more deeply entrenched as a mediocre
solution to teach mediocre writing to students that many in uni-
versities and colleges believed were not ready for higher education.
As the entire education system in the U.S. and elsewhere becomes
more culturally and linguistically diverse, it follows that curriculum
designers once more look to the five-paragraph essay as a quick
fix for L2 students who do not immediately write in ways that
are effective in the academy. This may help explain why so-called
“current-traditional” teaching has not only survived but thrived in
L2 writing (Johns, 1997). Current-traditional approaches to writ-
ing are organized around rhetorical modes such as description,
comparison, and process. Each mode becomes an “essay” with four
or five paragraphs, a controlling claim (thesis), three sub-points,
1 The G.I. (General Infantry) Bill was first passed in 1944 as the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act
and continues to provide veterans of the U.S. military with tuition for undergraduate, graduate,
and training programs.
and so on. ESL textbooks have showed particular zeal for a “rigid
formulation” of mode-based writing—the compare/contrast essay,
the process essay, and so forth—even as they claim to teach “process
writing” (Matsuda, 2003, p. 76). What we are left with is a process
for teaching just the five-paragraph essay, often repeated across mul-
tiple levels of a program. With the best of intentions, the construct
of writing has been narrowed and decontextualized, justified by the
myth that we’ve always done it this way. However, the five-paragraph
essay has not, in fact, existed forever, its roots are relatively shallow,
and such a flimsy tradition alone is no reason to continue teaching it.
Changes in Practice
Wardle (2017) argues in her elegant critique of the five-paragraph

essay that “there is no such thing as writing in general. Writing is
always in particular” (p. 30). The ancients knew this, Montaigne
certainly focused on the particular, and even the early manifesta-
tions of the English theme seemed concerned with specific slices of
life. In the rise of the hegemonic, standards-setting five-paragraph
essay, though, there was a profound change in the understanding
of writing, from a particular response to a particular rhetorical sit-
uation to a general form that must be repeatedly taught, rigidly
applied, and eternally assessed.
I am always mindful of the question I was asked in Michigan:
If we don't teach the familiar five-paragraph form, what do we
teach? This section includes some answers for the context in which
I teach, an IEP at a U.S. university, where international students
enroll in order to improve their English proficiency for future
academic study, professional purposes, or self-improvement. The
common thread in this section takes up Wardle’s (2017) challenge
to teach writing “in particular”; that is, to develop writing tasks
that are meaningful to students zow and that engage them in ways
that may transfer to a variety of writing situations in the future
(Ferris & Hayes, Chapter 6).
1. Make writing assignments meaningful.
Benjamin Franklin, no less, proposed a composition curriculum in

1751 that recommended:
The Boys should be put on Writing Letters to each other on any common
Occurrences, and on various Subjects, imaginary Business, &c. containing
little Stories, Accounts of their late Reading, what Parts of Authors please
them, and why. Letters of Congratulation, of Compliment, of Request, of
Thanks, of Recommendation, of Admonition, of Consolation, of Expos-
tulation, Excuse, 8c. (quoted in Schultz, 1999, p. 14)
By contrast, too many writing assignments today are automatically

called essays or, if they involve sources, research papers. 1 am fond of
a Zits cartoon in which a high school student is struggling with
an assignment to “write a message to a troubled country of our
choice.” He observes it is “half message, half essay ... it’s a messay”
(Scott & Borgman, 2012).
If an analogue of the assignment cannot be found “in the wild”
(Rorschach, 2004), then perhaps it is not a meaningful task, like
the cartoonists’ “messay.” For example, there are no contexts where
writing “an essay comparing you and your best friend” is a mean-
ingful task; it is purely a rote exercise in producing a compare/
contrast five-paragraph essay. However, students can write let-
ters and emails to actual or imagined audiences comparing two
experiences (e.g., print textbooks and ebooks, or monolingual and
bilingual dictionaries, or two different classrooms, or two brands of
cookies) and make a recommendation based on their analysis. Their
writing will still have appropriate form and structure by drawing
on the recognizable elements of the target mode (comparison), but
it will also fulfill Wardle’s (2017) principle that all writing be in
particular and not in general. Students will have written with the
purpose of creating meaning in their texts.
Choosing appropriate content and tasks, however, is challenging
for students transitioning into university studies because, after all,
they are not yet part of the communities for which they will need
to write. It is, therefore, vital to design courses that build knowl-

This can be
edge so that writing is meaningful and not mechanical.
achieved through sustained theme-based classes (Caplan, 2010),
collaborations with disciplinary faculty (Pessoa & Mitchell, Chap-
ter 8), or a focus on analyzing—“reading”—another university
class (Johns, 2008, and Chapter 7). For example, in my prepara-
tory ESL classes for international graduate students, Ichoose one
broad theme that students can relate to their different fields, such
as globalization, technology, health, or ethics. Together we build
background knowledge, read articles, write summaries, and analyze
data (see Swales & Feak, 2012). Then in groups and individually,
students take different angles on the topic in the fields of busi-
ness, education, engineering, and so on, culminating in a report or
literature review. Ortmeier-Hooper (Chapter 5) describes a similar
assignment sequence appropriate for high school and undergradu-
ate students.
2. Organize writing courses around genres not modes.
Genres are the ways we get things done in writing (and speak-
ing) in a particular social context. As Tardy (Chapter 2) explains,
genres are not simply forms—they have a purpose. Whereas writ-
ing textbooks and courses, especially in ESL, are often organized
around some list of rhetorical modes (write a descriptive paragraph,
a compare/contrast essay, a cause/effect essay, a persuasive essay, etc.),
actual writing in both academia and the world beyond is organized
in genres (lab reports, project proposals, research papers, discussion
board posts, reviews, reports, editorials, etc.). This is not to say that
rhetorical modes are unimportant: Individual parts of a longer text
might require definition, explanation, or description, and a com-
plex text might draw on multiple modes in different places (see
Chapter 8 for an example of this in an undergraduate assignment).
However, patterns of organization like comparison, process, and
chronology are not genres in themselves.
The appropriate choice of genre depends on the context of the
course and the current and future needs of the students. Although
IEPs are often preparing students for something else (undergradu-

ate courses, doctoral degrees, the business world), it is important
for students to write in ways that are meaningful and engaging to
them ow rather than always writing in ways they may need in the
future. For example, instead of assigning a “descriptive essay,” my
colleague and I teach restaurant reviews, product descriptions for
online retail sites, and real estate listings (Caplan & Farling, 2017).
Other genres that can easily be taught include fundraising letters,
online discussion boards, case analyses, and movie pitches (Caplan
& Bixby, 2014). Yasuda (2011) uses email to introduce genre as an
organizing principle in her EFL writing classes at a Japanese uni-
versity so that students “can experience a variety of discourses and
expand their use of registers and language choices to make mean-
ing by moving from oral, informal, and personal registers toward
written, formal, and public registers” (p. 113). Her syllabus teaches
students to write emails that, for example, express gratitude, make
apologies, express congratulations, set and change appointments,
and apply for jobs. Johns (Chapter 7) makes another course that
students are taking (or will take) the subject for analysis in her ESL
class, making it immediately and critically relevant.
In an IEP, genre-based writing instruction is challenging since
most of my students do not yet have the experience or content
knowledge to write in the disciplinary genres of an undergraduate
engineering class or an MBA seminar. One way to avoid assigning
“messays” is to skirt the temptation to fake a seemingly authentic
context and instead focus on key genres and part-genres (Swales &
Feak, 2012) that are found across academia and can be taught in an
IEP class using meaningful content, such as summaries or abstracts
(which vary widely depending on their context and purpose),
responses, short-answer definition questions, syntheses, annotated
bibliographies, emails to professors, critiques, and literature reviews
(Danielewicz, Jack, Singer, Stockwell, & Guest Pryal, n.d.; Nesi &
Gardner, 2012; Swales & Feak, 2012; Yasuda, 2011). Other impor-
tant genres for all students are those with which they present them-
selves to the world, such as CVs, websites, portfolios, and descrip-
tive texts on social media sites (see also Feak, Chapter 9).
Most genres entail multiple modes of writing: A literature

review, for instance, requires a delicate balance of summary and
argument, while a data commentary might be organized using
comparative, narrative, chronological, or analytical sections. There-
fore, it is important to spiral a writing curriculum so that writers
learn how to, for example, recount the methods of an experiment,
describe a historical event, explain data in a graph, and support
opinions about their reading and listening. Table 1.1 suggests pos-
sible genres that could be taught across a multi-level program,
which might form the basis for a genre-based writing curriculum
that still addresses rhetorical modes (see Caplan & Bixby, 2014,
for an example of one textbook series that supports this teaching
practice).
3. Draw attention to purpose, audience, and context as well as

structure.
Teaching without the five-paragraph essay does not mean aban-

doning all structure in writing. Structure is important, but it is not
universal, and it is far from the only consideration for any writer,
even on a standardized writing test (see Crusan & Ruecker, Chap-
ter 10). Teachers can motivate students to write meaningfully by
reinstating the context that the five-paragraph essay has eroded
over the years.
We don't just write. We write something to someone for some
purpose. For example, online product reviews are written to help
other consumers or complain about a bad purchase, and they
typically follow a regular structure: establishing the author's cred-
ibility, describing the product, evaluating key features, and mak-
ing a recommendation. A news story has the goal of informing
readers about an event and predictably has these parts: headline,
lead (main event), development (details and perspectives on the
lead), and an optional wrap-up, such as possible future develop-
ments (de Silva Joyce & Feez, 2012). Email requests sent to pro-
fessors have a clear goal and need a clear subject line, a greeting,
TABLE 1.1
Genre-Based Writing Tasks
Mode*/Level Elementary Intermediate
Narrative story, news report, case study,

autobiography, biography, profile movie synopsis
CV.
newsletter restaurant or company

article, movie product review profile, case
review study
Process or encyclopedia lab report, popular
Chronology entry, letter to a informational science/history
customer brochure magazine
article, research
methods
section
Problem/ Frequently- public-service business

Solution Asked Questions |announcement, _| plan, research
(FAQ) web page | request email proposal
Comparison email comparing | review comparing | synthesis

two experiences | products or
services
Argument™* advice column, | discussion board | literary/film

complaint letter | post, response,
business letter fundraising
letter
Genres that tourist guide summary empirical

require multiple and response, research
modes personal paper, data
statement commentary
* Many genres in fact draw on multiple modes in different stages of the text. This list identi-
fies the dominant mode in each genre for teachers trying to adapt genre-based pedagogy to a
mode-based curriculum.
* The traditional argument mode in fact includes a wide range of rhetorical functions, including
thesis-driven exposition, discussion, challenge or refutation, and recommendation (see Nesi &
Gardner, 2012, for a detailed explanation).
background information (generally introducing the writer), the

request itself, usually accompanied by a justification (why you're
making this request), and a closing with thanks and the writer's
name (Baugh, 2011).
Therefore, instead of starting with form or a predetermined
structure, genres are best taught inductively through engaging stu-
dents in the analysis of multiple model texts with the awareness
that there are always variations, evolutions, and innovations pos-
sible in the genre (Tardy, 2016). Rather than studying examples
that are too contrived to be useful or too sophisticated to represent
a reasonable target, students should read several models that are
close to their own writing proficiency on topics that are of rel-
evance to them in the present or near future.
It is not enough to tell students how to write a summary or a
product review or a complaint letter; they need to read and analyze
models from multiple writers and contexts. Martin (2009) calls this
approach “guidance through interaction in the context of shared
experience.” For example, when teaching students how to review
a product for a website, we show students multiple examples—
adapted for their language proficiency—and ask them to identify
the context, author’s purpose, typical organization of the genre, and
useful language features. In addition to analyzing models, writing a
new text in the target genre together with the students, a technique
called Joint Construction, appears to help some students internal-
ize the genre staging so they are better able to write independently.
This pedagogy is known as the Teaching/Learning Cycle (Martin,
2009; Rothery, 1996) and is further elaborated in Chapters 4 and
5 of this volume.
By analyzing actual texts, we can resist the temptation to turn
genres into formulas by assuming we know the unchanging rules
of writing. And by reminding learners that writing is a social act
of communication as well as a cognitive act of translating thoughts
into text, genre-based instruction focuses attention on writing as
making meaning.
4. Question the supposed “rules” of writing.
Too many writing textbooks perpetuate the myth that every piece
of writing must have a thesis statement (at the end of the first
paragraph), topic sentences, transition words, three main points, a
conclusion, and—my personal anathema—a “hook.” All of these
components are useful in some types of writing, but once the five-
paragraph essay has been safely exorcised, it will be hard to find a
context in which a// of them are desirable (see Chapter 2).
Rather than such universal and dubious dicta, students need to
explore and understand the content, purpose, structure, and language
of the genres they will write. As an illustrative example, consider the
hook. The idea that every text should begin with a clever sentence,
a catchy anecdote, or a rhetorical question echoes the journalistic
concept of the /ead (or /ede), whose purpose is to ensure readers will
continue with the column and not skip to the next page. That is
why this chapter begins with a personal anecdote: It is appropriate
and—I hope—effective in this genre for engaging you, the reader.
But the writing teacher does not have a choice; they must read every
word on every page of every student’s paper! In most school writing,
therefore, a hook is not only redundant, it is positively distracting
(see Pessoa & Mitchell, Chapter 8, and the invaluable analyses of
disciplinary writing in Danielewicz et al., n.d.). Scientific papers,
emails, memos, proposals, summaries, syntheses, discussion board
posts, text messages, and shopping lists are among the many genres
where a hook would be misplaced (“Do you want to eat this week?
Then please buy the following items at the supermarket”). The same
is true of thesis statements, in the strict sense of a claim or proposi-
tion that the writer will defend. A thesis is valuable in some forms of
persuasive writing but rarely in narratives, lab reports, patient-infor-
mation brochures, user manuals, or any genre that does not make an
argument (see also Chapter 9). My point here is not to condemn the
teaching of hooks, thesis statements, or any other tool of the five-
paragraph writer's trade, but rather to insist that the actual structure
and linguistic resources of the target genre be analyzed and taught.
Concluding Thoughts
The suggestions made here and throughout this volume call for
an approach to writing instruction that is situated, particular, and
nuanced. Genre-based instruction is demanding on the teacher:
finding or writing examples, developing materials to analyze them,
scaffolding instruction, and writing and using new rubrics for each
genre. By contrast, the five-paragraph essay is reductive, over-gen-
eralized, and blunt. But it is also easier to teach, learn, and grade,
thanks in part to the textbooks, websites, and curricula that have
adopted it in ways that make the form appear so established that
it must be the only way to teach: “Write em right,” indeed (Pud-
lowski, 1959).
Unless a department or institute is willing to commit to the
whole-scale curricular reform that would replace the five-pargaraph
essay with genre-based instruction, teachers will need to find ways
to make small but effective changes. Even within a rigid mode-
based curriculum, it is possible to change one assignment, as we
did when we changed a “descriptive essay” to a restaurant review.
Demonstrating the success of this small innovation through stu-
dent writing and enthusiasm can go a long way toward convincing
others to join the campaign. Analyzing genres also becomes much
easier as materials writers, teachers, and—importantly—students,
become familiar with the process of reading texts as models for their
purpose, structure, and language patterns. The features identified in
the deconstruction (or text analysis) phase become the criteria for
the grading rubric, at which point the familiar techniques of draft-
ing, peer review, and teacher-conferencing can reduce the grading
burden.
The most compelling argument in favor of these changes,
though, is that reading meaningful student texts written in iden-
tifiable genres is more interesting that trudging through another
pile of five-paragraph “messays.” A genre-based approach will not
make writing or writing instruction easy—they are not easy—but
it will make the task more rewarding for everyone concerned.
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ec ccldcdcddeecdccedcecccdcddcdeccdeeocodeoshetcccdcsectdsee Chapter 2
Is the Five-Paragraph Essay

a Genre?
CHRISTINE M. TARDY
I have been fortunate to have largely escaped any pres-

sures to teach the five-paragraph essay, in large part because I
have enjoyed relative autonomy as a writing instructor. My stu-
dents, however, have not been so lucky. My first head-on encounter
with the five-paragraph essay occurred while I was teaching at an
English-medium university in Turkey in the 1990s. A large num-
ber of my first-year students had just completed a year of English
language instruction at the university's English preparatory school
(an intensive English program). After noticing a strong resem-
blance in many of my students’ highly formulaic writing, I asked
a friend who was an instructor in the preparatory program about
how writing was taught there. The approach was entirely form-
based, strictly following the five-paragraph essay model: Students
were required to write five paragraphs, and each body paragraph
had to include an underlined topic sentence and had to begin
with a sequential discourse marker (firsz, second, third, etc.). Some
teachers further required that each of the five paragraphs include
24
2: Is Ita Genre? 25
three to five sentences—no more and no less. When students real-

ized they were being asked to abandon this formula in their first-
year English course, they often felt a bit unmoored. Traces of the
rigid formula remained, both in the students’ writing and, of even
more concern to me, in their beliefs about writing.
As a ubiquitous text type in K-12 and postsecondary writing
contexts, the five-paragraph essay has, it seems, taken its place
among other classroom and testing genres, and it is often consid-
ered, by default, to be just another genre that we should teach—or,
in some cases, the genre that we should teach. In her critique of
the five-paragraph essay, for example, Tremmel (2011), repeatedly
characterizes it as a genre, and I frequently hear this characteriza-
tion in teacher discussions on my campus and at conferences. |
suspect that one reason for this (mis)representation of the five-
paragraph essay is that the term genre is so often equated merely
with text form. In my own graduate courses on second language
writing, I regularly query my smart and informed students (who
also teach writing) as to whether they consider the five-paragraph
essay a genre; typically, 100 percent of them agree that it is.
But—the value of the form aside for now—can the the five-
paragraph essay really be considered a genre? If we carefully exam-
ine contemporary definitions of genre, the five-paragraph essay
would seem to fall short of claiming genre status on several levels.
As I hope to persuade readers in this chapter, there is, and should
be, a distinction between a text form (or formula) and a text genre,
and this distinction is especially valuable for student writers. When
we limit genres to template-like structures, we lose their social
nature, and it is precisely that social nature that makes genres so
productive and valuable for student writers.
The Research
The five-paragraph essay is, without question, a form. As Caplan
(Chapter 1) notes, when Pudlowski (1959) described the five-
paragraph essay in his article “Compositions—Write ‘em Right!”
he wrote that it was “a composition outline (we call it a formula)”

(p. 535). The outline was offered as a way to tame students’ “chaotic
compositions”—that is, to provide a stable structure to students.
Pudlowski’s characterization of this essay structure as a formula is
apt. Even its name emphasizes that it is simply a pre-determined
form. But as a text type that is defined by its formal structure alone,
it excludes itself from genre status, at least in the definitional crite-
ria of contemporary genre theory. Put simply, classifying the five-
paragraph essay as a genre falls into the common trap of conflating
genre and form.
A good starting point for this theoretical disentanglement
is Carolyn Miller’s (1984) influential article, “Genre as Social
Action,” which tackles the issue of defining genres by form head-
on. Miller states unequivocally at the start of her paper that “a rhe-
torically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the
substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to
accomplish” (p. 151, italics added). As she explains it, “Genre is
distinct from form” and is “a rhetorical means for mediating pri-
vate intentions and social exigence” (p. 163). Miller’s paper was in
part motivated by a desire to move definitions of genre away from
‘more static, form-based categories, including Aristotelian commu-
nication types (deliberative, forensic, and epideictic) or discourse
modes (description, exposition, narrative, and argument) (Dryer,
2015). Importantly, Miller’s goal in offering a rhetorically based
classification of genre was not simply an example of a scholar
splitting theoretical hairs. She conceded that there are multiple,
fruitful ways to classify discourse, including classifications based
on text form, but she argued that “we do not gain much by call-
ing all such classes ‘genres” (p. 155). Rather, a rhetorical classifica-
tion of discourse types (that is, classifying as “genres”) can help us
“to take seriously the rhetoric in. which we are immersed and the
situations in which we find ourselves” (p. 155, italics added). Classi-
fying genres rhetorically, Miller further states, implies that learning
a genre involves not simply learning a formal pattern but instead
learning to understand situations, communities, and our means
for action within them. For writing teachers and students, this is
2: Is Ita Genre? 27
a crucial distinction because the latter perspective fosters a more

flexible and generative approach to writing.
Miller’s insistence on viewing genre as a rhetorical classification
was echoed in Swales’ (1990) definition of genre, despite his more
language-focused orientation. In his early work, Swales empha-
sized shared communicative purpose as a privileged criterion for
genre status (a position he has since complicated in Askehave &
Swales, 2001), warning against “a facile classification based on sty-
listic features” (1990, p. 46). An emphasis on purpose is similarly
found in systemic-functional approaches, which define genre as a
“staged, goal-oriented social process” (Rose & Martin, 2012, p. 2).
In other words, while shared textual features are one character-
istic of a genre, it is shared purpose or goal (similar to Miller’s
“social action”) that is at the heart of genre, ultimately giving rise
to shared textual features. To illustrate the limitations of classify-
ing genres by form alone, Swales (1990) turned to the example of
parody. Parodies, of course, closely resemble other genres in form
(though typically with some exaggerated features of form or con-
tent), but they are carried out for very different purposes—gener-
ally, to critique. A parody is only recognized as such when a reader
(or listener) recognizes the writer’s intentions, generally requiring
a critical understanding of the relevant rhetorical situation. Form
alone is insufficient.
If social action—or communicative purpose—is a primary clas-
sification principle for genre, the five-paragraph essay would seem
to fail the genre test. After all, the five-paragraph essay formula is
called on to perform multiple communicative purposes or social
actions in numerous rhetorical situations. It may be used to respond
to a timed, high-stakes test prompt or to take up an assignment
prompt in a writing or disciplinary content course. Within these
very broad rhetorical contexts, students may use the five-paragraph
structure to argue for a particular position with research-backed
evidence, to share an opinion, to recount a significant event, to
summarize a text, to critique a text, or to apply a theory to a practi-
cal situation—and the list goes on. The five-paragraph essay can
certainly provide a general formulaic structure for carrying out
these many different goals (albeit a rather limiting one), but that
does not make it a genre. Genres are forms that arise as a result of
acommunity’s need to carry out specific goals; the five-paragraph
essay, in contrast, is a pre-existing template that may be applied to
various rhetorical situations in educational contexts.
A second argument against the five-paragraph essay’s classifica-
tion as a genre relates to the form’s stability, a characteristic high-
lighted by the text’s label, which dates back at least to Pudlowski’s
(1959) “five-paragraph paper” (p. 536). Forms are stable structures,
unlike responses to the social, cultural dynamics of a given rhetori-
cal situation (that is, genres). Forms are associated with “rules” or
prescribed ways of using texts. As Dean (2000) notes, the five-
paragraph essay form “has remained relatively unchanged for
almost a century” (p. 56). Genres, in contrast, have been described
as “much more flexible, plastic, and free” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 79). All
contemporary theories of genre emphasize that genres are (usu-
ally open) classifications that develop, evolve, mix, decay, and even
disappear. Rather than employing “rules” to be followed, genres are
marked by conventions—typified yet flexible ways of carrying out
one’s purpose. As stated by Hyland (2007), “Selecting a particular
genre implies the use of certain patterns, but this does not dictate
the way we write” (p. 152, italics in the original).
Because of their responsiveness to an immediate social situation,
genres are often described through metaphors that emphasize their
organic nature—“forms of life, ways of being...frames for social
action” (Bazerman, 1997, p. 19). Historical studies of genres—such
as the business memo (Yates, 1989) or the research article (Bazer-
man, 1988)—have illustrated how genres grow and evolve over
time in response to changes to a community's members, values,
practices, and material and sociopolitical circumstances. The five-
paragraph essay, in contrast, would appear to be a non-evolving
form, quite dissimilar from the “stabilized-for-now” (Schryer,
1993) discourse types that are classified as genres.
One argument for characterizing five-paragraph essays as genres
might be found in the notion of “classroom genres,” defined by
Russell (1997) as “genres that develop in educational activity sys-
tems to operationalize teaching and learning” (p. 530). In this case,
2: Is It a Genre? 29
though, there is often much terminological confusion. First, it is

important to distinguish between genres and the names given to
various assignment types (e.g., research paper, essay, report) (Johns,
2011). As numerous researchers have found (e.g., Gardner & Nesi,
2013; Graves, Hyland, & Samuels, 2010; Johns, 2011; Melissour-
gou & Frantzi, 2017; Melzer, 2009), teachers tend not to apply
genre-specific names to the writing they assign to students, but
the labels they do use (e.g., essay) perpetuate the view that there are
some shared qualities to texts with that label (see Connor & Ene,
Chapter 3). There is pedagogical and theoretical value in drawing
a distinction between assignment name or broad text types (e.g.,
reports) and genres (e.g., data report, personal observation report),
as outlined by Melissourgou and Frantzi (2017). It may be useful,
as well, to add text format or structure to the terminological pool
here because the five-paragraph essay is, more aptly, a structural
form that may be employed in various classroom assignment types
and classroom genres. Unfortunately, because of repeated exposure
to the five-paragraph form, students (and teachers) often come to
see it as a “composition classroom genre” (Johns, 2015, p. 117), and
herein lies the challenge.
Referring to the five-paragraph essay as a genre is particularly
problematic for students because it equates a decontextualized
form with genre, a concept that has been defined very specifically
through features like dynamic, rhetorical, social, communicative,
purpose-driven, and community-bound or socially-situated. As
Johns (1997, 2002, 2011) has long noted, this perception of writing
as a static formula is common amongst early postsecondary stu-
dents, and it can put them at a disadvantage when they encounter
new ways of reading and writing in postsecondary classrooms. One
responsibility of writing teachers then becomes helping “students
become genre theorists in the true sense: to destabilize their often
simplistic and sterile theories of texts and enrich their views of the
complexity of text processing, negotiation, and production within
communities of practice” (Johns, 2002, p. 240). Such metacogni-
tive awareness of the situated and social nature of writing can help
students approach new and unfamiliar writing tasks (Devitt, 2004,
2009; Johns, 2008; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Sorting out
the differences between static forms and dynamic genres therefore

becomes a job not only for genre researchers but also for students.
And equating form(ula)s and genre poses similar dangers for
teachers. When writing teachers characterize the five-paragraph
essay as a genre, they inadvertently dilute the power of genre as
a way to think about writing in and out of our classrooms. Genre
offers a metacognitive tool for linking ways of writing with rhe-
torical situations, including task goals, reader and writer relations
and roles, outcomes, as well as community values and expectations.
Reducing genre to static form limits its productive power as a meta-
cognitive tool for exploring and understanding writing. Doing so
may also lead instructors toward the trap of teaching genres as tem-
plates, risking a more prescriptive and decontextualized pedagogical
approach (e.g., Freedman, 1993). ‘The potential power of genre in
the classroom lies in its use as a thinking tool, a way for students to
discover how writing achieves (or fails to achieve) its goals through
relatively conventionalized means. Re-framing the five-paragraph
essay as a structure that might be effectively employed in some
genres—while acknowledging its limits in others—could actually
help reclaim its value as a structural tool. In other words, the prob-
_lem with the myth of the “five-paragraph essay genre” lies in its
implications that a structural template operates in the same way as
a genre. If teachers can distinguish between formal templates and
genres, between rigid rules and more variable and situated conven-
tions, they will be better equipped to help students explore these
relationships as well. In doing so, we can expand not just students’
metalanguage for talking about writing but, more importantly, their
tools and resources for writing.
Changes in Practice
The writing classroom can provide an effective space for disen-
tangling the five-paragraph essay formula from more dynamic
rhetorical forms (i.e., genres). Raising students’ awareness of the
distinctions between textual formulas and genres can play a critical
2: Is Ita Genre? Si
role in their understanding of writing, in developing a “vocabu-

lary of practice” (Yancey, 2010), and in “destabilizing” their existing
theories of writing and genre (Johns, 2002). These strategies work
toward that aim and are particularly suited to teaching writing in
postsecondary and advanced secondary educational contexts.
1. Contrast situated, goal-oriented writing types (genres) with

templates or formal structures.
Because students may be unfamiliar with the term genre or may

have heard it used synonymously with text form, it can be useful at
times to put terminology aside and focus instead on category dif-
ferences. One way to explore distinctions between genres and for-
mal structures is to provide students with lists of genres and lists of
formal structures, asking them to describe the differences between
these (see Figure 2.1). This description task can then lead to a dis-
cussion of the term genre (that is, texts that share a common func-
tion or purpose) and how it differs from formal structure alone. As
a follow up activity, teachers can give students another set of items
and ask students to sort them into genres and formal structures
(see Figure 2.2). In both activities, the goal is to engage students
with the distinct ways that we might classify and label texts—with
one classification being based on the communicative act that the
text is trying to accomplish and the other based on a form that
may be used (and even adapted) within numerous genres.
FIGURE 2.1
Comparing Genres and Formal Structures
Consider the texts included in the two lists. How do the two lists differ?
What distinguishes the texts in List 1 from those in List 2?
List 1 List2
album review complex sentence
recipe five-paragraph essay
wedding invitation topic sentence + supporting sentences
opinion/editorial piece
FIGURE 2.2
Distinguishing Genres and Formal Structures
Sort the items into two lists: genres and formal structures or templates.
Texts: Jab reports, case study report, bulleted list, résumé, science research poster,
chronological order paper, cause-and-effect paper
2. Consider the various genres that can be used to make an

argument.
One challenge for novice writers can be focusing on the broad pur-
pose (e.g., to argue for a position, to describe a personal experience)
of a text and then considering how that purpose may be further
complicated by aspects of a rhetorical situation, such as audience,
writer-reader relations, writer intentions and hidden agenda, and
the sociopolitical context. For example, writers “argue” through
many genres, and in any given situation, they choose the genre (or
genres) that will be most effective. One way to help students work
through the relationships among purpose, genre, and form is to
present them with a common social issue and to work through the
_genres and forms that different authors may employ.
Teachers can begin by introducing an issue that many students
in the class will be familiar with, perhaps one addressed in course
readings in a theme-based writing course. For example, in an issue
like climate change, the teacher might ask what kinds of texts they
have read that argue a position on the topic. Students might need
some prompting but should eventually be able to identify genres
like letters to the editor, opinion/editorial pieces, an organization's
official statements, resolutions, scientific research articles, political
advertisements, political speeches, protest signs, or magazine arti-
cles. The teacher can then choose a few of these genres to further
consider in terms of their forms. What are some typical features,
for example, in the form and content of a scientific research article
versus a letter-to-the-editor where both argue for the same posi-
tion on climate change? Looking at samples of the two texts, stu-
dents will be even better positioned to examine the ways in which
2: Is Ita Genre? 33
these two genres differ yet work to carry out similar broad goals.
A nuanced discussion will also lead students to consider how the
purpose of “arguing a position” may be further complicated. In a
scientific research article, for example, writers may share scientific
research in a way meant to accumulate persuasive evidence for
political action (while advancing a scientific agenda). In contrast,
in a letter to the editor, the same author might share their own
personal experience as a climate scientist, hoping to use their cred-
ibility and ethos as a means of persuading members of their local
community to take action. If that author attends an Earth Day
rally, they may hold up a large sign that argues their position in a
very different way. The audiences, writer roles, venue of publica-
tion, and rhetorical timing all influence the genre that the writer
may choose to use, and the form of those genres is similarly shaped
by the same influences.
A broad discussion of purpose and genre can also lead to pro-
ductive discussions of form. Looking at samples, students may
consider how the forms are employed to meet the more specific
rhetorical situations of different genres. They can link formal pat-
terns to these contextual differences and also consider why certain
forms might be ineffective in such a text. For example, why might
a picture of a starving polar bear on a small ice patch be effective in
an ad for Greenpeace but not in a scientific research article? Such
discussions can help student de-link broad purposes (such as argu-
ments or narratives) from more specific purposes tied to rhetorical
situations and to consider the relationship between preferred forms
and those more specific purposes. Ultimately, the goal is to help
students see forms as tools to employ within various genres rather
than to understand forms as universally applicable.
A valuable, and fun, follow-up to such discussions could be for
students to imagine—or even try composing—different argument
genres through a five-paragraph essay. For example, can they re-
write a political speech, a protest sign, a scientific report, and a
letter to the editor all as five-paragraph essays? Attempting to
do so can highlight for students why forms are not universally
effective.
3. De-link argument essays from five-paragraph essays.
The five-paragraph essay has been especially common in argu-

mentative writing; therefore, it may be helpful to spend more time
helping students consider the relationships between the two but
also other possibilities for argumentative writing. While the activi-
ties in #2 serve as a starting point, students will quickly note that
they rarely have the opportunity to write in genres like research
articles, position statements, or resolutions in a classroom. Instead,
they are likely to be asked to write an “argumentative essay” in
numerous academic classrooms. One way to further explore this
relationship between a five-paragraph structure and an argumenta-
tive essay, then, is to examine student writing more closely.
Using an online corpus of student writing, such as the Michigan
Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) (eli-corpus.|sa.
umich.edu), students can look at examples of successful argumen-
tative essays composed for different disciplinary classes. Prompts
like those in Figure 2.3 can guide student exploration of the sam-
ple texts, helping them to identify options for structuring such a
paper that go beyond a prescribed form.
4. Brainstorm the possible uses of formal structures like the

five-paragraph formula.
In some contexts, it may be valuable to acknowledge to students that

stable forms like the five-paragraph essay may be used effectively in
some contexts. For example, in a multi-case study of undergradu-
ate students in a General Education course, Jacobson (2018) found
that one student he was following (“Hercules”) successfully applied
a five-paragraph essay structure to an assignment in a family stud-
ies course, although the assignment guidelines asked students to
write for a non-specialist audience such as a music magazine or
the campus newspaper. Despite the prompt’s reference to two con-
texts that would not typically use a five-paragraph form, Hercules
astutely recognized that the prompt and rubric required an outline
that indexed the five-paragraph formula that he had learned in
2: Is Ita Genre? 35
FIGURE 2.3
Prompts for Analysis of Authentic Student Texts
In MICUSP, select Argumentative Essay for Paper Type, and then select
one or two disciplines that you would like to examine. Look through a few
student texts to answer these questions:
" Can you find any examples of a strict five-paragraph essay

(introduction—three body paragraphs—summarizing conclusion)
in the corpus examples? What features helped you recognize this
as a five-paragraph formula?
« Can you find any examples of adaptations of the five-paragraph
structure? If so, how carefully does the writer follow the structure?
What kinds of adaptations has the writer made? Why do you
think they made these adaptations?
* Ifyou cannot find any examples of a five-paragraph essay in these
student examples, consider why that may be.
= Can you identify any other common structural patterns in the
student argumentative essays that you examined in the corpus?
high school: an introduction with a thesis statement, body para-

graphs with support, and a summary-style conclusion. In the end,
Hercules’ use of this structure—rather than a form that might be
commonly found in a magazine or student newspaper—met the
teacher’s expectations and earned a high grade. This example offers
a reminder that a five-paragraph form may serve as a useful start-
ing point in some contexts of writing and to help students recog-
nize when such a structure may be effectively used or adapted.
To help students explore this issue, teachers can begin by brain-
storming with the class some situations in which a five-paragraph
formula might come in handy for student writing. Such a discus-
sion can engage students as well with the complexities of audi-
ence. Using the five-paragraph essay in an actual campus newspa-
per article, for example, is unlikely to be effective, but using it in a
class assignment that merely imagines campus newspaper readers
as a possible audience might be, depending on other aspects of the
task such as the task guidelines, the rubric, and in-class discussion.
Once students have generated a short list of instances in which

they might use a five-paragraph formula (e.g., timed essay exams,
high-stakes tests; see Crusan & Ruecker, Chapter 10), they can also
consider why the form might succeed in these specific instances, as
well as what other forms might be employed just as (or even more)
effectively.
5. Consider how far the five-paragraph form can be stretched

and adapted across genres.
The book Hamilton: The Revolution shares the full libretto of the
hit musical along with Lin-Manuel Miranda's personal annota-
tions to his lyrics. An innovative genre-bending musical may be the
last place that we would expect to find a five-paragraph structure,
but indeed Miranda reveals in a humorous sidenote that one song
(“Helpless”) uses “exactly the form of the Personal Literary EssayI
learned in eighth grade English. Introduction, Statement of The-
sis, Three Points, Conclusion” (Miranda & McCarter, 2016, p. 82).
And the song does indeed proceed with such discourse markers
like Number one, Number two, and Number three before introducing
and expanding on each main point. While Miranda’s lyrics clearly
go far beyond the rigid structure of a five-paragraph essay, they
provide a playful example of how that basic structure may be bent |
and adapted, ultimately becoming unrecognizable as such.
To engage students in such playful adaptation of the five-para-
graph form, teachers might first share an example such as this one
from Hamilton, and then assign a short homework assignment of
having students look for adapted versions of the five-paragraph
form in places like songs, advertisements, speeches, or debates.
After sharing any examples they found, students could further play
with the form by adapting it to genres like a love letter, an online
consumer review (such as those found on Amazon or Yelp), or
even a tweet. Can they stretch the structure so far that it becomes
suitable within the genre? In what ways did beginning with this
form support their writing and in what ways did it constrain
them? .
2: Is Ita Genre? 37
6. Illustrate the relative constraints of five-paragraph

structures.
While it is true that five-paragraph structures can be adapted for

more complex writing, it should also be acknowledged that strict
adherence to a five-paragraph template limits writing to a formula
and thereby may very well constrain what a writer can achieve. It
can be helpful for students to experience the constraints of the
form first-hand. Toward this goal, teachers might begin by assign-
ing students a writing task that asks them to respond with a strict
five-paragraph structure; it may even be useful to provide a visual
template for the structure. After the students have completed their
writing in class or at home, the teacher can vary the context slightly
and ask them to re-write the content in a new genre that would be
appropriate in that context. Students can explore samples of the
target genre that they select, identify conventions and variations,
and then re-write their five-paragraph paper into the new genre.
A third round of writing, with yet another new genre, can help
further illustrate the limits of formulas for achieving more specific
communicative purposes. Figure 2.4 shares a sequence of tasks to
explore the constraints of a five-paragraph structure compared to a
genre-informed approach.
7. Explore with students the difference between conventions

and formulas.
The distinction between the terms convention and_formula can be

confusing to students, so it is worth having an explicit discussion
about their overlaps and differences. It is important for students to
see conventions as common, or socially preferred, patterns rather
than static rules. To demonstrate the flexibility of conventions,
teachers might share numerous examples of short genres—like
wedding invitations, book blurbs, or university course descriptions
with students. With guidance, students can identify common con-
ventions, relating to content, organization structure, grammar and
vocabulary, or even design. They should also be encouraged, though,
FIGURE 2.4
Exploring the Constraints of the Five-Paragraph Structure
= Task One: Write a five-paragraph paper in which you respond

to this question: If a student at your university (or school) uses
English as a second language, should he or she be required to
enroll in an ESL-only section of writing (or language arts)? Be
sure to follow the provided five-paragraph template exactly.
« Task Two: Now, imagine that you have been asked to respond to
a survey at your university (or school). One open-ended question
on the survey is: “As an English as a second language (ESL)
student, do you prefer to enroll in a writing course with other ESL
students only or with native English speakers and some other ESL
students? Please explain in no more than 300 words.”In writing
your response to this question, you may use content (and even
language) from your response to Task One, but write this new
response in a way that you feel is appropriate for responding to the
hypothetical survey question.
« Task Three: Your university (or school) is contemplating
eliminating ESL sections of their required writing course, and
some students have begun to write letters to the writing program
director in support of or in opposition to this possible change.
Write your own formal letter to the director sharing your view on
this issue with the hopes of influencing the final decision.
to look at the variations in conventions across samples within the

genre. While all wedding invitations must include the names of the
people getting married, they can introduce those names in different
ways (e.g., by their full names, by their first names only, as the chil-
dren of their parents). Writers select from possible options based
on their personal intentions and values as well as those of their
immediate social and rhetorical situation. In contrast, students can
also look at formulaic texts, such as passport application forms,
tax files, or school assignments, that dictate a template form. As
follow-up, students can collect examples of formula- and template-
driven texts as well as those that have recognizable conventions but
offer writers choice in how they adopt, adapt, or transgress those
conventions.
2: Is Ita Genre? 39
In discussing conventions and strict formulaic structures, stu-

dents will likely note that some genres incorporate both, and that
genres may differ in the flexibility allowed within conventions. A
personal narrative, for example, would tend to be more open to
variation than, for example, a budget proposal for a research grant.
Even highly complex and non-formulaic genres like dissertations
and theses are in part constrained by rules dictated by an institu-
tion or documentation style. As they learn to distinguish rules and
conventions, as well as potential for flexibility within conventions,
writers can begin to make more purposeful and informed choices
in their writing and perhaps even begin to exploit genres for their
own purposes.
Concluding Thoughts
The activities described here work toward the same goals of rais-
ing students’ awareness of the complexities of writing and disen-
tangling text structure from the more socially situated concept of
genre. Of course, writers need an understanding of and resources
for form, and even templates have their place in learning. But static
structures are insufficient for effective written communication;
genre, in contrast, can provide students with a productive tool for
considering how to write within and across situations and com-
munities. If our goal as teachers is ultimately to build flexible writ-
ers, genre offers an important resource for students, and its value
depends on an insistence that genre is much more than static form.
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Wdlddédddlddisdddididdddddsadsddddstdddidiaddddasiadddiadddddssddddiddiiddiiitiiddiiii, C h a pte r 3
Does Everyone Write

the Five-Paragraph Essay?
ULLA M. CONNOR AND ESTELA ENE
The five-paragraph essay has not been taught and val-

ued globally; however, that does not mean that it is not taught
or appreciated anywhere. Its status varies from never being intro-
duced in some contexts, to being required in national assessments —
in others, and everything in between. This chapter considers and
provides evidence-based answers to several important questions:
How widely is the five-paragraph essay really taught around the
world, in English-speaking countries, other first languages, and
EFL classes? What circumstances surround its adoption or rejec-
tion? What values and ideologies are passed on through the teach-
ing of the five-paragraph essay, to what effect, and how can we
show students what lies beyond the curtain of the five-paragraph
formula?
42
3: Does Everyone Write It? 43
The Five-Paragraph Essay

in English-Speaking Countries
Before examining EFL contexts, we should first note that the five-
paragraph essay is not taught everywhere in English-speaking
countries. In the U.S., “the essay’—very loosely labeled—is taught
or assigned most frequently, and it encompasses almost any multi-
paragraph written text (as also mentioned in Chapters 1,2, and 7 and
Melzer, 2014). Often, various assignment types (e.g., research paper,
essay, report) (Johns, 2011) are conflated under the “essay” category
based on perceived shared structural features (Tardy, Chapter 2).
Although writing courses in British Commonwealth countries
do not exist the way they have in the U.S. since the creation of
first-year Composition courses at Harvard in 1875, the generic use
of the terms essays and papers is prevalent. In large-scale research at
11 Canadian universities and 36 departments, Graves and White
(2016) found that teachers across the disciplines assigned essays
and papers, particularly in the humanities, while in engineering
proposals and reports were also frequent. A crucial difference from
the U.S. is that the students have been taught how to write these
primarily through a multiple-draft approach and teacher feedback
in the academic content courses in the students’ disciplines rather
than required, separate Composition courses.
In spite of the fact that the term essay appears to be used in prac-
tice to refer to almost any written text, it seems that the authen-
tic rhetorical situations from which the features of genre emerge
are better linked to writing assignments in other English-speaking
countries than they are in U.S. Composition classrooms. In the U.S.,
“because of repeated exposure to the five-paragraph template, stu-
dents (and teachers) often come to see the five-paragraph essay as a
‘composition classroom genre” (Johns, 2015, p. 117), particularly in
high school. In the U.K., on the other hand, the teaching of writing
focuses more on the functional purposes of texts in context. The
functional, context-aware approach to teaching writing has been
linked to the reasons why significant cross-cultural differences can
be found in the persuasive writing of students in English-speaking
ee
ee ee ee a
countries. Thus, in a study undertaken as part of the International

Education Association study of written composition in England,
New Zealand, and the U.S., Connor and Lauer (1988) found that
the U.S. students received lower scores than the students from the
U.K. and New Zealand on several features of argumentative writ-
ing, their performance reflecting cross-cultural differences in what
is emphasized about writing in the three countries. As Johns (1997,
2002, 2015) has pointed out, the perception that high school stu-
dents in the U.S. form about texts as inflexible formats rather than
permanent negotiations with a rhetorical situation is largely due to
exposure to the five-paragraph essay, which prevents them from suc-
cessfully employing persuasive strategies even despite being concep-
tually aware of expository and argumentative rhetorical modes.
In England, the transition from secondary school to university
requires an ideological shift in learners, rather than socializing
into a prescriptive format (Scott, 2002). That is to say, the weight
rests on decyphering “internalized ways of knowing and doing” (p.
91) which serve as codes that new university students must crack.
In contrast, in the U.S. the transition into university schooling
involves extending past the organization of a five-paragraph essay.
The Five-Paragraph Essay in Other L1s

We also glean from the literature that the five-paragraph essay is
not universally taught in other first languages, for cultural and rhe-
torical reasons. Important studies, first led by Composition schol-
ars in the 1980s and 1990s as well as more recently, highlight that:
1. what is valued in one cultural context may not be valued

in other cultural contexts.
2. writing practices of disciplines outweigh in importance
general Composition courses.
3. text-types are, for the most part, based on purpose rather
than structure.
These three highlights will be addressed.

ww |, \Nhat is valued in one cultural context may not be

valued in other cultural contexts.
The textual analyses of written compositions across cultures in
Purves’s (1988) study have shown that what is considered as effec-
tive writing differs across cultures. For example, Kachru’s (1988)
textual analysis of student writing in Hindi reveals standards and
expectations that clearly differ from those in English. The first
paragraphs in essays provide an overall schema for general back-
ground, but no direct tie to the topic. Additionally, the unity of
the topic is not a requirement of a paragraph; thus, digression is
tolerable. There is no explicit need for topic sentences, and when
crafting an argument, the claim and justification can be presented
in separate paragraphs. Even in terms of affective involvement,
including the writers’ own judgments is acceptable.
Another example of how values in one culture may not be the
same in another comes from Li’s (2002) report on her studies in
China, showing the emphasis in that educational system on devel-
oping students’ intellect as well as moral ideology. This is seen in
the shift from the prevailing style of narration (Aiyongwen) before
secondary school, to a focus on opinion writing (yi/unwen). Li’s
study identified patterns of student writing for college admit-
tance and identified a stress on morality and historical knowledge,
emphasizing the theme and content above the structure. Some
texts echoed the formulaic eight-legged essay (Kaplan, 1968),
characterized by eight rhetorical moves to present an argument.
This indirect organization that Kaplan identified in many Chinese
student writers “has clearly endured into modern times” (Kaplan,
1968, p. 3), but Li (2002) posits that greater stress is now placed
on logic and theory in addition to analysis and interpretation.
Notably, this is corroborated by You (2008), in a survey of writing
themes employed in Chinese schools. You’s research indicates that
the sociopolitical landscape significantly influences what and how
students write, and he claims that the theme “decides the selec-
tion of types of writing and dictates the layout of text structure”
(p. 254). You found that the treatment of theme in writing “carries
equal, if not more, weight to textual organization” (p. 254), much
in agreement with Li’s (1996) assessment of what is deemed “good”

writing.
In the European context, Kruse and Chitez (2012) showed
cultural differences in writing across the Swiss regions (Italian,
French, and German) and found that the Italian-speaking uni-
versity stressed the use of “personal voice,” the French-speaking
university stressed the voice of the discipline, and the German-
speaking university expected students to switch between the aca-
demic and the personal, according to genre.
wu 2,\Nriting practices of disciplines outweigh in

importance general Composition courses.
In Europe, the attitudes toward the ways good writing is acquired

are quite different from those that have evolved in the United States
(Caplan, Chapter 1). In Germany and France, for example, writing
is not taught as a separate subject of college education (Donahue,
2002). Instead, writing is taught as part of disciplinary socializa-
tion. As in the U.K., in the transition from the secondary school to
university settings, students develop authority and learn the genres
- of their discourse communities. Students must negotiate the inter-
change from knowledge-telling to knowledge-transformation, a .
difference between university studies and high school. Their expe-
riences in the university setting represent an apprenticeship. They
are not students of writing and subjects, but students of subjects
into which writing is integrated. This leads student writers to navi-
gate the practices of the discipline and to acculturate themselves
into it—that is, locating resources, organizing peer-group activi-
ties, and developing long-term, self-directed activities. Thus, learn-
ing to develop the rhetoric of the discipline is organic, but also a
sink-or-swim situation, particularly for developing writers and for
new immigrants who must master both their new languages and
the ways in which these languages and discourses operate in their
chosen disciplines.
«uw3,Text-types are, for the most part, based on purpose

rather than structure.
This point is closely interrelated with #2, and the approach to

developing writing skills in the context of academic subjects/con-
tent courses by learning how to act rhetorically on specific purposes
supports the point that purpose, not formulaic structures, controls
genres. Thus, structures emerge from purpose. In addition, Donahue
(2002) reviews four prevalent forms of writing from the French /ycée
(secondary) years: commentaire composé, étude d'un texte argumentatif,
dissertation, and discussion. In the transition to the first year of col-
lege, writing forms largely remain the same, often characterized by
an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction is set off
from the body, presenting the problem, the question the essay pro-
poses to answer, a plan, and maintaining the thesis-antithesis-syn-
thesis structure in all essay forms except the commentaire. The body
consists primarily of explicit positions. In the conclusion, the writer
returns to the introduction with the perspective on the argument
and evaluation, and then ends with a personal viewpoint.
Overall, studies in this section show that what “good” writing is
and what is learned in different educational contexts varies from
country to country. The cultural background and the educational
system make a significant difference in how a writer learns to pres-
ent knowledge in a particular discipline, which will determine how
students will format their writing. Though the idea that essays are
structured texts recurs, it appears that the structure emerges for
students through exposure and practice inductively, in relation to
specific disciplinary contexts and rhetorical purposes.
The Five-Paragraph Essay in EFL Classrooms

As far as EFL writing classrooms across the world are concerned, in
recent years, there has been rising interest in documenting what is
taught and what methods are used for teaching English writing. To
our knowledge, focused, large-scale research on the use of the five-

paragraph essay per se has not been conducted, though it would be
useful. Much of the existing literature attests that pre-university
(K-12) EFL classes tend to be integrated skills classes in which
writing is but a small (a quarter or less) portion of the curriculum.
A case in point is the more extreme example of Egypt, with 2 per-
cent of class time spent on teaching EFL writing (Abdel Latif
& Haridy, 2018). Many EFL students lack genuine motivation to
master writing in English unless they belong to the minority that
intends to study abroad or work in multinational or foreign com-
panies, which is often something they do not know until they are
in high school (see also Reichelt, 2005, about Poland).’Thus, when
studying writing, EFL students’ goal is not solely or primarily to
learn how to write, unless the pressure of a standardized test is
impending; rather, in EFL contexts writing is practiced in order to
learn language and/or content (Manchén, 2011). ’
This means that
the focus on grammar and vocabulary, especially with novice writ-
ers in K-12, supersedes the interest in genre features and rhetori-
cal strategies. However, it also means that many genres are experi-
mented with, and these include so-called functional texts such as
the letter or email. Creative writing may also be practiced, even if
only to take an occasional break (Ene & Hryniuk, 2018; Ene &
Mitrea, 2013). |
Depending on their context and trajectory, many academic
English writers around the world may not be exposed to the five-
paragraph essay until they decide to study in an English-speaking
country. Studies from vastly distant geographical locations and
different educational systems illustrate the ubiquity of the essay
broadly defined as a multiparagraph text that may be expository
or argumentative/persuasive and made up of main ideas, intro-
duction, body, and conclusion. Many such studies (see, for exam-
ple, chapters in the edited volume by Ruecker & Crusan, 2018)
illustrate that, even though there is a strong correlation between
the kinds of writing taught in K-12 EFL and those required on
national standardized tests, that relationship does not always lead
to a generalized use of the rigid template of the five-paragraph
essay. In their comparative study of EFL writing practices among

K-12 teachers of English from China, Mexico, and Poland, Ene
and Hryniuk (2018) showed that the participating Chinese teach-
ers reported teaching academic, persuasive essay writing, and pro-
fessional letters and reports in accordance with tasks their students
would have to perform on the CET (College English Test), a high-
stakes national examination. Meanwhile, in Poland expository or
persuasive academic essays were seldom assigned (by 5 percent of
the study participants) because informal letters and email writing
had to be taught in preparation for the high school exit exam, the
Matura. However, interestingly enough, the teachers from Mexico,
where there is no national English test but globalist attitudes are
felt, taught multi-paragraph expository and argumentative essay
writing (which they identified as academic writing) the most. The
teachers in this study did not indicate using the five-paragraph
essay template at the time, though they acknowledged feeling obli-
gated to closely follow model texts from their textbooks and focus
on the genres that would be required on important tests.
The influence of large-scale policy is not always perceived as
negative. In an account from Austria, Kremmel, Ebeharter, and
Maurer (2018) describe the positive effects of implementing the
Common European Framework (CEFR), which outlines language
achievement standards across the European Union. Transitioning
to the CEFR and the use of the Matura from a previously solid use
of communicative language teaching, Austrian teachers reported
starting to teach a wider array of text types in addition to the essay,
presented as “a familiar genre for most teachers and students” (p.
125); the new texts include reports, email, articles, blogs, leaflets,
proposals, and letters. At the same time, the use of opinion-based,
persuasive, and narrative essays in the classroom also increased after
2007. The teachers increased discussions of audience, context, and
purpose, sociolinguistic aspects, and register features. In addition,
the Austrian teachers reported focusing their feedback and assess-
ment on organization and cohesion rather than linguistic accuracy
alone. No mention of using the five-paragraph essay template was
made in this study.
In some global contexts, there is no doubt that strict essay

structures, very likely organized in five paragraphs, are required
and taught. There are contexts where strict national testing poli-
cies, usually associated with high school graduation and univer-
sity admission, coupled with insufficient teacher preparation and
dire work conditions, force EFL teachers to teach to those tests by
relying on the five-paragraph essay template. Ngo (2018) presents
two teacher narratives from Vietnam that testify to the teaching
of writing being subservient to multiple choice testing and—at
the more advanced levels—writing assignments based on Inter-
national English Language Testing System (IELTS™), Test of
English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL®), and Cambridge Main
Suite exams. Such actions tend to reinforce the five-paragraph
essay structure, although that may not be the intention of the test
(Crusan & Ruecker, Chapter 10). From Iran, which has a large
young population competing for university positions, Marefat and
Heydari (2018) review Iranian-produced tests of English writing
that either emphasize formal and sentence-level aspects of the
English language or copy almost identically the Test of Written
English (TWE®), which, in instructors’ minds, appears to empha-
. size a formulaic essay form. Teachers participating in their research
shared emphasizing the product rather than the process of writing ©
in their classes, using templates and prefabricated essays that the
students memorize in order to do well on their tests. In another
telling example, West and Thiruchelvam (2018) report from the
fiercely test-oriented Korean educational system:
English language testing exists at every stage of Korean education. Eng-
lish plays a large part in the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test (KSAT) for
college applications; most universities require a minimum score on one
of several standardized English exams—e.g., TOEIC® (Test of Engish
for International Communication), TOEFL®, or TEPS (Test of English
Proficiency) (South Korea)—to graduate, and many companies require a
minimum score on the TOEIC to apply for a position. (p. 139)
In response to criticism about Korean students’ low perfor-

mance on productive skills despite the testing-oriented instruction,
a Computer-Based English Test (CBET) was developed to test

speaking and writing; for writing, the students are expected to
write an email response, a description of a graph or visual data,
and an argumentative or compare and contrast essay. In alterna-
tive courses students can take in order to prepare for the CBET,
instruction focuses on the types of writing they need to perform on
the test, including the essay. Once more, though no explicit men-
tion is made of the five-paragraph essay, it is to be inferred that that
structure or something closely similar is practiced because of the
CBET’s similarity to the TOEFL®, TWE®, and other such tests.
A number of chapters in this volume aim to illustrate that the
five-paragraph essay is, at best, a pedagogical genre without signifi-
cant benefits for the development of good writing. As this chapter
shows, the five-paragraph essay may not be taught everywhere
in the world, but something form-oriented like it that can be
described as a guided, structured essay is taught in many class-
rooms globally. Anecdotally, personally, and through research, we
know that many writing students and teachers in EFL contexts
welcome the five-paragraph or highly structured paragraph essay.
Formed in systems in which writing skills have been developed by
osmosis, through extensive reading and exposure to target genres
and perhaps little explicit instruction both in their L1s and in Eng-
lish (Connor in Braine, 1999; Li, 1996; Graves & White, 2016),
some teachers crave a structure that can help them and their stu-
dents make sense of writing. Though this is not generalizable, we
have met teachers like one of the participants in Ene and Mitrea
(2013) in Romania who share the wish that the five-paragraph
essay or something like it should be used to teach writing in the
L1 so that students can learn to organize their thoughts in writing.
However, the use of the the five- or highly structured-paragraph
essay as a dependable template that can serve as a solid point of
reference for how to write in English comes with a set of perils.
According to Myskow and Gordon (2009), too much dependence
on text structures can be stifling, hindering not only creativity and
originality but development itself. Originating in a deficit model,
the five-paragraph essay risks leveling all genres into a single
structure and repetitive, unimaginative thinking. The oversimpli-

fication to a single structure creates a narrow, warped view of what
real, good writing can be. Particularly. important to this chapter is
the point that using the five-paragraph essay structure to teach all
writing in the classroom eliminates any local cultural flavor and
relevance to specific contexts. One must be mindful that the val-
ues and assumptions resting beneath the surface of this particular
approach to writing are essentially transmitted with it. [lluminat-
ing the status quo that endorses the five-paragraph essay, Tremmel
(2011) posits that such “educational practice consistently attempts
to use logic to cut up complex processes into manageable chunks
thought to be easily disseminated to novices” (p. 30). Thus, nov-
ices in writing classrooms are inadvertently subject to an approach
that appeals to “a certain Western love of orderliness and efficiency”
(Tremmel, 2011, p. 32). It is important that instructors be aware of
such assumptions and how to approach the teaching of Composi-
tion from a critical EAP perspective that values authentic learner
writing needs and practices across cultures and disciplines.
Changes in Practice
Writing differs across varying cultural contexts. One means of

preparing students for the complex cultural differences in writ-
ing standards is by applying principles of intercultural rhetoric
(IR) to classroom instruction (Connor, 1996, 2011). IR is defined
as “the study of written discourse between and among individuals
with different cultural backgrounds” (Connor, 2008, p. 2). The ped-
agogical movement of IR originated from Kaplan's (1966) seminal
work in contrastive rhetoric (CR). By continuing the tradition of
systematic analysis of the influence of one’s L1 and culture onto
one’s L2 writing, IR aims to help teachers understand difficulties
second language writers face. The change in preferred term from
CR to IR signaled a move away from looking at two pieces of
writing as culturally and rhetorically disparate and toward viewing
such texts as negotiations between and within cultures (Connor,
1996). This is especially pertinent in light of Atkinson’s (1999) call

for a dynamic view of culture, in which IR is seen to advocate for
greater sensitivity to the social contexts in which writing occurs,
allowing for the development of a more comprehensive view of
language. The evolution of IR promotes an understanding that
texts are part of the social context in which they are written, that
culture is complex and dynamic, and that written discourse is a
complex negotiation (Connor, 2011).
1. Prepare students to learn the “small cultures” that influence

writing.
In the new understanding of culture in IR, the concept of “large

cultures” versus “small cultures” is important. Large cultures have
ethnic, national, or international group features as essential comp-
nonents and tend to be normative and prescriptive. Small cultures,
on the other hand, are non-essentialist and based on processes that
relate to cohesive behaviors within social groupings. According to
Adrian Holliday (1999), small cultures are rooted in activities and
lead to specific discourses. Each classroom can be seen as having
its own culture (see also Chapter 5). In classrooms, there can be
overlapping social practices, such as national culture, professional
academic culture, classroom culture, student culture, and youth
culture. We can also view small cultures as discourse communi-
ties (Swales, 1990), or groups of people communicating within a
particular academic discipline. EAP genre theory informs instruc-
tors that various discourse communities have their own norms that
characterize certain genres and social practices for producing and
consuming genres (Feak, Chapter 9; Swales, 2004). We suggest
helping learners map the large and small cultures they belong to.
m@ Ask them to reflect individually or work with a partner to

create each other’s map of large and small cultures. Students
can consider some large cultures: nationality, first language,
and additional languages; and small cultures: gender, age,
professional or academic field/background. Thus, a student
CHANGING PRACTICES
may end up with “American, Spanish L1, English L2” for

large cultures and “female, 21 years old, and university
student majoring in Business” for small cultures. Conversely,
her partner may have a very different profile, including
“Chinese nationality and L1 with English as an L2” as large
cultures, and “male, 22, majoring in Business” among his
small cultures.
Next, ask students to describe the ways in which they need
to communicate to successfully work with and among -
other people participating in the same small culture,
e.g., Business, Manufacturing Engineering, Biology,
Anthropology, etc. Our Business majors from the examples
described may agree that their communication needs to be
generally clear and concise but also polite; additionally, they
may agree on how difficult it is to express personal opinions
using J in group work, though the U.S.-born student may
attribute this more to being female than to being a non-
native speaker of English. Even though general, this step
will raise awareness of similarities and differences, and will
signal to the students that they have cultures, and that those ,
cultures are not universally shared (although features may
be). State this at the end of their brainstorm.
Moving into a deeper level of specificity, ask your students
to imagine writing an email or a business letter to their
partner, who will likely have some different small or
large culture traits. Ask the students to consider who the
addressee is, what the purpose of the communication
is, in what context it is happening (business, academic,
personal, etc.), and what textual choices derive from these
characteristics.
Finally, let the students compose the text and exchange it
with their partner for feedback. Ask students to discuss
together where their textual choices were successful or
misfired, asking them to identify specific examples of
mismatches between small or large culture traits and
textual choices. At this and the previous point, our example

students should discover additional nuances of how
differently they achieve the common goal of being clear,
concise, and polite, and should deepen their reflection on
how their various small and large cultures affect the length
of their texts, the specific words used in the opening and
closing, the order in which they present the information, etc.
@ Engage ina large-group reflective discussion about what
the group learned from the activity.
@ Ask the students to fill out an “exit ticket” listing three
things they learned about small and large cultures and
writing strategies.
2. Compare and contrast texts from similar genres but different

cultural contexts.
Two examples from the research at the International Center for

Intercultural Communication at IUPUI about comparing and
contrasting genres and structures in teaching will be presented
here, one from an intercultural business setting, the other from an
academic writing context. In an intercultural research study involv-
ing students from three different languages and countries, Connor,
Davis, and De Rycker (1995, 1997) collected and analyzed letters
of job applications among students in Business classes. Both the
native English speakers and the international students wrote their
letters in English.
In the first year of the study, the students’ letters varied widely
in their length and style. The US. letters were long and included
detailed information about the students’ accomplishments for the
potential internship to which they were applying; the letters of the
students from Finland and Belgium were short and matter-of-
fact. They included sentences like: I wish to apply for such and such
internship. My vitae is attached. I am ready for an interview.
As the study continued in the next two years, the teachers in the
three countries were able to use letters from the previous year as
samples of the expectations about the style of such letters in each

country. The students quickly learned about the standards and norms
of application letter writing in the different national contexts. The
value of this intercultural project for the participating students and
teachers was tremendous. At the time it was conducted, in the 1990s,
the letters crossed the ocean by mail. In today’s world, with the inter-
net, such real-life experiences in intercultural writing are much more
easily accomplished. Specific teaching instructions for the genre are
included in Connor, Davis, and De Rycker (1995, 1997).
Another example comes from EAP instruction. This is a revised
lesson from a training program for students from China and Korea
(see Connor, 2011), of which the goals were to build awareness
of varying language discourses among the students. The two large
cultures are Chinese and Korean, while the small cultures were
quite diverse, representing various disciplines in the medical field,
including Nursing, Surgery, Gastroenterology, and Urology.
In first introducing learners to the process of thinking about
small cultures that emphasize the expectations for writing in spe-
cific disciplines, the characteristics of the research article abstract
(adapted from Swales & Feak, 2012) are presented to students
. (Figure 3.1). Using the prompts in Figure 3.2, learners are asked
to outline abstracts in their first language and evaluate the type of _
language used in them relative to sample abstracts in their L1 as
well as abstracts in English that display the characteristics listed in
Figure 3.1. At the end of such an activity, learners further research
and draft abstracts of their own after collecting and analyzing a
small personal corpus of relevant samples.
FIGURE 3.1
Genre Characteristics (adapted from Swales and Feak, 2012)
A research article abstract has the following characteristics:
= It focuses on the major aspect(s) of the article.
= It condenses information from the research article.
= It is structured to incorporate background, aim, method, results,
and conclusion.
FIGURE 3.2
Abstract Outlining Activity (adapted from Swales and Feak, 2012,
and Fowler and Aksnes, 2007)
Abstract Outlining Activity

For this activity you are going to read the abstract for the article “Does Self-
Citation Pay?” by Fowler and Aksnes (2007). Fill in the outline below and prepare
to discuss with your instructor and classmates.
Opening Sentence
" How do the authors begin? What is significant about this?
Body of the Abstract
= How are the major sections introduced (e.g., the background, aim,
method, results, conclusion)? Are these specifically marked? For example,
are there specific words or phrases used to introduce each section?
* In what order do these sections appear?
. Concluding Sentence
" How do the authors end/conclude the abstract? What is significant about
this?
. Language
" What tenses are employed throughout the abstract? Where and why?
* What is the overall technique for transitioning between sentences?
" How do the authors transition between each major section (i.e., what
transitional words or techniques are used when moving from background
to aim, or method to results)?
" How are numbers presented? Why do you think this is?
Compare and Contrast with an Abstract in Another Language

" Repeat the questions above with an abstract in your field of study from
either your first language or another language with which you are familiar.
" Note the major similarities and/or differences. Why do you think these
similarities/differences occur?
Compare and Contrast with an Abstract You Wrote

« Repeat the questions in part I through IV above with an abstract you
wrote.
= Note the major similarities and/or differences. Why do you think these
similarities/differences occur? What changes do you need to make to your
own abstract? Why?
The major motivators in the preparation of the assignment were

to give students’ multilingual backgrounds relevance by validating
their first language expectations and values for a comparable genre.
_ This allows learners to not just become aware of differences, but
learn how to take agency over the preparation of writing and notice
the expectations their audiences may have. Likewise, allowing learn-
ers to compare the assigned abstract with a self-produced abstract
for their academic discipline provides the opportunity to identify
the small culture influences and the implications these have for
their writing. Thus, by planning and presenting an assignment that
provides space for learners to engage with audience expectations,
students are learning the why and how of writing, rather than being
told to follow step-by-step procedures, e.g., the five-paragraph essay.
In short, this assignment walks learners through the principles by
first introducing small culture expectations (of their discipline and
genre) so that they can become aware of how to approach a writ-
ing task. Next, comparing the research article abstract with similar
genres in their first language, learners are exposed to differences in
writing decisions they can make while seeing what is valued and
expected in the target situation. Finally, the steps for this activity
' direct students to view their audience not through prescriptive rules
but rather by teaching them how to conceptualize the writing task .
and why they are making such decisions.
Concluding Thoughts
This chapter has discussed how much of the focus around the world
in writing instruction is not on the organization of five-paragraph
essays, though there are exceptions to this rule. The research pre-
sented indicates that the five-paragraph essay persists in the peda-
gogies of classrooms where teaching to the test predominates. The
research also highlights the varying cultural values and standards
underpinning what is considered “good” writing across cultural and
national backgrounds. Foster and Russell (2002) clearly explicate
the dissimilar pedagogical methods and mindsets instructors and
institutions use in approaching writing. This means that when

international and multilingual writers are brought together into
one classroom, instructors must find new ways to teach and think |
of writing standards, and not rely on homogenous structures like
the five-paragraph essay. IR’s emphasis on negotiation and accom-
modation positions instructors to engage in ongoing conversations
about the evolution of L2 writing studies. IR can help to expand
one’s understanding of English instruction by identifying preferred
writing styles and structures in comparable genres across languages,
as well as providing social, cultural, and historical explanations for
such differences. It is also good for finding instances where nego-
tiations have been used and accepted. Thus, IR has the potential to
move toward the “practice-based” pedagogy advocated by Canaga-
rajah (2013) if, as Belcher (2014) suggested, it can “continue to
complicate, problematize and enrich our understanding of what
community membership means for and to writers (and readers),
not just with respect to the communities they are born into, but
those they choose to join or hope to change or decide to create” (p.
66). With this pedagogical tool, scholars and educators alike can
help writers to better compare genre expectations in target texts
with similar genres in their first language. This will further their
understanding of, access to, and implementation of successful lin-
guistic and rhetorical choices for the discourse communities that
they seek to enter.
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Writing Practices Beyond

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Interactions with and

around Texts: Writing in
Elementary Schools
LUCIANA C. DE OLIVEIRA AND SHARON L. SMITH
The five-paragraph essay is one of the first forms of writ-

ing with which young students in the U.S. come into contact,
and its template is far too often the only approach to writing that
they are taught to imitate during their formative years in elemen-
tary school. Of course, the five-paragraph essay is not all that is
required of young writers. A glance at the elementary education
standards in the United States known as the Common Core State
Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Prac-
tices [NGA] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO],
2010a) and an examination of the varied writing tasks that appear
across the diverse content areas in elementary education reveal that
there are, in fact, numerous genres required. Each of these genres
encountered in elementary schooling possesses its own purpose,
context, and structure. As a result of these unique characteristics,
65
the overwhelming majority of genres cannot be produced using

the same five-paragraph essay formula, because constructing texts
within a genre requires particular language and organization fea-
tures specific to that genre.
The idea that elementary school writing only consists of the
five-paragraph essay oversimplifies the large range of literacy
demands that young writers encounter, and the sustained prolif-
eration of this erroneous idea and the widespread teaching of the
formulaic five-paragraph essay have had detrimental effects on the
writing of our youth (Argys, 2008; Miller, 2010). Luciana has wit-
nessed undergraduate university students who have just finished
their K-12 education struggling with writing assignments that
ask them to move beyond a five-paragraph essay. Sharon has seen
fourth grade students struggling to write creatively, verbalizing
that they had always been given a prompt to which they would
respond utilizing a template composed of a thesis statement, three
supporting facts, and a conclusion reiterating the introduction.
This five-paragraph template method for writing instruction
implies that writing has merely been reduced to placing infor-
mation into slots, rather than acknowledging the intricate and
multifaceted process that takes place between the writer and the
reader to construct and negotiate meaning (Brannon et al., 2008). .
Use of these rigid templates means that content takes a back seat
to organization, structure, and transitions (Campbell & Latimer,
2012). Although students may initially feel constrained by the five-
paragraph essay, they often come to rely on and feel lost without it
(e.g., Campbell & Latimer, 2012; Miller, 2010), just like Sharon’s
fourth-graders.
This chapter demonstrates that writing, even at the primary
level, cannot be reduced to the “universal” five-paragraph essay. We
illustrate how a cycle of teaching and learning that draws on a
genre-based writing pedagogy can foster meaningful interactions
with and around texts and writing practices that reach far beyond
those of the five-paragraph template approach.
4: Interactions with/around Texts 67
The Research
Writing is composed of distinct genres, the different kinds of texts

that are written or spoken for specific audiences in specific social
contexts in order to achieve a specific purpose (see Tardy, Chap-
ter 2). The approach to genre pedagogy that provides the founda-
tion for this chapter is frequently described as “the Sydney School”
(Johns, 2002). This concept of genre is based on many years of
work in language and education derived from Systemic-Functional
Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), a theory of
language that examines linguistic choices and connects them to
different contexts. The Sydney School’s model of genre pedagogy
aims to enable all students, especially culturally and linguistically
diverse learners, to competently navigate the writing demands in
academic and civic arenas (Harman, 2018b; Humphrey, 2018). This
approach to literacy instruction has been successfully used since
the 1980s throughout school systems in Australia and is increas-
ingly being used internationally (Rose & Martin, 2012), garnering
interest in the United States (e.g., Brisk, 2015; de Oliveira, 2011,
Gebhard, Harman, & Seger, 2007; Harman, 2018a; Schleppegrell
& Colombi, 2002).
In the Sydney School, genres are “recurrent configurations of
meanings [...] that enact the social practices of a given culture”
or “staged, goal-oriented social processes” (Martin & Rose, 2008,
p. 6). Genres are viewed as staged because of the multiple moves
that it takes to achieve the writer’s goal, and they are considered
goal-oriented because the text is created to accomplish a specific
purpose. Finally, they are considered social because they are cre-
The different stages, or moves, within a
ated for a specific audience.
genre are identifiable not only by their communicative purpose, but
also by their linguistic patterns. While the texts within a genre tend
to share common characteristics, their complex moves and patterns
of language use cannot possibly be reduced to the five-paragraph
essay template.
wu Genre in the Common Core: The Standards versus

the Five-Paragraph Essay
Genres with similar purposes and language patterns can be col-
lected into genre families. These families are almost always pres-
ent in educational standards, although they are often referred to
by different terms. The Common Core, a set of English language
arts and mathematics standards developed in order to meet the
perceived need for consistent, common learning goals for students
across the United States (de Oliveira, 2016), organizes writing into
three genre families, which they call text types: (1) narrative, (2)
informational/explanatory, and (3) opinion/argument (NGA &
CCSSO, 2010a). These standards, implemented in 2010, require
students to read and write texts across numerous contexts and for
diverse purposes, marking new expectations for writing instruc-
tion in elementary classrooms. Through a close examination of the
Common Core and by drawing on existing literature (e.g., Derewi-
anka & Jones, 2016; Rose & Martin, 2012), we have identified
genres within each text type that are typical of elementary writing
(see Table 4.1).
The narrative text type includes stories, which have the social
purpose of providing entertainment, and recounts, which have the |
social purpose of relating a series of events. Although multiple sto-
ries might share similar stages, the patterns found within this genre
vary vastly, as literary texts often achieve their purpose of enter-
taining by “play[ing] around with patterns” (Derewianka & Jones,
2016, p. 81). If this genre is forced to fit the five-paragraph essay
template, the resulting stories will lack depth, essence, and life and
will not be able to achieve their social purpose: to entertain.
An informational or explanatory text is used for the purposes
of informing, organizing, identifying, describing, and/or explain-
ing. The five-paragraph essay frequently appears with this text type
in elementary classrooms. However, when examining the extent to
which the social purposes of this text type differ, it becomes readily
TABLE 4.1
Example Genres for Each Text Type in the Common Core
State Standards
Text Example Common Stages

Type Genre Purpose or Moves
to entertain Orientation Narratives

or engage Complication Anecdotes
Resolution Fables
=a
to tell what Orientation/ Recounting a
happened background historical event
Record/account of Recounting solving
stages math problems
Informational/ | procedures to instruct Purpose How to do a craft

Explanatory how to do Equipment How to play a game
something Method/steps How to go
Results somewhere
How to make candy
reports to provide Classification or Types of sharks

information Positioning A description of
about a Description Antarctica
topic Greek and Roman
cultures
explanations to explain Phenomenon How a life cycle

how things Explanation works
work/ What causes
why they hurricanes
happen
Opinion/ arguments to persuade Issue/thesis Essay taking a stance

Argument Arguments/sides Discussion exploring
Reiteration/ various sides
resolution Formal debate
text to critique Context Product review

responses Description Interpreting a book
Evaluation message
Reaffirmation/ Challenging a book
challenge message
Opinion of a movie
This table is partially inspired by work of Derewianka and Jones (2016, pp. 8-9) and Rose and
Martin (2012, pp. 129-130).
apparent that a standardized template is not adequate to address

the needs of young authors writing informational or explanatory
texts. For example, within the explanation genre alone, students
are exposed to and expected to produce sequential explanations,
cyclical explanations (e.g., the life cycle of a butterfly), factorial
(or causal) explanations, system explanations, and consequential
explanations (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).
In elementary school, language is used in the opinion or argu-
mentative text type to persuade others or to respond to others and
their work (Derewianka & Jones, 2016). With the new era of stan-
dards, even primary students are being asked to construct responses
with the purposes of assessing, interpreting, and evaluating literary
texts. The higher-order reasoning skills and personalized responses
essential to this genre are hampered when students are forced to
fit their responses to the five-paragraph essay template, and the
resulting texts are limited in their ability to accomplish their social
purposes.
As evidenced by Table 4.1, each of the three text types contains
multiple, diverse genres whose purposes are achieved in unique
ways and are impossible to produce by a “one-size-fits-all” writ-
ing template. This differentiates the production of genres from the
five-paragraph essay template, which does not enable students to -
meet the writing demands and cross-disciplinary expectations of
the Common Core nor to achieve the wide range of expected pur-
poses found within the three text types. Indeed, the majority of
the genres present in elementary education must employ structures
and language features that differ from the five-paragraph essay in
order to successfully meet their social purposes (Humphrey, Droga,
& Feez, 2012).
Furthermore, the descriptions of text types in the standards
address expectations for language use. In other words, they empha-
size that, while all disciplinary areas include teaching ¢hrough lan-
guage, it is crucial that writing instruction also incorporates teach-
ing about language. Texts organize language in specific ways, and the
features and patterns of meanings in texts are dependent on their
purposes and context (Rose & Martin, 2012). A five-paragraph
essay approach to writing does not provide students with clear

guidelines about how a particular genre is typically organized
because it fixates on only one structure; however, a genre-based
approach highlights the typical organization and language features
that are expected in each genre across content areas and focuses
on these features with students (see Table 4.1 for moves used to
organize each genre). For example, an examination of the narra-
tive genre family shows that stories are organized by complications
and resolutions, and recounts are sequenced in events, and both
tend to use individual nouns like the hunter, his boat, or a beach. A
genre-based approach allows and requires language to be taught in
context through reading and writing, providing meaningful oppor-
tunities for students to understand how authors use language to
accomplish their social purposes.
Effective texts within a genre often follow a specific sequence of
stages composed of language choices in order to realize these pur-
poses (Brisk, 2015; de Oliveira, 2011), which may initially make
this approach appear to be similar to the five-paragraph essay
template. However, there is an important distinction: Genre peda-
gogy is centered around the idea that the choices of genre, stages,
and language features are meaningful and completely dependent
on situation and purpose, contrasted with the rigid structure of
the five-paragraph essay template, which does nothing to prepare
students to consider audience or purpose and “forces premature
closure on complicated interpretive issues and stifles ongoing
exploration” (Wiley, 2000, p. 61). Instead of fostering young writ-
ers in developing more abstract and increasingly complex con-
ceptual and meaningful understandings of writing and content
as they advance through their schooling, this template approach
focuses writers on the structure itself. Some may think that this
is helpful for so-called “struggling” writers, including English
language learners, but, in fact, its limitations perpetuate a deficit
view of these writers by reinforcing the notion that they are not
capable of moving beyond a simple structure due to their devel-
oping writing skills (Brannon et al., 2008; Campbell & Latimer,
2012).
Furthermore, a genre-based approach recognizes and acknowl-

edges that defining specific text features may be problematic
because realizations of genres vary and evolve so as to achieve
their purposes in different contexts (de Oliveira, 2016). Genres are
not static; their social purposes differ and are constantly shaped
and reshaped by the contexts in our changing world. This in itself
is important for students to understand. However, despite these
variations, there are still some identifiable patterns and language
choices found across texts that can and should be taught (Derewi-
anka, 2011).
w«« The Teaching/Learning Cycle

This section outlines the Teaching/Learning Cycle (TLC), an
instructional model that teachers can implement in their class-
rooms to teach writing across content areas. We believe that this
model allows educators and students to focus on the stages of a
given genre in a way that does not result in a fixed template simi-
lar to what we are trying to avoid with the five-paragraph essay.
Rather, the TLC encourages teachers and students to reflect on
~ how a wide variety of texts utilize their unique structures in order
to accomplish social purposes (Derewianka & Jones, 2016). The .
overview of this model is followed by a section in which we provide
practical examples of how the TLC can be carried out in elemen-
tary settings.
The TLC is built on the idea of scaffolding, or helping stu-
dents achieve outcomes that would not have been possible for
them to reach on their own (Derewianka & Jones, 2016; see
Ortmeier-Hooper, Chapter 5, for more on scaffolding). Since its
initial implementation (Rothery, 1996), researchers and educators
have reconceptualized and refined the TLC, with several creating
their own adaptations (e.g., Brisk, 2015; de Oliveira & Lan, 2014;
Rose & Martin, 2012). Our version of this framework is presented
in Figure 4.1.
Students’ knowledge about language and content that the
teacher develops through reading and dissecting mentor texts can
FIGURE 4.1
The Teaching/Learning Cycle (TLC)
DETAILED READING :
Building content CONTENT
knowledge of the topic What is happening?
Whoarethe |
people/things
INDEPENDENT CONSTRUCTION ‘TEXT DEC cTIO! involved? What are
_ INDEPENDENT PRACTICE MODELING. : the circumstances:
surrounding
oa Students write — Students learn about events?
_.. texts on their own. the language of the text —
INTERPRETATION |
What are the roles
and relationships _
| takenup bythe |
| people/things
‘COLLABORATIVE CONSTRUCTION __ JOINT CONSTRUCTION
___ SHARED PRACTICE GUIDED PRACTICE
_ Students discuss and write _ | Teacher and students build ORGANIZATION
_ togetheringroups a text together
as a class ‘How is the text —
Adapted from Martin and Rose (2008) and de Oliveira and Lan (2014).
then be used during writing lessons, utilizing modeling and direct

instruction in the context of a shared experience. Building this
knowledge and these shared understandings of the field of study
can take place through multiple activities such as brainstorming
sessions, partner discussions, expert interviews, fieldtrips, and col-
laborative guided reading (Derewianka & Jones, 2012). Students
can then draw on these shared experiences later on when they are
jointly or individually constructing their own texts.
The TLC we present is made up of four phases of activity. The
first phase, text deconstruction, is centered around developing
students’ knowledge about a specific genre in which students are
expected to read and write. As all genres serve specific purposes,
students must understand the purpose of a particular text and how
that purpose is achieved through its stages and language choices in
order to effectively write within the genre. This knowledge about
language and genre is gained through the teacher-led process of
examining and dissecting texts.
The second phase of activity, joint construction, allows teach-
ers to scaffold students as they develop control over the genre
(Derewianka & Jones, 2012). Teachers co-construct a text in the

target genre with students, incorporating their suggestions. This text
is often similar to the mentor text that-they already deconstructed.
Collaborative construction, in which groups of students share
in writing a new text in the target genre, is a third phase that has
been developed as a bridge between the joint and independent con-
struction phases (Brisk, 2015; de Oliveira & Lan, 2014). This activ-
ity provides ways to further talk about language and scaffold stu-
dent writing, which research has shown to be especially beneficial
for young students, novice writers (Daiute & Dalton, 1992), and
language learners (e.g., Storch, 2011; Swain & Watanabe, 2012).
The last phase of activity in the TLC is independent construc-
tion. Students work on their own to construct texts in the target
genre. In both this phase and in collaborative construction, all the
typical process-writing steps are used by students (e.g., brainstorm-
ing, planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing). Guided inter-
actions through the context of shared experiences are central to the
TLC, and through these four phases, students are scaffolded as
they learn to read and write academic texts in a whole-class setting.
Changes in Practice
Our review of standards and literature in this field demonstrates

that elementary school writing does not require the five-paragraph
essay. Students need to recognize that there are a plethora of spe-
cific text structures and language choices that are used to accom-
plish different social purposes (Rose & Martin, 2012), and teach-
ers can help their students develop knowledge about language and
an awareness of genre through different instructional strategies.
In order to show how educators can develop this knowledge and
awareness, we examine the TLC as an instructional model, high-
lighting specific tasks, assignments, and activities for each instruc-
tional phase and providing examples that elementary teachers can
draw on when implementing this pedagogical approach in ‘their
own classrooms.
wwe (yeconstruction
During the deconstruction phase, teachers first introduce mentor

texts from a specific genre to their students. Teachers then guide
students in deconstructing these texts through demonstration,
modeling, and discussions about text purpose, stages, and language
features typical of that genre, while simultaneously developing stu-
dents’ knowledge of the content. After ensuring that all students
understand the text (Derewianka & Jones, 2016), teachers typi-
cally read through the text with students, focusing on features of
the language. These can include common grammatical structures,
voice, formality, common vocabulary, or other target constructions.
Deconstruction is often best supported through another practice
called detailed reading. Detailed reading involves a short excerpt
or text that the teacher selects which is similar in genre to a text
that students will be writing later. Detailed reading can be guided
by questions related to the content, interpretation, and organiza-
tion, such as the ones in Table 4.2. Another strategy to facilitate
these discussions is for the teacher and students to build a common
language for talking about texts and language, or a metalanguage
(Derewianka & Jones, 2016; also see Pessoa & Mitchell, Chapter
8, for similar prompts at the undergraduate level).
We have found that Appendix C of the Common Core is a
great resource for mentor texts for the TLC. It supplies annotated
TABLE 4.2
Prompts for Text Deconstruction
= Where are these texts found?

# Who uses this genre?
« Why is this genre or these types of texts used?
« What stages or features are common among texts of this genre?
= What is the text about? What is the topic?
=» Why did the author choose these language choices for this text?
= How do these language choices connect to the rest of the text?
= What is the effect of these language choices on meaning?
= What stages or features of this genre are optional?
Note: Some of these questions were adapted from Derewianka and Jones (2012).
samples of student writing for each text type that demonstrate the
quality of writing expected at each grade level (NGA & CCSSO,
2010b). Luciana has worked with several groups of pre- and in-
service elementary teachers to deconstruct My Big Book about Spain,
an informational first grade exemplar from this corpus of student
writing samples, in order to model how teachers could deconstruct
the text with their own students.
Exemplar Text. “My Big Book about Spain”

Spain is in Europe. Spain is located in the southwestern tip of Europe.
Europe is a far away place from here. Spain has a lot of fiestas. In some
of the fiestas they make masks and make special food too. Spain has bull
fights and I would want to see one. I think Spain looks like an upside
down hat. In some of the fiestas, the people are loud. Some of the fiestas
are even beautiful and colorful. Spain has a lot of different people. In
the bull fights they make the bulls tired and make them fall out Spain
is very colorful even if you go there you will see I’m right. Spain has five
neighbors. Spain’s neighbors are France, Andorra, Algeria, Portugal and
Morocco. One day when I am a researcher I am going to go to Spain and
write about it! (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b, p. 11)
During a recent workshop, Luciana recorded the TLC activi- -

ties that took place. Excerpt 1 shows the first language choices she
explicitly taught: the genre (Line 1) and its purpose (Line 2).
Excerpt 1. Deconstruction Phase, Part 1

1. Luciana: We're going to be reading a descriptive report. It’s called, “My
Big Book About Spain” ... And then we're going to write a “Big Book
about Miami” because I figure this is something that we have shared
knowledge about...
2. So, adescriptive report is one particular genre that has the purpose ofclas-
sifying and describing a phenomenon or place, okay?
After identifying the purpose and its corresponding genre, Luciana

taught the structure of a descriptive report and the genre’s different
stages: (a) positioning that identifies the place being described,
4: Interactions with/around Texts vel
and (b) description of particular features and characteristics. She

then pointed out specific features (Line 3).

3: The language features are general and abstract nouns and doing, being,
and having verbs. So, when we're reading this descriptive report, pay
attention to these kinds of things, okay? We're going to read now. /Luci-
ana reads text aloud with class.]
In this next excerpt, Luciana demonstrated where the first stage

of the exemplar text occurs (Line 4) and then asked the students
to identify specific language features in this stage, connecting how
these specific verbs help contribute to the stage. She continued to
do this with other aspects of the text, calling attention to describ-
ing words, nouns, and other verbs.

4, L: So, the positioning is usually the first stage and you're going to
see that in the first two sentences in our mentor text [...]: “Spain is in
Europe. Spain is located in the southwestern tip of Europe.” So, what
are some of the [verd] types that you see in the positioning?
Student C: Js. Being.
Detedsyand.«
Students D & E: Is located
Student S: And one more is.
Se L: You are positioning where the place is so you can describe it.
SCN
SSS
At the end of the deconstruction, she called the students’ atten-

tion to the text’s organization (Line 10) and demonstrated how
this choice allowed the author to accomplish his purpose of giving
information about Spain.

10. L: I want you to pay attention what happens here. [She reads mentor
text aloud.] “Spain has five neighbors. Spain's neighbors are...” So yes,
remember we talked a little bit about the zig-zag structure? So, we have
“Spain has five neighbors,” so this author is introducing the notion of

five neighbors in one sentence and then picking it up at the beginning
of the next sentence, right? So, “Spain’s neighbors are...” This allows the
author to add more information to the sentence, you know, by picking
up what was introduced after the [verb] and then at the first item in the
next sentence.
The TLC can be applied to teaching any genre at any grade level
or in any context, and any text can be deconstructed by follow-
ing the steps outlined in Table 4.3. If more information regarding
the different stages of each genre is desired, Derewianka and Jones
(2016) provide a description of numerous genres and their social
purposes, the stages common to each one, examples of texts in each
genre with their language features identified, and explanations of
how each of these language choices helped achieve the authors’
purposes.
uuu JOiInt Construction
During joint construction, the teacher is typically in the front of

the room, acting as scribe and eliciting from students how to co-
write the text. Teachers can use questions to guide students with.
the content and organization and to draw out the text, such as the
ones in Table 4.4. As students start using the language features of
the chosen genre, teachers can provide a bridge between students’
TABLE 4.3
Steps for Text Deconstruction
1. Identify a target genre.

2. Choose a mentor text in this genre.
3. Examine it with students, identifying the:
* purpose of the text
= name of the genre with this purpose
= stages typical of this genre and how they contribute to its purpose
= language features typical of this genre and how they contribute to its
purpose
TABLE 4.4
Prompts for Joint Construction
= What are the typical stages for this genre? What stages should we
make sure to include?
= What are some language features that we should use?
* Why should we make these language choices? What effect do they
have on the meaning of our text?
= What information should we include?
= What else can we say here? How could we expand this sentence?
Can you give me a(n) ___(e.g., adjective that adds more detail)?
= It sounds like you wanted to say, “ .” Is that what you meant?
* How could we say this so it sounds more like the language in this
genre?
* Let’s read through what we have written so far and see if it is okay.
" Is there anything that our mentor text had that we are missing?
Note: Some of these questions were based on components from Hammond and Gibbons’ (2005)
framework for interactional scaffolding.
everyday language and the language of school. Elementary stu-

dents are still in the process of acquiring this academic language,
so modeling vocabulary, sentence structures, and other language
features is important. Teachers can often do this by rephrasing or
recasting students’ contributions. They can also model the steps in
the writing process during this time, such as brainstorming, plan-
ning, drafting, revising, and editing.
Continuing with the “Big Books” lesson, Luciana modeled steps
in the traditional writing process (e.g., brainstorming, drafting)
while simultaneously engaging in the joint construction phase. She
asked students to brainstorm ideas that should go into a descriptive
report about Miami and guided their discussion.
Later, when Luciana decided that the students were ready to
write, she led the class as they made different choices about lan-
guage in order to jointly draft a descriptive report. Lines 11 through
23 (Excerpt 5) demonstrate what this phase of the TLC might
sound like when it is carried out in the classroom. The product that
was created during this lesson is also provided as an example of a
jointly constructed text.
a
Excerpt 5. Joint Construction Phase

if. L: Are we ready to write? So, the first thing we write is the title of
our descriptive report that is going to be... /writes, “My Big Book About
Miami”). So, we would start with what stage?
12, All: Positioning
13: L: The positioning. So, we need to position Miami somehow. So, we
want to use “southernmost major city in the continental U.S.” Iwould
say we should start with the word Miami. Does that make sense?...
“Miami is,” so we use the deing process there... “the southernmost
major city in the continental United States.”
14. Student D: Would the weather follow naturally from there, since we
mention where it is and ...
15. Student E: “Due to the location, it’s hot.” Something about that.
16. L: Okay. “Due to...” That’s a great beginning. “Due to its location,
Miami ...”
Le Student E: Or, “Miami's weather...”
18. L: “Miami's weather is...”
i All: Hot!
20. L: “...is very hot...” [laughs]
21; Student S: And humid!
a2. L: Most of the year. Should we say this?
23. All: Yes. [Luciana and the students continue to jointly construct the text
together]
Jointly Constructed Text. “Our Big Book about Miami”

Miami is the southern-most major city in the continental United States.
Due to its location, Miami’s weather is very hot and humid most of the
year. A lot of tourists from all over the world come to Miami to experi-
ence its many unique attractions: the beaches (/a playa), the Everglades,
restaurants, clubs, and numerous sports. This lively city is very diverse,
with its many cultures, languages, and cuisines. Come visit Miami, the
perfect vacation spot!
Having a shared experience (e.g., living in Miami) to write

about was essential for the joint construction; without a shared
experience, some students would not have been able to contribute.
Luciana encouraged all students to fully participate, providing

them with scaffolding when needed (e.g., recasting in Line 16,
sentence starters in Line 18, elaborating in Line 20). Teachers can
apply joint construction to other genres, contexts, and texts, fol-
lowing the steps in Table 4.5 when implementing this phase in
their own classroom.
w«« Collaborative and Independent Construction
After deconstructing and jointly constructing texts together as a

class, students have the opportunity to work on their own to con-
struct their texts in the target genre. In both collaborative and
independent construction, all the typical process-writing steps are
used by students (e.g., brainstorming, planning, drafting, revising,
editing, publishing). ’The difference between the collaborative and
independent construction is that during collaborative construction
students work with other students in pairs or small groups to con-
struct a text together. As students work to complete their texts,
teachers can hold writing conferences and monitor student prog-
ress, utilizing the prompts in Table 4.6.
It is expected that during the course of the TLC, teachers will
gradually release responsibility to the students, minimizing their
TABLE 4.5
Steps for Joint Construction
1. Identify a shared experience that can be used to create a text in the

same genre as the mentor text.
2. Write the shared text where all the students can clearly see what is
being written and act as the scribe.
3. Ask students to brainstorm what to include in the shared writing,
guiding students’ discussion.
4. Ask students to contribute to the text acting as a scribe and guiding
the conversation by eliciting more details and recapping, recasting, and
elaborating on what they say.
5. Highlight the steps that the class took to jointly construct the text,
modeling and asking the students to utilize metacognitive strategies
(e.g., Why did we include this sentence?).
88
TABLE 4.6
Prompts for Collaborative and Independent Construction es
a cha a ek A hh oi Bi Be ie a nen
= What genre stages did you include?
= What are some language features that you included?
= What information did you include?
= Why did you make these language choices? How do they affect your
text’s meaning?
support and guidance and giving students more independence dur-

ing these final phases. However, teachers should continue to scaf-
fold pairs/groups and individuals as needed. One crucial scaffold-
ing move during these phases is the provision of explicit evaluative
criteria to help direct student work (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).
These criteria should be specific to each genre and outline what
characteristics the teacher expects students’ texts to contain (e.g.,
Figure 4.2 for the “Big Book” task). The teacher and the students
FIGURE 4.2
Descriptive Report Checklist
First Grade Checklist for Descriptive Reports

NOT A
YET BIT YES!!!
2 BURPOS ee
[gave information aboutoneperson, animal,placeorthing. |_| |_|
[Tdescribed whattisikeandwhatitdoes orisusedfor | [||
Overall
|. eRe
Title 5 |figavemyreportatile
my report atitie. Sg
sd Ser ce
[General Statement [named mytopicandwhatitisatthebeginning ——«|_—s«|—«d|
[Description [told differentaspects ofmytopicinseparateparts. |_|
Ending’ |lwiete anending. 5 = SaLD aL ans Unwin |WOay SLL |
fF deas [used isandhastoinky topictotsdescriton. || |_|
|___Elaboration _|! used specific words todescribe mytopic. ss | S| ST
exportvoice —_|rusediacisinmyrepot. Sd
[organization | includedmytopicatthebeginning ofsentences. | | |
L. 3UF =a) i >
| Spelling | used all | know about words to help me spell

fronton |
| put punctuation at the end of every sentence
| used commas in lists.
| used capital letters for names.
can collaboratively develop these criteria during the deconstruc-

tion and joint construction phases, or the teacher can provide the
students with them (Derewianka & Jones, 2016). Students can
reflect on the criteria and use the checklist to guide their texts.
Even though this chapter portrays the TLC in a sequential
manner, this instructional model can be adapted to individual
classes’ needs. During each writing or content unit, all four stages
of the TLC may not be covered. Younger students often need more
scaffolding and the teacher may repeat the two initial stages to
help students build genre knowledge. Or, the students may already
be very familiar with the genre and its language features, and the
teacher may decide not to include the collaborative construction
phase. When teachers decide their students are ready to move on
from deconstruction and joint construction, they can implement
these final phases of the TLC in their own classrooms by following
the steps in Table 4.7.
«« Crosscutting Principles for the TLC

Unlike five-paragraph essay teaching, the TLC approaches
the whole text as the unit in focus, rather than individual sen-
tences or paragraphs. Instead of just slotting information into a
TABLE 4.7
Steps for Collaborative and Independent Construction
1. Decide whether students should work independently or

collaboratively.
. Instruct students to write a text in the same genre.
bd. Provide students with evaluative criteria to help direct their work (e.g.,
checklist, rubric).
4. Have students carry out the various steps in the writing process,
monitoring progress and differentiating instruction through writing
conferences and/or small groups.
= Have students brainstorm and plan what to include in their writing.
= Have students draft their writing.
= Have students revise and edit their writing, using their evaluative
criteria as guide.
ROSS
ee
predetermined form, these phases enable teachers to support

their students in developing knowledge about language and con-
trol of school genres across disciplines. From our own experi-
ence and by drawing on established literature, we have identified
nine principles to guide writing instruction with the TLC (see
Table 4.8).
TABLE 4.8
Principles for Writing Instruction with the
Teaching-Learning Cycle
Principle 1 Provide students with authentic, well-written,

developmentally appropriate mentor texts, and keep
them visible to students during all phases.
Principle 2 Spend time closely examining the genre, focusing on its
purpose, stages, language features, and how meaning is
created.
Principle 3 Explicitly and directly instruct students about these
aspects, verbalizing and modeling thinking aloud
(deconstruction / joint construction).
Principle 4 Develop a metalanguage with students to guide
discussions.
Principle 5 Promote student inquiry and interaction and elicit their
contributions.
Principle 6 Scaffold students through sentence starters, recasting
their everyday language into academic language, and
elaborating on their answers.
Principle 7 Model writing processes (e.g., brainstorming, planning,
drafting, revising, editing), and provide students the
opportunity to engage in these processes.
Principle 8 Provide explicit criteria to guide student work

(collaborative/independent construction).
Principle 9 Adapt the TLC to.each class’s needs.
Note: Some of these principles were adapted from Pavlak (2013).
Concluding Thoughts
This chapter has demonstrated that the five-paragraph essay does
not adequately meet the needs of writing in elementary grades,
highlighting the numerous different genres of writing required
in K-12 education, each of which requires a unique structure and
specific language features in order to accomplish its social purpose.
At the same time, it proposes genre-based pedagogy as an effective
approach to teaching writing in elementary schools and beyond
(see Ortmeier-Hooper, Chapter 5, for an application of the TLC
to secondary schools).
One of the major goals in education is for students to become
independent, lifelong learners. As such, they need skills and strate-
gies to be able to monitor their learning and know how to find and
use the knowledge that they need (Spencer & Guillaume, 2006).
By teaching students how to deconstruct and draw on mentor texts
when learning a new genre, they will be able to independently
go through these steps as they encounter different types of texts
throughout their lives. This highlights the importance of verbal-
izing and thinking aloud when deconstructing and jointly con-
structing texts with students (Principle 3). By modeling cognitive
processes, this framework gains the potential to become a tool that
students can use to examine texts on their own in the future. With
scaffolding from teachers through the TLC, “students should be
able to confidently interpret and employ a wide range of text types
for a variety of social purposes, including texts that have a more
complex, unpredictable structure” (Derewianka, 2011, p. 3).
As writing has become crucial to our academic, social, and
professional lives (National Commission on Writing, 2017), it is
imperative that we prepare students to critically think about their
writing and be able to eventually construct a wide variety of genres
autonomously. In contrast to the five-paragraph essay that has been
shown counterproductive to achieving this goal, genre-based peda-
gogy and its TLC offer a successful, flexible approach to writing
instruction that will prepare elementary students for their future
education and careers.
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en LLL LL AAB000A9AA0A09A- HAE” C h a pte r 5
Rethinking the Five-Paragraph

Essay as a Scaffold in
secondary School
CHRISTINA ORTMEIER-HOOPER
During my first year of teaching, I taught high school

English language arts (ELA)! and ESL at an urban U.S. high
school. In my English classroom, I worked with students in the
lower-level academic track, and my teaching mentor told me that
one of my goals as a teacher was to help them successfully master
the five-paragraph essay form. He noted that it would be “useful”
and “prepare them for the future.” The “future” seemed to allude
to a combination of preparing them for college, preparing them
for their other subject-area teachers, preparing them for our yearly
standardized assessment tests, and preparing them for a whole host
of writing tasks that might lie ahead for them. He reasoned that
1In US. secondary school contexts, ELA refers to English language arts classes. These are the
main English literature/writing courses that are required of and taught to all secondary school
students. All second-language students will take these classes, though some may take them
alongside additional ESL support classes.
89
mastery of the five-paragraph form was a basic frame, an example

of “good writing and organization” that we could teach them. As he
walked me through the assignments, he handed me a graphic orga-
nizer for the five-paragraph essay: a scaffold for the scaffold. Down
the hall, my ESL teaching mentor echoed these claims, pointing
to a poster on the wall illustrating the five-paragraph theme with
colorful boxes for an introduction, three paragraphs, and a conclu-
sion—a visual how-to guide to help students master the structure.
Eager to prove myself and a little wary of raising questions, I
taught the five-paragraph essay. I used highlighters to help stu-
dents match portions of their thesis statements to each paragraph,
color coding the corresponding pieces. I used graphic organizers. I
found a similar poster of bright colors for my own bulletin board.
There was the five-paragraph personal essay, the five-paragraph
analytical essay, the five-paragraph book summary, the five-para-
graph biography, the five-paragraph description, and so on. My
adolescent students, bright and cunning, quickly realized the plug-
and-play nature of the formula I asked from them.
The writing that my students produced was organized but
empty. When the school year ended, guidance counselors and
teachers looked at the students’ writing and argued that they were
still unprepared for advanced coursework; their essays seemed
“uncritical” or “simplistic.” The students didn't argue. They saw -
their low-level placements as the best they could do; they were “bad
at writing” because, after all, English was their second language,
and they hated to write anyway. In an absurd twist, the curricular
writing goal for these students continued to be the five-paragraph
essay.
Fifteen years later, my research (Ortmeier-Hooper, 2010, 2013,
2017) found that writing experiences of many secondary L2 stu-
dents in U.S. schools had not changed a great deal. Second lan-
guage students in mainstream English and ESL classrooms did
very little writing. Their longest writing assignments were often
one page in length and even those were infrequent. When they
did write, the emphasis continued to be almost exclusively on the
5: The 5PE as a Scaffold 91
five-paragraph formula. In my research, teachers saw the five-para-

graph form as a set of training wheels for real writing that would
come later, and eventually, teaching the five-paragraph essay would
enable their students to become more adept with other genres and
writing expectations. But the students in these studies, and others,
rarely got the opportunity to move on. In fact, their rote mastery
of the five-paragraph form actually worked against them; teachers
would note that students had the form “down,” but there really
didn’t seem to be much voice, much critical thinking, much effort,
or even intellectual curiosity evident in their writing.
I use the terms formula and form throughout with purpose. I
acknowledge that there are formulaic conventions that do inform
certain genres, like those in scientific research (see Chapters 2 and
9); however, in the secondary school setting, the five-paragraph
formula is often employed as an unthinking application. It is
arhetorical—rarely informed by considerations of audience, writ-
er’s goals, or the genre’s purpose. Further, calling it a five-paragraph
“essay” seems like a misnomer as it does not follow the conventions
or aims of essays in the traditional literary sense, a point explored
by Caplan (see Chapter 1).
This chapter raises questions about and considers whether the
five-paragraph formula actually serves as an all-purpose scaffold
for L2 student writers in secondary schools. I illustrate how the
presence of the five-paragraph form as a “survival genre” for these
students can make it a permanent scaffold that actually hinders
their development as writers and creates obstacles to higher levels
of academic achievement.
The Research
The five-paragraph essay is a formula that remains ubiquitous in

many classrooms and schools; secondary teachers often contend
that they continue to teach the five-paragraph form because it
is a good starting point, especially for English language learners;
ostensibly, it is a scaffold to help writers develop habits or skills

that they may carry to other genres. Scaffolding is a concept that
is widely discussed in conversations on student learning and best
practices. The concept of scaffolding is drawn from Vygotsky’s
(1978) theories of learning and the zone of proximal development
(ZPD). The ZPD describes the gap between what a student can
accomplish independently and what a student can do with assis-
tance. Instruction that considers the ZPD aims to locate that opti-
mal time where instruction is most beneficial in helping students
to reach just beyond their current level of independent learning.
Drawing on construction as a metaphor, scaffolding refers to the
structures that are put into place to help students “build” toward
mastery. As in construction, the scaffolding is removed after the
building is complete.
In teaching, scaffolding depends on teachers incorporating
pedagogical support devices and systems to help move students
from their current knowledge to more advanced skills and under-
standing. As the student achieves mastery, the instructor lowers
and reduces the use of that aid so that the student can move toward
more confidence, independence, and mastery. Ideally, teachers build
systematically on students’ current understandings, experiences,
and knowledge in order to gain mastery of new skills. In TESOL
research, scaffolding is often described as a way of reducing cogni-
tive load as students acquire language skills in their second or third
language.
Athansases and de Oliveira (2014), in their study of the scaffolds
in the literacy development of Latina/o youth, have made compel-
ling arguments about how teachers can best use scaffolding in their
classrooms. They identify three questions that they suggest should
guide our employment of scaffolding devices and techniques in the
classroom: (1) scaffolding for whom? (2) scaffolding for what? and
(3) scaffolding how? (p. 265). To unravel some of the lore employed
to justify. the five-paragraph form as a scaffold, I use two parts
of this this framework to contextualize the research and trends
surrounding this formula: (1) for whom does the five-paragraph
essay function as a scaffold? and (2) what are we trying to scaf-

fold student writers toward when we use the five-paragraph
essay?
«m1, For whom does the five-paragraph essay function

as a scaffold?
This is an interesting question. The answers that I often hear sug-

gest that the five-paragraph essay is a necessary formula for stu-
dents to learn, especially those students in lower-level or remedial
tracks—novice writers—and especially, those students who write
or are learning to write in English as a second language. The five-
paragraph form is often considered one of the “basics” that students
in these tracks should know and master in order to demonstrate
writing proficiency and maybe clarity of thought. Instructors often
note that it teaches students how to organize their writing and
develop thesis-driven arguments for the classroom. Teachers argue
that it is a necessary beginning for students, and without master-
ing it, the students will struggle to complete more sophisticated
writing and thinking later on. Others acknowledge, often in more
quiet, hushed tones, that the five-paragraph form is the one they
have to teach so that students can do well on the various standard-
ized tests that seem to dominate today’s educational landscape (see
Chapter 10).
The idea that the five-paragraph form will scaffold students to
more sophisticated thinking and writing is at best, inconsistent,
and at worse, unfounded. Still, the form continues to be prevalent
and depicted as an important and necessary part of a student writ-
er’s development. Underlying the defenses of the five-paragraph
essay that appear on blogs, in journals, and at conferences are a
number of uncomfortable truths and unquestioned concerns. We
should be asking critical questions about whom this specific form
really benefits and why. We need to ask: How do the various factors
of testing, grading, underdeveloped writing curricula, and a lack
of instructional and material support for teachers figure into the
dominant use of this form? Even if we start from a genuine place of

using the five-paragraph form to help our students improve their
writing, here are the realities about the form and material condi-
tions that undercut those intentions:
™ In most schools, the time for student writing and writing

instruction is often cut short due to other curricular .
priorities and competing demands in the ELA/ESL
curriculum (Applebee & Langer, 2011; Graham, Capizzi,
Harris, Hebert, & Morphy, 2014; Henderson, Rupley,
Nichols, Nichols, & Rasinski, 2018; National Commission
on Writing, 2004). Teaching the five-paragraph essay
helps teachers and administrators to seemingly solve that
problem. As long as students only have to master one form,
there is no need to spend class time studying other genres
or longer pieces or to develop students’ critical engagement
as writers.
m@ The five-paragraph form is a formula that can be taught
by most teachers, especially those with less knowledge,
training, or confidence in their ability to develop and
provide more complex and effective writing instruction.
Hirvela and Belcher (2007) have noted that “writing
teacher education is underdeveloped, sometimes
misinformed, and often invisible.” Studies by Larsen (2013)
and others (Graham et al., 2014; Yi, 2013) have found that
coursework on the teaching of writing is often not part
of the professional development for many ESL and ELA
teachers and teachers-in-training. As a result, some teachers
may be uncomfortable teaching writing or developing
writing curricula for their courses. Some haven't studied
various methods of teaching writing, and other may not
be well-versed in classroom strategies that are supported
by contemporary theory and research. When the resources
for teachers are limited, the five-paragraph formula
becomes an easy curricular solution for teachers (and their
administrators) who wish to have their students produce

writing to meet state-level standards or other objectives.
The prevalence of high-stakes tests that seem to reward use
of this form in many secondary schools compounds these
concerns.
m@ In some large-scale, often mass-produced, state and other
high-stakes assessments and exams, there is evidence
that the five-paragraph form is the common (and often
expected) response for the writing prompts given to
students (see Chapter 10). Over the past two decades, the
emphasis on mandated testing at the state level has created
more demand for the teaching of the form. In the U.S.,
students (and their teachers) in almost all states encounter
mandated tests on writing at three or more grade levels
(Hillocks, 2002; Applebee & Langer, 2011). In the limited
blocks of time that are the staple of these mandated tests,
students are asked to write quickly and rewarded for the
four- or five-paragraph formula. The formulaic writing
that students produce demonstrates little creative or critical
thinking. Even more striking, Hillocks (2005) noted in his
study of the impact of testing on writing instruction that
the majority of students across multiple states were writing
in formulaic five-paragraph precision but when examined
more closely, the content of their writing was dull and
largely filled with unsubstantiated claims. Yet despite these
concerns, Hillocks’ research found that students received
high scores as long as they followed the five-paragraph
template. Other research, however, has found contradictory
results, and at least some tests are moving away from the
five-paragraph form (see Chapter 10). Clearly, though,
there is ongoing pressure on teachers and students to stress
formula over content or critical thinking.
H The relatively easy scoring of the five-paragraph essay is
also a factor in how commonly assigned it is. Perelman
(2014) illustrated how the scoring mechanism used by
large-scale testing companies furthers the incentive for

students to produce formulaic writing. Simply put, the
five-paragraph essay is easy and efficient to score for human
raters and machines (Perelman, 2012). For the testing
firms that create, publish, and score these exams, the five-
paragraph formula provides one way for automated scoring
machines to rate students’ texts for organization, along —
with word count and paragraph length. But the machines
cannot read for meaning or critical thinking. Even for
those testing firms that hire human readers, their training
protocols often encourage these readers to value the five-
paragraph form as a norm in order to provide uniformity
and standardization as a way to deal with the volume of
submissions.
@ In the classroom, similar efforts for efficiency and
assessment also contribute to the form’s normative status. It
can be very easy to grade. The parts of the whole are easily
identified. Is there an opening paragraph with a thesis?
Check. Are there three body paragraphs? Check. Does each
body paragraph have a topic sentence? Check. Does it have
a conclusion? Check.
These realities raise hard questions about why we continue to teach _

the formula and, if it is seen as a scaffold, whom does it serve: stu-
dents? teachers? administrators? testing companies? This is a tough
question to answer and one that should make us very uncomfort-
able, especially since so many teachers have the intention of doing
the very best by their students.
In truth, the five-paragraph essay has become what I’ve termed
“a survival genre” for students, teachers of English, and administra-
tors (Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013, 2017). As teachers and administra-
tors sit in conference rooms and worry about the newest round of
test scores, reports, and their students, survival is still often the topic
of our conversations. But how much has this emphasis on survival
influenced how we approach our expectations of our L2 students
as participants and writers in English classrooms? How often do
we find ourselves saying, “Well, after this test, we will teach them
something more, we just have to get them through ... and then we
will move into newer, more expansive writing and provide more
writing variety”? How often does the scaffold become the perma-
nent structure for ESL students in our programs and schools? The
belief in the five-paragraph form as a necessary survival scaffold
for L2 students creates conditions in which teachers (and students)
lose sight of their original intents for scaffolding in the first place:
to foster and encourage students’ greater independence and mas-
tery as writers.
«uw2, \Nhat are we trying to scaffold student writers

toward when we use the five-paragraph essay?
Over the years,Ikeep coming back to one question: When do the

majority of our L2 student writers get to move on to those more
sophisticated genres? Ironically, in my own experiences as a second-
ary school teacher, I was surprised that when I did try to move on
to new genres, I encountered resistance—sometimes from admin-
istrators and sometimes from my own students. My students, well
trained in the boilerplate of the five-paragraph expectation, some-
times resented or complained about a new assignment or genre
which forced them to think more critically and made writing more
complicated. ‘Their resistance, coupled with pressure from other
teachers or administrators, made me doubt myself. It also made me
doubt their abilities as writers. Maybe their resistance was a sign
that they weren't truly ready?
Looking back, I see now that I tended to forget that writing
well was indeed complicated. It took time. It was a challenge. It
could be frustrating. And that was okay. We didn’t need to give up
so easily; we could forge through. That is what real writers know.
In many ways, the five-paragraph boilerplate was actually a false
scaffold; it didn’t prepare my students for much beyond the tests,
and it made writing seem like a simple, homogenous formula that
required sentences and form. When they encountered genres that
pushed them beyond formulas, they voiced fear that they could not
succeed often couched in discussions of “not being good writers” or

“not being good at English.” It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Writing felt impossible, and they had few experiences and success
with other genres that might fuel their resiliency and confidence to
forge forward. Teaching the five-paragraph approach as a scaffold
had not prepared them to think critically about their topics or their
goals as writers.
One particular concern with teaching the frecklesterse form
as a scaffold is that it can perpetually misrepresent writing to stu-
dents as a homogenous formula; students are led to not see and
not learn the distinctions across various genres. In many secondary
schools, particularly among mid- or lower-level academic tracked
classrooms’, writing assignments from arguments to narratives,
from informational texts to personal statements, from opinion edi-
torials to research reports are all taught with the five-paragraph
form. No distinctions are made, and the prevailing sense is that
one form of writing will fit all occasions. Studies have found that
the result of such instruction is that students perceive all writ-
ing to be the same, regardless of purpose, readers/audience, and
genre (Hillocks, 2002, 2005). That perception is not only driven by
test expectations but also by rubrics. For example, in his analy-
. sis of the Illinois state writing assessment, Hillocks (2002) noted
that the different kinds of writing that the test claimed to assess
all merged together when it came to the rubrics that were used
to evaluate the students’ writing. So even though teachers were
encouraged to teach narrative or argument or informational texts,
the form that those genres and the rubrics used to grade and evalu-
ate all favored the five-paragraph formula. Through the tests and
the standardized rubrics, the various genres of writing had become
2 In USS. secondary school contexts, educational or academic tracking refers to the placement
of students into separate and hierarchically tiered classrooms and academic settings. Scholars
including Oakes (2005), Gamoran (2010), Shifrer and Callahan (2012), Umanksy (2016), and
Ortmeier-Hooper and Ruecker (2016) have long documented and discussed how academic
tracking into lower-level tracks adversely impacts the educational achievement levels and
motivation of impoverished students, as well as African-American, Latino, and immigrant L2
students.
homogenized in the classroom. The dominance of the five-para-

graph as the standard, homogenous pattern has also impacted
commercial textbooks geared toward teachers and students in the
secondary grades. It is a problematic trend. For adolescent L2 writ-
ers, the emphasis on a single formula can have grim consequences
in terms of their opportunities and academic advancement.
By and large, secondary L2 students in U.S. contexts do not
receive the range of writing experiences and expectations that their
monolingual, native English-speaking peers have. For example,
studies by Enright (2010) and Enright and Gilliland (2011) found
multilingual students in U.S. secondary schools were more often
placed in the lower tracked Earth Science classes over the higher-
tracked Biology track, which contained honors and fluent-English
speakers. The lower-tracked students, according to the teacher,
struggled more with writing, with a tendency to summarize pro-
cedures rather than offer explanations for observed phenomena.
In response, the writing in the lower-level track was ultimately
watered down (Enright & Gilliland, 2011, p. 189). The English
learners were continually underprepared and “ill-equipped to do
the writing,” which then continually justified their placement in the
lower-tiered course for one year after another. Rinard (2010) and
Valdés (2001) noted similar trends in introductory ESL courses,
where basic instruction and scripted protocol-based writing exer-
cises dominated the curriculum, and advanced writing opportuni-
ties were absent.
As Hillocks (2005) has noted in his critique of formulaic writ-
ing assignments, “Teachers of writing and textbooks on writing
have treated substance as though it were of little or at best, sporadic
reference to content: that once students learn the various forms,
they are then prepared to write real prose” (p. 238). The disturbing
irony is that many L2 writers never get to transition into the classes
where they will move into writing “real prose.” In her work on L2
students transitioning from secondary school to college, Harklau
(2011) found that the five-paragraph essay became the default
form for all the students whenever they were asked to write a
page or more (which wasn't often) and that, in the lower-academic
tracks where many English language learners in U.S. secondary

schools find themselves placed, becoming proficient at the five-
paragraph form worked for them. Mastery of the structure led
to good marks for the ESL students, the “triumph of form over
substance” (Harklau, 2011, p. 228). But Harklau discovered that
mastery of the five-paragraph form did not help these multilingual
students move ahead academically, and they were often confused
when they were told that their written work was not “good enough”
to allow them entrance into high-tiered classes or when they were
placed back into ESL classes upon reaching community college.
The reality is that in many U.S. secondary schools, ESL students
are remarkably absent from academically advanced classes (Kanno
& Cromley, 2013; Kanno & Kangas, 2014; Ortmeier-Hooper &
Enright, 2011). L2 students often find themselves moving hori-
zontally—out of ESL or language development courses and into
lower-level academic classes in the content areas; they rarely move
vertically up the academic tracks into honors or advanced place-
ment courses. Writing is the gatekeeping measure that is most
often used, formally or informally, to assess how students might
succeed in these advanced courses. Students lack experience with
genres beyond the five-paragraph essay. They also lack practice
-with writing activities like invention (discovering their topics,
brainstorming, prewriting, etc.), development (expanding their _
ideas, developing their language, tailoring their introductions to
engage readers, honing their descriptions, layout, or arguments,
discussing and thinking critically about audience) and develop-
ing strategies for revision. Together, this lack of practice and lack
of experiences impact students’ academic trajectories in secondary
school and their options for higher education (Ortmeier-Hooper
& Enright, 2011; Ruecker, 2015).
In some ways, the perpetual use and permanent scaffolding of
the five-paragraph essay became a self-fulfilling prophecy for these
students and their teachers. Because they were unsure what to do
when they could not follow the template, teachers interpreted that
uncertainty as a lack of mastery, and the scaffold was never taken
down.
5: The 5PE asa Scaffold 101
Since writing well serves as one of the conditions that can

impede or facilitate school-age multilingual writers’ advancement
into college-level academic tracks (Harklau, 2011; Ortmeier-
Hooper & Ruecker, 2016), it stands to reason that L2 students
need to have more than just a formula to help them gain skills
and develop more sophisticated texts. They need experiences writ-
ing in authentic genres for real audiences. Campbell (2014) points
outs that “the problem with the five-paragraph formula [is] that its
offer of structure stops the very thinking we need students to do.
Their focus becomes fitting sentences into the correct slots rather
than figuring out for themselves what they’re trying to say and the
best structure for saying it” (p. 61). When the five-paragraph form
is used as a scaffold, it often becomes “a stopping point instead of a
starting point” for students, and also for their teachers (Campbell,
2014, p. 62).
A quick search on Google with the search terms “five-paragraph
essay” and “graphic organizer” reveals more than 3,000,000 hits:
there are millions of downloadable PDFs and images, all prepared
to be reproduced by teachers for their students. Some are color
coded; some have distinct lines for topic sentences. Others are
playful: hamburgers, Oreo cookies, even an ice-cream sundae—all
reinforcing the plug-and-play nature of the five-paragraph essay.
They are the tangible and highly visible edifices of the ways in
which writing is calcified and reduced to fill-in-the-blank-type
formulas. In my own work as a teacher, I see the importance of
graphic organizers; however, the ubiquitous presence of these par-
ticular organizers compounds the concerns I have articulated here
and reinforces the prevailing thoughts about the five-paragraph
essay’s relevance and usefulness as a necessary classroom staple. The
graphic organizers also emphasize writing as a passive, formulaic
activity, rather than an active, critical, communicative act (Emig,
1977; Bean, 2011). Teachers therefore need approaches that high-
light the problem-solving aspects of writing, from understanding
the expectations of a given audience to building awareness of the
differing forms and expectations of a genre, to the ways in which
certain sentence constructions and word choices are valued within
a given rhetorical situation. Bean (2011) advises that we need to

teach writing in ways that present students with challenging genres
and situations, arguing: “In creating an environment that demands
their best writing, we can promote their general cognitive and
intellectual growth” (p. xviii). |
An over-reliance on this one formula works against teachers
aiming to prepare their students for higher education and col-
lege/career readiness. Colleges expect to see students establish
their arguments, responses, and narratives in papers that have
more depth than the standard five-paragraph theme. Workplaces,
as well as college professors across the disciplines, are looking for
a far richer understanding of content, context, and critical think-
ing (Argys, 2008; Fanwetti, Bushrow, & DeWeese, 2010; National
Commission on Writing, 2004). Finally, the reliance on the five-
paragraph formula as a scaffold often blinds us (and our students)
to other writing strengths (Yi, 2008; Zhao, 2015). Equating the
teaching of writing well to the mastery of the five-paragraph form
limits students who still struggle with thesis-driven arguments, but
it also misses opportunities to let those very same student writers
find their voices in other genres. The same students who struggle
with one form may still be ready to experiment and venture into
_ creative writing, workplace writing, and multi-genre writing (see,
for example, Miller, 2018, and Romano, 2013). In short, we tend
to overlook that even struggling student writers may surprise us _
when given the chance to engage with different writing genres and
situations.
As writing teachers,we share a goal that students should come to
see and use writing as a communicative act, as a way to strengthen
critical-thinking skills, and as a pathway to their own intellec-
tual growth and engagement in expressing their ideas. When our
scaffolds for writing instruction are reductive, students do not
develop those skills or an awareness of the decisions that writers
make as they write for different audiences and different purposes.
Strictly teaching the “base formula” allows writing to become over-
scaffolded to such a point that it denies student writers the oppor-
tunity to stretch and grow more confident in their writing. They
are not given the opportunity to test their own critical-thinking

strategies for various writing tasks.
This lack of experience and the resulting lack of confidence dis-
courage many student writers from venturing into more advanced
genres and make them hesitant to engage in more rhetorically
complex writing situations. The result is that many multilingual
writers get stuck in the very scaffolds that we create to help them.
Changes in Practice
Better methods of scaffolding the teaching of writing do exist, and

teachers should develop approaches that help students to build
their knowledge and confidence as writers, beyond formulas. But
as Bean (2011) has pointed out, “The use of writing and critical-
thinking activities to promote learning does not happen through
serendipity. Teachers must plan for it and foster it” (p. 2). Teachers
need to create opportunities for students to engage with meaning-
ful writing assignments; at the same time, they need to develop
scaffolding techniques that lead students to be more engaged with
writing. There is no question that student writers often need struc-
tures that help them to gain confidence and skills as writers, but
teachers can adopt better scaffolding techniques that also help stu-
dents to develop deeper thinking skills when it comes to their writ-
ten work. Here are a few ways to create better scaffolding for the
teaching of writing at the secondary level.
1. Find varying mentor texts and use them more productively

as teaching tools to lead students to write in more authentic
genres.
We can't teach every genre, but we can teach student writers to

become savvy readers of genres and their audiences (see Chapters
2 and 7). Different genres, and different writing situations, require
writing in various structures and for varying audience expectations.
Reading and writing authentic genres allows for opportunities to
discuss a writer’s purpose and audience in greater detail and encour-

ages student writers to engage in critical thinking as they write and
revise a given assignment. Practice with meaningful genres can also
promote advanced academic preparation for students who wish to
pursue higher education. One scaffolding approach is to encour-
age students to read new genres as writers. For example, Campbell
(2014) suggests that teachers use class time to work with students
on close reading of mentor texts. Dorfman (2013) has defined
mentor texts as pieces of writing that both teacher and student “can
return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to
be studied and imitated. ... Mentor texts help students to take risks
and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps
them to try out new strategies and formats” (p. 1). Using mentor
texts in the secondary classroom is a powerful scaffolding device
that helps students move beyond the formulaic and think critically
about their decisions as writers. In discussing mentor texts, teach-
ers can help student writers to see the kinds of rhetorical decisions
about form, audience, sentences, and appeals that writers make to
reach their readers. Widening students’ understanding of more
advanced genres encourages student writers not to see writing as
formulaic, but to see writing, and the conventions and genres that
_ We use in various situations, as frames for social action and com-
municative acts.
One approach that secondary teachers can draw upon is the —
Teaching/Learning Cycle (TLC), which scaffolds writing with
activities through which student writers and their teachers embrace
more “talking” about how texts work in the world (de Oliveira &
Smith, Chapter 4; see also Brisk, 2013; Gebhard 8&Harman, 2011).
In this method, secondary teachers begin by locating authentic
mentor texts that exemplify the kinds of writing that they want
their students to compose. In the middle and high school settings,
mentor texts from published flash non-fiction authors are partic-
ularly useful. Flash non-fiction is a genre of short (one to three
pages) non-fiction texts, published in collections or on websites like
Brevity Magazine (http://brevitymag.com/); they serve as excellent
contemporary authentic writing samples and employ a number
of formats, lengths, styles, and approaches used by real writers. In

the classroom, teachers can share these texts with students and
encourage class discussions that examine closely how these writ-
ers approach their introductions and openings, conclusions, para-
graphs, word choices, and even sentences. These kinds of texts,
when coupled with class discussions on the texts’ features and the
authors’ choices, can help students to articulate the options and
possibilities for their own work as writers. For more persuasive
or argumentative writing, secondary teachers can find models
of opinion/editorial pieces on news sites or the blogs of estab-
lished writers. In this vein, the New York Times has an outstand-
ing website, The Learning Network (www.nytimes.com/section/
learning), which offers teachers outstanding examples of mentor
texts for feature writing, opinion/editorials, research-based writ-
ing, and more informational genres. To decide which mentor texts
are best for a given writing assignment, secondary teachers should
consider how their selection of mentor texts mirrors their expecta-
tions for their own student writers. In choosing texts and authentic
writing models for their adolescent students, secondary teachers
might ask: What is it about this particular model that Id like my
students to emulate or consider trying in their own work? Does
the mentor text illustrate one or two learning objectives that I have
for my student writers? Are these interesting examples of how
the writer takes risks or uses language? Does the subject matter
or experience explored in the mentor text connect in some way
to my students’ experiences or identities in their communities or
schools?
2. Choose mentor texts with an eye toward scaffolding by

considering how students can analyze them as a class of
writers and what they can learn from the texts throughout
their own drafting and revision processes.
In practice, teachers should try to locate at least two mentor texts

for any given assignment so that students can see a broader range
of writers’ choices and options and because students may admire
or connect with one writer’s style more than another. The length
of the mentor texts should be accessible as well. In other words, a
teacher should not use a ten-page memoir to teach the personal
narrative when her assignment asks students to write two to four
pages. If the length of the model does not correspond to the length
that is expected from the student writer, it is difficult for students
to discern how writers make decisions about details, description,
word choices, pace, structure, organization, sentences, and para-
graphing. By employing models that are close to the same length
as the assignment, students can more easily see—and teachers
can more easily teach—how to make similar choices in their own
texts. In addition, when teachers use models that are too long, the
emphasis of the lesson tends to shift more towards the reading and
interpretation of a literary story; as a result, there is less time to
“read” the piece as fellow writers and for students to compose their
own work.
Once a teacher has chosen appropriate model texts, the next
phase of the TLC is interactive deconstruction. In this phase, teach-
ers and students work together in the classroom to break down a
mentor text and discuss what can be detected about the writer’s
rhetorical choices. They carefully review, through class discussion
and other activities, the nature and form of the genre, as well as
its purpose for both readers and writer. Deconstruction, as a class-
room discussion activity, helps secondary students to notice certain —
textual features. For example, students might consider how writers
follow certain genre conventions and/or construct sentences with
certain rhetorical aims (see Chapters 4 and 8). They also might
take note of when writers decide to break with convention and
how effective those choices are (see also Chapter 2).
The mentor texts can also serve multiple aims over the course of
a writing assignment, and when used well, they can lead to effec-
tive prompts and scaffolding activities that engage student writ-
ers to think more critically and write with more investment. As
students begin to compose on their own or with partners, teachers
can then return to the chosen mentor texts at multiple moments in
order to use those texts to point out certain features (openings, the-
sis statements, transitions, paragraphing, verb tenses, subject-verb
agreement, personal pronoun usage, endings, dialogue, etc.) to

highlight aspects of the text that they would like students to notice
and learn to use in their own writing.
3. Develop sequenced writing assignments across various

genres and audiences.
Decontextualized writing assignments encourage students to

see writing assignments merely as exercises to please the teacher
rather than exciting opportunities to engage in written commu-
nication. One goal of our writing instruction should be to develop
assignments that build curiosity and interest in the communica-
tive aspects of writing by having student writers produce authen-
tic, meaningful texts. One approach originally developed by Leki
(1992), which I have expanded upon for secondary classrooms
(Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013), encourages teachers to sequence writ-
ing assignments so that different genres build upon one another.
Students embrace a single subject area so that they can become
experts on that area in terms of knowledge and vocabulary, but the
writing assignments stretch them to experience different genres.
For instance, a teacher might start with a personal narrative assign-
ment in which a student writes about a grandparent’s struggle with
cancer caused by many years of smoking. The next assignment
might be a researched-based report on the health hazards of smok-
ing, integrating library research with interviews of community or
family members. A third assignment might compare and contrast
vaping (using electronic cigarettes) and smoking, examining the
hazards of each of the activities. Finally, a fourth assignment might
focus on persuasion; students might produce a brochure or pub-
lic service announcement about the dangers of smoking for their
peers. The sequenced approach allows students to build and draw
upon accumulated topic knowledge and vocabulary as they work
through each writing assignment. As they write through sequences
of genres, they become authorial experts on the topic. That sense
of expertise serves as a scaffold and builds confidence even as they
are learning a new genre or stretching their writing skills in other
ways.
4. Embed essays/writing assignments into larger writing

projects.
Another approach to scaffolding involves encouraging inquiry-

based learning and writing within the context of larger projects
(e.g., Franquiz & Salinas, 2011). Teachers develop projects that
include more complex genres that students may encounter and
use, not just in academic settings, but also in their future roles as
community members and as part of an engaged citizenry within
their communities and schools. In designing such projects, teachers
should consider asking students to write for audiences that are well
known to them, but also encourage them to stretch by asking them
to write to audiences that are more complex and public.
For example, one such assignment might include a 3-4 week
project in which students research their heritage countries, keep
daily journals about their findings, interview family members,
write essays that intertwine memoir with field- and library-based
research, then share those essays through posters, online publica-
tions, and student-led events with stakeholders in and outside their
schools—principals, peers, other teachers, community members,
etc. The goal is to weave low-stakes writing moments (keeping
journals to comment on research, interviews, and memories) with
- more complex genres like essays, research papers, and memoirs, for
an authentic audience that will respond to their work.
Often it is easier for teachers to develop meaningful writing
assignments within larger embedded writing projects because there
is more time. Such projects also encourage students to problem-
solve, think critically, and see writing as meaningful; as a result,
they engage more actively with their writing, and embedded proj-
ects help to move students away from seeing writing as a passive,
fill-in-the-blank activity.
In this model, teachers scaffold an immersive writing project
by creating benchmarks—that is, check-in points and activities
like peer-review, low-stakes writing, multiple drafts, and reflective
writing along the way, moving students gently through a series of
steps toward higher expectations and more meaningful outcomes
with their writing. Dasbender (2014) suggests using a series of
sustained, directed reflective writing prompts throughout writing

projects in order to help build students’ awareness of their reading
and writing processes. The students’ responses also aid the teacher
in understanding how students perceive and understand the writ-
ing activities in the classroom. As a scaffolding strategy, reflective
writing provides teachers with a barometer for understanding how
certain writing activities are helping students to build their skills,
for discovering where additional instructional activities might
be necessary, and for evaluating student progress throughout the
project.
5. Find value in shorter, ungraded writing opportunities.
Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay means not only teaching

advanced and more varied genres to students, but it also means add-
ing more breadth and depth to what and how we teach. It requires
incorporating strategies that help students to use writing to learn
new concepts and develop stronger understandings of how they
think and how they develop their ideas and texts. In the classroom,
adding more range to instruction includes incorporating writing-
to-learn activities. These can be short, ungraded, or informal writ-
ing tasks that help students to think about key concerns or ideas.
They can also include writing prompts that encourage students to
be reflective and help students to identify meta-cognitive under-
standings about their own choices and decisions as writers. In other
words, we can use shorter writing opportunities to build L2 stu-
dents’ writing stamina and encourage them to see writing as an
active, thinking endeavor, not a passive one.
6. Be persistently reflective about the scaffolding employed in

the classroom, and advocate for a school writing culture that
embraces writing as more than a plug-and-play activity.
The material conditions that impact how secondary school teach-

ers approach the teaching of writing will continue to be a chal-
lenge, but it is important that we recognize and advocate for the
importance of writing to our students and administrators. ‘The
push-and-pull of time for writing vs. time for content in U.S.

secondary schools has not disappeared in the past two decades,
and it will probably remain a concern. But there are indications
that the research on devoting more time to writing in schools and
better writing instruction is starting to take hold. For one, ongo-
ing discussions on college readiness in educational forums as well
as more public venues have created an opportunity for teachers,
administrators, and other stakeholders to talk more frankly about
the kinds of writing that students need to experience in order
to be career- and college-ready. These conversations, along with
research that continues to point to conditions that shortchange
writing instruction in schools, have created opportunities for
teachers to advocate for better quality writing instruction, more
training, and more writing time in their classrooms. Organizations
like The National Writing Project (NWP) and National Coun-
cil of Teachers of English (NCTE) have published policy papers
and recommendations on best practices, along with book series
like NCTE’s Principles in Practice, which aims to link research
with detailed, instructional ideas for working with student writ-
ers. In many U.S. secondary schools, administrators are encourag-
ing the development of writing centers, Composition courses for
_ all students that provide the time for teaching writing, and other
school-wide writing initiatives that help establish a culture that
values a critically engaged view of writing and writing well for all
students.
For teachers, there are also opportunities to restructure writing
curricula that emphasize quality writing projects with many of the
features noted above rather than quantity. Without a doubt, many
L2 writers in U.S. secondary schools are not doing enough sus-
tained writing in their classrooms. But the reaction should not be
the addition of numerous five-paragraph essays, which tend not
to achieve the goals we want for our student writers and often
overwhelm teachers. Instead, teachers can consider fewer (two
or three over the course of a semester) thoughtful, meaningful
writing projects, in which they can teach meaningfully about the
various aspects of composition, review, genre, and audience and aid

their students in reaching higher expectations.
Finally, if the goal of scaffolding is to help students move to the
next level as readers and writers, then teachers should have a clear
sense of the writing goals they are trying to help students to reach.
Teachers should speak with their colleagues who teach upper-level
and advanced courses. Ask about the genres that they are working
on with their students. Sit in on a class and observe the kinds of
discussions students in those courses are having about writing and
the kinds of writing-based projects they are completing. Ask to
see sample assignments and student texts, and then use those texts
as targets for your students. Study those samples in the classroom
with your students, and allow students the opportunity to attempt
those assignments or ones that are similar. Teachers and their stu-
dents need to keep moving that goalpost forward.
Concluding Thoughts
Scaffolding is a teaching concept that can aid our students in

reaching higher expectations and mastery. But the five-paragraph
form does not get us or our students to that goal, and we need
to be cognizant of that reality. We should be willing to learn and
implement more adaptive teaching practices for writing. When
secondary teachers do use formulaic writing, they should criti-
cally reflect on how those practices and scaffolds function for stu-
dents. As writing teachers, we need to acknowledge that learning
to write well is a lifelong endeavor. There will always be a new
and complicated writing situation or genre that our students need
to learn. Being reflective means being cognizant of the kinds of
scaffolds we use and sincerely questioning and reflecting upon
the goals and limitations they present for students. To acknowl-
edge that fact means that teachers must take steps to create
more opportunities for L2 student writers to move beyond the
basics.
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Wddittdddtddésdtdddddédddddddldddstddddidgdddsaddsssasdddiiiiddddiidddiididddiitds C h a pte r 6
Transferable Principles
and Processes in
Undergraduate Writing
DANA FERRIS AND HOGAN HAYES
A few years ago, the first author (Dana) was teaching an

advanced Composition class, a requirement for upper-division
- (junior/senior) students at her university. The theme of the class
was rhetorical and genre awareness. To find out more about her ©
students’ prior experiences with genre in college/university-level
writing, she had them, for their first homework assignment, read a
short article called “Unteaching the Five-Paragraph Essay” (Foley,
1989) and provide written short answers to this question: In her
article, Foley argues that the ‘five-paragraph essay” formula taught to
students in school (before college) harms them in a variety of ways. As a
student writer, do you agree with her? Why or why not?
Dana went through her students’ responses and categorized
them according to overall attitude toward the five-paragraph essay
(positive, negative, or mixed) and the reasons/themes seen in their
answers. The responses were fascinating: Of the 41 students in two
116
6: Transferable Principles 117
classes, 28 said that the five-paragraph essay was harmful to stu-

dent writers, five said it was helpful, and eight had a mixed reaction
(they could see both benefits and drawbacks to it). Here are several
representative quotations.
Harmful
Looking back to my writing experiences in junior high and high school, I
think I spent just as much time worrying that my essay followed the five-
paragraph format as I did on the content, for fear that deviating from the
“proper” method would make me seem an incompetent writer. I can recall
how, on a couple occasions, I was forced to remove a strong argument
because it did not fit seamlessly into the flow of my 3 body paragraphs...
I can see how this must have restricted the evolution of my personal writ-
ing style in some way.
Helpful
I was taught the five-paragraph essay in elementary school and still use
it today in college. I’ve also been taught other organizational patterns for
essays but I really do find the basic five paragraphs is always my starting
point. Foley has a point that the formula writing allows students to get
lazy and can deter growth but overall I think she’s overreacting. The for-
mula is only a problem if that’s all the student can do.
Mixed
I disagree with her because like she said it is a formula for writing that
teaches students the basics of writing. I don’t think that it necessarily
harms them, but the repetitiveness of the five-paragraph essay is damag-
ing the creativeness of students. It is an easy way to get an assignment
done when needed, so the harm is mostly affecting the creative expression
of students.
When we identified themes or reasons behind the students’ general

reactions to the article and the homework prompt, there was quite
a range, as shown in Figure 6.1.
The student responses were striking because they cut at the
heart of one of the main arguments in favor of teaching younger
FIGURE 6.1
Themes in Student Writers’ Responses
to the Five-Paragraph Essay
Number of
Theme — Representative Quotation
Blocks “It is an easy way to get an assignment done when needed,
creativity so the harm is mostly affecting the creative expression of
students.”
Did not “Tt was engraved [in our heads] not to deviate from this
prepare us for format, but once in college we were told to ignore what we
college writing were taught. This was difficult since it was the only wayI
expectations knew how to organize an essay.”
Holds “Tt usually seems that I must choose only three examples
students to argue with; however, when I do write ideas flow and
back/limits come to me that can strengthen my argument but I
their idea hesitate to incorporate them into my paper because it
development seems off topic and maybe just a little too much.”
Rigid/artificial “A five paragraph essay is too rigid and limiting for people
to truly express their thoughts. It constantly frustrates
me....”
“Tt feels like a constant hindrance.”
Provides a “T believe it was a great foundation to the beginning of

necessary writing. Students are able to at least start somewhere with
foundation the ‘five-paragraph essay.”
Inhibits “T believe it does take away the ability for students to
critical make connections and to use their imagination because
thinking the formula is very easy and once it is mastered, not much
thought has to go into it. I also think that it doesn’t engage
students in critical thinking. “
Interferes with “T found that I had trouble establishing deeper
coherence connections between different ideas. I also had trouble
with transitioning between ideas as they were usually only
related in a superficial way.”
Punishes “The students who break away from this formula and
students who think outside of the box, but get criticized for doing so is
wont conform when it becomes harmful.”
Allows “When the student unthinkingly quotes three different
students to be arguments for one hypothesis and slaps them together to
lazy make an essay, then the student is not writing to the best
of his ability.”
Allows “The formula provides students with a structure to write
teachers to be essays in a way that the instructor can easily grade them,
lazy but the students aren't really learning anything.”
Boring and “Tt has chained me to a cut and dry technique that follows
demotivating the same guidelines, and has quite frankly caused me to
grow bored while writing.”
students (secondary students, developmental college writers, first-

year Composition students) how to produce a five-paragraph
essay: This form, even if it’s rigid and artificial, will give students
something to build upon in the future when they must undertake
more complex academic writing. It gives them “a place to start.”
But these advanced Composition students, juniors and seniors at a
prestigious university who have nearly finished with their under-
graduate studies, overwhelmingly felt the opposite: Not only did
learning the five-paragraph essay fail to help them develop as
thinkers and writers, it had actually inhibited them from doing so.
These students, who were a few years removed from their high
school and early college instruction, had both the experience and
the distance to judge the effects of this ubiquitous approach to
writing pedagogy on their own progress, and the verdict was clear:
The five-paragraph essay did not “transfer” to more challenging
writing tasks. That notion of transfer was a myth.
This chapter first discusses what the literature says about writ-
ten transfer and why that research predicts that the five-paragraph
essay will fail to achieve its purposes with regard to helping stu-
dents succeed in the future. Then, it presents an alternative class-
room approach that addresses teachers’ and students’ felt needs
for a foundation or place to start in writing instruction and in
approaching complex writing tasks. This approach focuses not
on form or formula (as in the five-paragraph essay) but rather on
transferable principles and processes for successful writing that
can apply to a wide range of academic and professional writing
contexts.
The Research
The term learning transfer describes how knowledge developed

in a learning context impacts subsequent performance in a target
context (Royer, Mestre, & Dufresne, 2005). Knowledge that has a
positive impact on target contexts can be called both durable and
flexible, and that is the kind of knowledge educators want students
to acquire. There are many different ways for knowledge to transfer

across contexts. While considering the durability and flexibility of
knowledge used to compose a five-paragraph essay, four types of
transfer should be understood: similarity transfer, near transfer, far
transfer, and dynamic transfer. .
The concept that students use knowledge from the classroom
in other settings is so central to educational endeavors that most
assume it is a simple and spontaneous process (Perkins & Salomon,
1988). Researchers have renewed their interest in transfer during
the last few decades, however, due in large part to the upheaval of
such assumptions (Brent, 2011). The most influential and infor-
mative challenge to those assumptions arose from a study on anal-
ogous thinking by the cognitive psychologists Gick and Holyoak
(1980). In their study, participants first read a story about a military
problem and its solution. The story demonstrates the concept of
convergence: a large land-based force can be split up to negotiate
difficult terrain so that the entire force can attack a target at the
same time. After reading this story, participants were asked to solve
the Duncker tumor radiation problem, a medical problem involv-
ing an inoperable stomach tumor surrounded by delicate tissue. The
hypothesis being tested was that reading about the analogous mili-
tary problem would improve performance on the Duncker tumor
radiation problem. If participants were not explicitly prompted to
consider the military problem, however, they rarely did so. These ~
results exposed a flaw in pedagogies that assume transfer is easy
and spontaneous.
Many of the assumptions behind the utility of the five-para-
graph essay are undermined by Gick and Holyoak’s research. When
these findings were introduced to the Composition community by
Perkins and Salomon (1988), researchers such as Russell (1995),
Petraglia (1999), and Smit (2004) began to question the transfer-
ability of writing skills, noting the many ways writing demands
change depending on the rhetorical situation. Russell (1995) spe-
cifically questioned the utility of general writing skills instruction
using a graceful and oft-cited analogy in which he compares the
expectations of traditional writing instruction to the expectations

of a hypothetical general ball-handling skills course intended to
teach students to play any and every ball-related sport. It is quickly
obvious that the skills developed, for example, to hit a baseball
with a bat do not transfer to shooting a basketball, kicking a soccer
ball, or driving a golf ball with a club. Russell’s argument is that
discrete skills developed in one context do not transfer automati-
cally to others because features of writing are utilized so differently
from one context to the next that generalizability is difficult if not
impossible.
Pedagogies that assume students will recognize similarities
across contexts expect students to engage in something called
similarity transfer. As a hypothetical example, students who
compose several five-paragraph essays for an American Litera-
ture course will develop an ability to incorporate evidence, such
as quotes and paraphrases from a text, to support their literary
analyses. Those same hypothetical students may later be expected
to incorporate evidence from sources when composing a first-year
essay about, let’s say, the impact of social media on political dis-
course. In successful examples of similarity transfer, the students in
first-year Composition will recognize they are making claims that
require support from a text, a practice that is similar to what they
did in their American Literature course. The example assumes stu-
dents will recognize the similarities despite changes to the types of
evidence valued, how evidence is evaluated, and the way evidence is
incorporated into the new text. Those or other changes across con-
texts often obstruct similarity transfer, because for similarity trans-
fer to be successful, “people must detect the similarity between two
situations, otherwise the knowledge from one situation will not be
applied to the other” (Martin & Schwartz, 2013, p. 449). While
most writing instructors can cite anecdotes showing when students
have made this kind of connection across contexts, research from
educational psychology consistently demonstrates how working
toward similarity transfer is difficult and often frustrated by other
factors (Martin & Schwartz, 2013).
One factor that can frustrate knowledge transfer is the “distance”

across contexts. These distances are distinguished as near and far
transfer (Barnett & Ceci, 2002). Near transfer occurs when there
are fewer differences between the learning and target contexts.
When five-paragraph essays are assigned in two different second-
ary education classes, that is an example of relatively near transfer.
Far transfer occurs when there are more differences between the
learning and target contexts. For example, a case study of upper-
division biology courses demonstrated that students engaging in
the discipline’s writing process needed to understand the relation-
ship between a claim and evidence (Hayes, 2015). Understanding
that relationship was a core learning objective in first-year Com-
position at the same institution. The case study showed how the
relationship between claims and evidence was presented very dif-
ferently in the context of upper-division biology compared to what
students saw in Composition classrooms. In biology courses, the
students worked with discipline-specific claim-evidence structures
on timed writing exams, sometimes composing claims in short
paragraphs using evidence provided in tables and diagrams and
other times providing evidence for claims by composing tables and
diagrams. If students were going to use the knowledge from first-
year Composition, the type of transfer would be far transfer.
Instances of far transfer typically depend “on deliberate mind-
ful abstraction of skill or knowledge from one context for applica- "
tion in another” (Perkins & Salomon, 1988, p. 25). For this kind of
transfer to occur, the learner must recognize the utility of familiar
knowledge, decide that the knowledge is applicable in a new set-
ting, and then repurpose that knowledge to make it appropriate
for the new setting. Perkins and Salomon (2012) term this the
“detect-elect-connect” model of transfer (p. 248). The greater the
distance across contexts, however, the more difficult it becomes
to initiate, because detection becomes increasingly unlikely and
connections become more challenging to make. Many Com-
position theorists have argued the act of writing is subject to so
many cultural, environmental, and social influences that every new
writing context requires a form of far transfer. This has led some
to conclude “no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists
or could exist” (Kent, 1999, p. 1), and that people must learn to
write anew each time they enter an unfamiliar writing context
(Russell, 1995). Nevertheless, researchers agree that transfer of
prior writing knowledge is necessary for successful writing in new
contexts (“Elon Statement on Writing Transfer,” 2016), which has
motivated the development of pedagogies that teach for a type of
transfer that does not depend on a writer’s ability to match con-
cepts across contexts. These pedagogies ask students to consider
concepts that can be used to understand new and unfamiliar writ-
ing situations (e.g., Downs & Wardle, 2007; Smit, 2004; Yancey,
Robertson, & Tacsak, 2014), engaging in a type of transfer that
has been described by Martin and Schwartz (2013) as “dynamic
transfer.”
Dynamic transfer “occurs when people coordinate multiple con-
ceptual components, often through interaction with the environ-
ment, to create an innovation” (Martin & Schwartz, 2013, p. 450).
In cases of dynamic transfer, the coordination of ideas that leads to
new understanding takes time and several trials. ‘The new under-
standings are developed as learners coordinate ideas and materials
while working toward a goal. Dynamic transfer does not require a
learner to realize “this is like that,” as in similarity transfer. Instead,
the learner works to understand how “this goes with that” (Martin
& Schwartz, 2013, p. 453). The process requires time and a set-
ting in which learners can overcome problems through trials and
interactions. This is particularly important when the new problem
is complex or ill-defined. When students are asked to compose
literacy narratives, for instance, they are engaged in a complex task
that includes evaluating biographical evidence through the lens
of literacy. There is only so much a good assignment prompt can
provide in this case because much of the content is tied to the
student’s identity and history. The literacy narrative is designed as
a complex and ill-defined problem. In such situations, there are
many concepts to keep track of and multiple potential solutions; as
such, these situations often require these types of interactions with

the environment:
A. Frame the problem.

= Define purpose and audience.
B. Seek out examples.
= Analyze prior examples of the genre.
C. Distribute some of the cognitive work into learning
materials.
= Compose notes, outlines, annotated bibliographies.
D. Find opportunities to attempt solutions and get feedback.
= Compose drafts and engage in peer review.
The second half of this list of activities, Items C and D, may

lead some to believe that much of the knowledge used to compose
the five-paragraph essay should transfer into other writing situ-
ations—such as the literacy narrative assignment. After all, both
tasks require students to use outlines, sources, and revision. This
belief, however, would be based on assumptions about transfer that
have been undermined in the research. For students to transfer
discrete skills such as outlining, incorporating sources, and revi-
sion, they need to engage in similarity transfer—where they detect
the similarities across different contexts.The ability to detect those’
similarities is sharply reduced, however, as differences between the
two contexts increase, moving the type of transfer from near to far.
This is why one cannot lose sight of Items A and B. The skills
associated with those activities are not discrete. They are abstract
and context-bound: analyze the genre, articulate the purpose, and
define the audience. The genre, purpose, and audience associ-
ated with the five-paragraph essay are very different from those
associated with writing situations in the first-year Composition
classes in the United States, writing in the disciplines, and writ-
ing beyond the university. This growing distance makes it increas-
ingly difficult to engage in similarity transfer when moving from
the context of the five-paragraph essay to later contexts. Instead,
6: Teansferabile Principles 125
writers must abstract concepts such as genre and purpose to rec-

ognize their utility across contexts. Dynamic transfer facilitates
the transformation of prior knowledge required to do this. The
five-paragraph essay, however, is not an effective way to provide
the skills or knowledge associated with genre, purpose, and audi-
ence. It is merely an academic form that students use to display to
writing teachers or testers that they can write a basic expository
essay.
Changes in Practices
In our experience, students don't appear to feel confident about

or empowered by previous writing instruction that trains them
in the five-paragraph essay format. As the research cited and dis-
cussed explains, the only model of transfer that predicts lessons
learned from the five-paragraph essay will be useful in other set-
tings is similarity transfer, and that model does not take differences
across contexts into account. The models of transfer that consider
such differences—far and dynamic—do not predict that lessons
learned by repeatedly producing such a generic, artificial written
form would be accessible or usable for student writers when they
later encounter more specialized writing tasks, whether they be
lab reports, research papers, internship applications, or personal
statements for graduate or professional school, let alone workplace
writing (see Chapters 7 and 9). But if teaching the five-paragraph
essay to L2 writers won't “help them in the future,” what should
EAP and other writing instructors do instead?
A better way to reframe the myth of transfer with regard to
the five-paragraph essay is to examine what is really behind it,
both for teachers and for students. At its heart, when this myth
is defended or stated as fact, it’s because of the belief that writ-
ers need a “foundation” or “a place to start.” Academic and profes-
sional written genres are too complex and context-dependent to
be reduced to any formula, but teachers can provide (1) principles
for what constitutes successful writing and (2) a process for getting
started that can be modeled for students and that will be adaptable
to future writing tasks. The next sections outline what transferable
principles and processes might look like for teachers.
«ww Transferable Principles

Readers may note that some of the principles in Figure 6.2, with
references to a thesis, focus, and a transparent organization, bear
similarities to five-paragraph essay precepts. However, the key dif-
ference is that these are principles, not iron-clad rules. For exam-
ple, an academic or professional text could be purpose- or thesis-
driven but not necessarily include an explicit thesis statement, as
a traditional five-paragraph essay would. As an example, consider
op-ed pieces. The writer’s opinion and purpose for writing can be
clearly discerned, but there might not be one specific sentence that
expresses it. Similarly, signals of organization don't always have to
come from a set list of transitions or topic sentences. They could
come from subheadings or simply from logical ordering of ideas.
Again, one can find many real-world academic and professional
texts in which the text structure is easily discernable, but the orga-
nizational signals are subtle rather than obvious.
Further, the principle of being “economical” means that in real-
world writing, successful writers don't ramble on and on, nor do
they re-state the same point several different ways so that they
FIGURE 6.2
Principles of Successful Academic Writing
Successful academic writing...

" is purpose/thesis-driven
* is clearly focused
= signals its internal organization to the reader
=" is economical
= is well-edited
eeee ae We PEO
Sources: Bean, 2011; Ferris & Ferrando, 2015; Hairston & Keene, 2003.
can generate exactly three points and five paragraphs or meet a

minimum word count. It means that busy real-world readers don’t
want to read long, padded, repetitive prose. They want writers to
get to the point and they want writers to stay focused once they’ve
gotten there. These principles are transferable because though they
are operationalized differently for a range of tasks and genres, they
make sense in general. Thus, it’s best to reinforce principles rather
than specific artifacts such as thesis statements, topic sentences, or
transitions. These principles provide a foundation for both ana-
lyzing authentic genre examples and for planning and evaluating
students’ own work.
««w Transferable Processes

Figure 6.3 outlines a process to help students get started as they
approach the range of writing and communication tasks they will
need in school and in the workplace. Readers will notice that this
pedagogical sequence duplicates the steps previously outlined for
dynamic transfer.
Students—and their teachers—worry that if they don't have
a five-paragraph formula to follow, they'll sit helplessly in front
of a blank piece of paper or computer screen, not knowing where
to start. But there are other ways to start a piece of writing than
trying to generate content to fit into a formula—better and more
interesting ways. The items listed in Figure 6.3 give students some
concrete steps they can take during the prewriting, planning, and
FIGURE 6.3
A Process for Approaching New Writing Tasks
1. Understand the task.

2. Investigate the genre.
3. Consider the target audience.
4. Generate content.
5. Study models.
drafting stages of a writing task. A teacher can model and scaffold

these steps for a broad range of tasks; it’s also possible that these
steps can be taught as transferable strategies that students can use
when they face new writing tasks outside of the EAP or Composi-
tion class. .
A brief example of this process can be seen in an “open let-
ter” assignment used recently for university multilingual writers
(from Ferris & Ferrando, 2015). The students were in the middle
level of three developmental/EAP Reading/Composition courses
for first-year university students. The theme of the course was
“Exploring Generations’—understanding and contrasting char-
acteristics of Millennials, Baby Boomers, etc.—and the open let-
ter assignment focused on millennials in education. Students
could choose from and research one of three related subtopics.
Their final product in the assignment unit would be an open
letter.
To help students approach this unfamiliar task and genre, teach-
ers took them through several steps. First, they were introduced to
the characteristics of the open letter (see Figure 6.4). Next, they
looked at a sample open letter (Kaufman, 2014) that was related
to the broad topic of millennials. They outlined the content of the
open letter (see Figure 6.5), also examining the language used, and
discussed how their open letter, written to a different audience,
FIGURE 6.4
Previewing Genre Characteristics
An open letter is a piece of writing that has these characteristics:
" It brings attention to or clarifies an issue facing a specific population

by explaining the issue in depth.
= It requests a call for action/solution/response (through proposed
solutions).
= It provides support/reasons (using personal experience and /or
primary/secondary sources).
= It is written to a specific audience, but anyone can see it.
= It is formatted like a letter.
Source: Ferris & Ferrando, 2015.
FIGURE 6.5
Open Letter Outlining Activity
Letter Outlining Activity

For this exercise, read “An Open Letter From A Millennial To Society: Stop Blaming
Us For Everything” by Aaron Kaufman. Fill in the outline below; note form is fine.
When you are done, you will discuss your outline with your teacher and classmates.
Introduction
= How does the author get the reader’s attention?
* Why (according to the author) is this an important topic?
= Where is the thesis of the paper?
Body
= What are the major sections of the body? List them.
* What kinds of evidence does the author use to present and support his
information?
. Conclusion
= What are some of the solutions suggested in the conclusion?
# What is the author’s final statement about the significance of the topic?
Language
# What is the overall tone of this letter?
# Where is the author being sarcastic? Serious? Mad?
Your Letter
# While this letter was meant for the general society to read, your letter will
be read by an important administrator at your university.
# What are aspects of this letter (organization, language use, paragraph
development, structure, formatting, use of sources) that you might use for
your letter? Are there any aspects that might not be appropriate for your
audience? Is there anything missing? Write your ideas below.
Source: Ferris & Ferrando, 2015.
might be different from the sample. They went on to research,

draft, and revise their own open letters, submitting them with their
final course portfolios.
This assignment sequence was extremely successful. Besides
modeling the process—considering audience, understanding the
genre, examining models—it also reinforced important academic
reading and writing skills, such as making an argument and using

a range of sources. The next term, using the same subtopics, stu-
dents instead wrote an op-ed piece, again with opportunities to
study models to help them deconstruct this authentic genre.
Another important observation about this assignment was that
the students loved it. They enjoyed having the autonomy of get-
ting to choose a subtopic and research it; they appreciated: the
complexity, which challenged them and built their confidence; and
they liked the fact that they got to learn about and try to imitate a
real-world genre, not simply regurgitate the formula they may have
studied for their SAT® and TOEFL® exams. A doctoral student
did her dissertation research on two sections of this course, and
part of her analysis was looking at how students dealt with this
complex open-letter assignment, which had several intermediate
steps and consumed four of the quarter’s ten weeks. She found that
the students were much more highly motivated and engaged by
this task than anything else they did in the course (Evans, 2017).
The key application of this real-world example is that students
were not given a formula but rather a process for getting started
and moving through the assignment. Students do need approaches
to complex assignments thoughtfully scaffolded for them, but they
do not require a rigid form to imitate.
Concluding Thoughts
As teachers, we knew why we didn’t like the five-paragraph essay

formula. We also thought it was incredibly boring to teach and to
read five-paragraph essays. Students’ voices brought this home for
us in deeper, more poignant ways. As advanced Composition stu-
dents, they could see, well into their undergraduate programs, that
this instruction had failed them in a range of ways. Some were very
frustrated by this, feeling that they should have been much further
along as thinkers and writers than they actually were.
We don't think teachers, whether in high school or college pre-
paratory programs, want to sell their students short, stifle their
confidence, or bore them to tears. They think students “need a

foundation” and that this formula provides them with one. We
agree with the first part—a foundation is good, a “way in” is good.
But the formula is both unnecessary—it doesn't, in fact, transfer
to anything meaningful—and harmful in that it short-circuits
student writers’ ability to think and explore topics and content in
authentic and engaging ways.
Whatever a teacher’s reasons for teaching five-paragraph essays
to their students, they should cross “it will help them in the future”
off the list. It won't. But other ways into writing tasks will help
them and build their confidence.
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Gee LLL LL cccccaAQEA00OQ0O0OO009BB09B009B09EA9DAEEUEZ& C h a pte r 7
Writing in the Interstices:

Assisting Novice
Undergraduates in Analyzing
Authentic Writing Tasks
ANN M. JOHNS
Every time a student sits down to write for us, he [sic] has to invent the
university for the occasion—invent the university . . . or a branch of it like
History or Economics, Anthropology or English. He has to [...] try ona
particular way of Knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding,
and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps |
should say the discourses of our community, since a student must work
within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples
or the development of an argument are both distinct, and even to the
professional, mysterious.
Bartholomae, 1985, p. 134
Though a considerable amount of research needs to

be completed to understand transfer of learning (Ferris & Hayes,
Chapter 6), one point seems clear: successful students must have
the tools to enter a classroom and be able to identify, work with, and
often negotiate the class culture and its assessments. One problem
£33
with the content of most EAP writing classes is that teachers and
students cannot predict precisely what an instructor in a given con-
tent class will devise to assess the students writing. This problem is
even greater if students are in a pre-university course and currently
enrolled in no content classes to which they can refer. Research
tells us that tendencies and norms exist within the disciplines at the
linguistic and discoursal levels (Hyland, 2013; Pessoa 8& Mitchell,
Chapter 8); however, predicting how these norms and tendencies
will be adopted in a writing assignment, if at all, is challenging, as
Bartholomae points out.
At certain points in students’ academic lives, the problem of
determining how they can be prepared for the unpredictability of
writing assignments/prompts in their content classes is particu-
larly intense. This chapter focuses on the two- or three-year gap
between students’ test-heavy secondary school education in the
U.S. and the later periods when students are becoming initiated
into a discipline and its genres. I will refer to this gap period as the
interstices, borrowed from a term defined in the Merriam-Webster
dictionary as “a gap or break in something generally continuous.” It
is agreed by the experts that the interstices is a vexing time in terms
of academic literacy development, during which “there is consider-
able confusion amongst students and writing instructors regarding
the kinds of writing students are [or will be] requiredto produce”
(Nesi & Gardner, 2012, p. 3). |
During the interstices, the first years of college or university
when students may be enrolled in stand-alone EAP classes in pre-
university programs, writing classes (e.g., first-year Composition),
or struggling with their first breadth or disciplinary courses, writ-
ing teachers need to ask: How can we, as academic literacy instruc-
tors, make best use of these students’ time, preparing them to be
real writers rather than the literacy robots that their five-paragraph
essay education may have engendered?
I have been searching for answers to this question for years (see,
e.g., Johns, 1997, 2001, 2008) and have concluded that we somehow
have to make the demands of specific rhetorical situations real to
students in a manner that has immediate effects on their academic
success. Ideally, to achieve this end, writing class students would all
be enrolled, simultaneously, in a single content class during their
7: Writing in the Interstices 135
first semester/term, where we could study that class and its practices
as an academic literacy microcosm; and for fifteen years, my uni-
versity supported this arrangement, which enhanced both students’
motivation and their persistence in college (Johns, 2001). How-
ever, few EAP or Composition teachers have the privilege of co-
teaching with a content instructor, which would enable the writing
class to study the situated realities of producing successful texts in a
content-area classroom.
Now, more typically, my university’s students are scattered dur-
ing the interstices among introductory classes across the disci-
plines, so I have designed “Reading Your Classes” modules in an
attempt to provide the kind of situated immediacy that appears to
be so important for students’ growing maturity as writers. These
modules, embedded in first-year writing classes, consist of:
@ Module 1: Students identify and begin to observe a content

course in which they are currently enrolled, commenting on
professor behavior, lecture content, structure and style, and
other features.
@ =Module 2: Because the syllabus/course outline reveals a
great deal about a class and its instructor, the students
analyze and discuss this text from their selected class,
employing a series of questions adapted from this guide:
https://teaching.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/syllabus_
components.pdf. They record in their calendars the dates
on which tests occur or writing assignments are due and,
in a writing assignment, produce an explanatory email to a
friend who might be considering enrolling in the class.
™ Module 3: They examine the discipline (and department)
in which the course is situated (an internet search) and
hypothesize about how that discipline is realized (or not) in
their class assignments, readings, and lectures, using their
syllabus and assigned readings to guide them.
™ Module 4: They study, role play, and then interact with the
content-class instructor or teaching assistant about issues in
the class, e.g., how they should read the assigned texts, take
notes, or study for the examinations.
@ Module 5: They share with their writing-class peers the

assignments and test questions from their selected class,
which then become central to the writing task activities.
The students reflect after each module—and their written reflec-

tions become the “What I ‘read’ about my class” assignment, one of
the graded elements of my writing course. My purpose here is to
convince readers that taking time to examine classroom materials
and the cultures of their courses is useful not only for the inter-
stices period but beyond.
This chapter focuses on the writing task activities (Module 5)
that have been quite successful and appreciated by students in the
Reading Your Classes sequence, principally because of the imme-
diate feedback (content instructor comments and grades) and the
opportunities for transfer to other classes (see Ferris & Hayes,
Chapter 6; James, 2010). These modules and the related activities
don’t take very much time (20 to 30 minutes biweekly), and can be
inserted into most writing class curricula.
What these modules do, among their other benefits, is remove
students from their dependence upon the five-paragraph essay.
As students complete their situated analyses, they come to realize
fairly quickly that they need to explore a situated writing context
to understand what is required by the tasks assigned. Never in my
experience with using this approach have students found the five-
paragraph essay, unmodified, useful.
The Research
Why should students examine a specific academic classroom and its

literacy demands during the interstices (or any educational) period?
As noted earlier, there may be considerable variation across classes,
even in a course with different instructors that is intended to pres-
ent the same material and develop in students the same attitudes
and skills. On these points, Prior (1995) argued that “[each] aca-
demic discourse and academic environment is complex, constructed
and unfolding” (p. 77). There are reasons for this complexity, of
course, some of which relate to the multiple influences upon course

and task design. In her work entitled “Texts and contextual layers,”
Samraj (2002) reported on a study in which she viewed individual
classroom writing tasks in terms of their situatedness, their “social,
cultural, political, ideological and discursive dimensions” (Coe,
1994, p. 161). Her results, and my informal studies, have shown
that classroom tasks are influenced by individual writers’ engage-
ment, persona, and other factors (as well as the general attitude of
the class members and class atmosphere); individual instructors’
preferences, personalities and quirks; the institution and depart-
ment for which the class is taught; the academic discipline; and,
of course, the instructor’s particular “take” on that discipline, often
influenced by their research, assigned readings, or ideology. There-
fore, if our students are going to come to understand the situated-
ness of tasks assigned, particularly in this interstices period, but
also at other academic levels, if at all possible, we need to capture
their immediate efforts to understand and respond to writing tasks
in their current content classrooms. When this is done, students
come to appreciate the importance of selective use of their prior
knowledge and of task analysis while developing a metalanguage
about writing that can be transferred to many writing experiences,
both in university and elsewhere.
Three research-based arguments can be made, all of which relate
to the immediacy of students’ literacy needs and the importance of
a situated task analysis that is designed to destabilize students’ five-
paragraph-essay writing theories (Johns, 2002) and replace them
with an openness to a content-classroom context and its literacy
practices.
ww, Content instructors’ text naming is often casual,

and their tasks may not reflect the discipline that
the class represents.
Here I draw principally from the most extensive research into

undergraduate writing tasks yet completed in the United States
(Melzer, 2014); however, a broad, detailed study of student writ-
ten responses to academic tasks in U.K. universities has been
completed by Nesi and Gardner (2012), and their conclusions are,

for the most part, similar to Melzer’s.
Though appropriate naming of texts from a genre is helpful
to students (Johns, 2008), authors of both studies found that a
content instructor’s naming of an assigned text is often casual and
open-ended, telling students very little about what is expected in a
written response. It turns out that an essay in many classes can refer
to a number of text types—or any writing that students complete;
similarly, research papers from different classes are “too varied to
classify by formal features, and too classroom-specific to be con-
sidered a type of writing without also analyzing the immediate
social context” (Melzer, 2014, p. 42). Assignments may be vague in
other ways, as well. Nesi and Gardner (2012), when interviewing
university tutors (that is, instructors) in the United Kingdom about
the desirable characteristics of a student’s written response, found
the tutors “spoke of the importance of argument and structure, and
expressed appreciation for clarity and originality, but they could
not provide any detail of how these characteristics could be recog-
nized, or realized in text” (p. 261). These researchers pointed out
that “this [vagueness] is perhaps understandable, as academic writ-
ing skills have traditionally been acquired through prolonged expo-
sure rather than explicit instruction, a process [called] ‘pedagogy
by osmosis” (p. 261). They point out that this “osmosis” view was .
ingrained during a time when traditionally prepared, middle- and
upper-class students attended universities. But the notion breaks
down with a diversified student body, now typical of English-dom-
inant universities throughout the world (see Caplan, Chapter 1).
Additionally, many content classroom writing tasks assigned
during this interstices period, and at other times, as well, are just
that—classroom tasks. They generally require students to work
with sources, data, readings, or lectures from the class but do not
necessarily draw from, or have an immediate resemblance to, the
respected genres of the discipline that the class represents. Thus,
for example, there are essay exams in biology where students list
genus and species features, but their required response does not
resemble a genre that the instructor might write (see Johns, 1991).
Russell (1997) notes that these classroom tasks are not designed to
initiate students into the disciplines, but instead “to operationalize

teaching and learning” (p. 530). What results from these writing
experiences? Unlike what may happen in more advanced classes
(see Chapters 6 and 9), students in the interstices may be misled by
these vague or general assignments and draw unreflexively on their
past five-paragraph writing experiences for guidance.
«ue2, Because short answer examinations are the most

common type of writing that undergraduates are
required to undertake during the interstices, they
need frequent practice analyzing, planning for, and
responding to timed writing tasks.
Among the 2,101 tasks that Melzer (2014) collected from 100
postsecondary institutions of different types across the United
States, by far the most common, one-quarter of the sample, in fact,
was the short-answer response, often misleadingly called an essay,
a section of their timed, in-class examinations. In one out of every
four courses in his extensive sample, a mid-term and final exami-
nation consisting of multiple choice items and sometimes one or
two short answer/essay tasks provided the only assessments stu-
dents were asked to complete for a grade. The majority of the essay
tasks required rote memorization or regurgitation of facts. Here are
two examples:
m Explain the differences between behavioral health and mental

health.
= From my [the professor’s] outline on earthquakes, explain the
“effects” ofearthquakes. (Melzer, 2014, p. 22)
Due to this focus on memorization and regurgitation, Melzer con-

cluded that even faculty across the disciplines who claim that they
value persuasion and exploration grade students principally on
“informative [in-class] tasks like listing, identifying, and explain-
ing” (p. 22), requiring “first order” thinking (p. 35).
In collecting students’ essay questions written under timed con-
ditions over the past 30 years or so, I have found, like Melzer, that
outside of writing courses, the short-answer, timed essay is the most

common type of writing in interstices-level classes—and some-
times beyond. Nesi and Gardner (2012) provide a fine-grained
approach to this issue, demonstrating (not unexpectedly) that
writing tasks become more demanding intellectually as students
progress in the university. However, timed essay examination writ-
ing continues to dominate the classroom assessments throughout
most students’ university undergraduate programs. Unfortunately,
the timed nature of the assessments limits students’ abilities to pre-
pare a mature, well thought-out text (see Chapter 10).
«3, During the interstices, out-of-class assignments

in the content areas are remarkably, and
unpredictably, varied, though somewhat rare.
Generally, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
squeeze the content and argumentation of
these tasks into a five-paragraph essay.
The undergraduate research paper, again a general, pedagogical term,
was the second most common writing type Melzer found in his 2014
study. What these papers often have in common in the interstices
are: (1) they are to be written outside of class; (2) they draw from
data or readings, often selected by the instructor; and (3) they are
organized, in many cases, in either problem-solution or claim-data_
macro-structures (see Carter, 2007; Nesi & Gardner, 2012).
Because our focus here is on demonstrating how training in the
five-paragraph essay does not prepare students for the types of tasks
they are given in their discipline-specific courses, a few examples of
prompts for “research papers” that I have collected from my univer-
sity over the years are shown. Some in this collection of prompts
are remarkably open-ended:
Write a 10-page paper about your culture. (Introduction to Asian

Studies)
Prepare a two-page paper on Act I, Scene I. (British Literature)
Others are more complete and focused, including, in a few cases,

rhetorical features of the context such as in this example:
Illegal international migration between Mexico and the United States has
commanded a great deal of attention from policy makers in both countries. A
sound policy needs to be grounded in an understanding of the magnitude of the
flows as well as the forces that generate this form of migration. In your memo,
you are to assume the role of a policy analyst who is responsible for provid-
ing this information and a discussion of the impacts of this migration on both
countries. Additionally, you are to suggest a plan ofaction for the United States
government to shape its immigration policy towards Mexico as well as justifi-
cation for the policy that you suggest. In addition to lectures and the textbook,
draw upon at least two web-based sources for your text. [Use sources that will
convince your audience!] (Cultural Geography)
The point I have been making is this: the two most common
types of undergraduate writing, the timed, in-class essay and the
research paper, are tasks for which the five-paragraph essay is inap-
propriate. Therefore, a student who attempts a five-paragraph
essay to perform these common undergraduate writing tasks will
not be successful. Instead, they need to have the skills to adapt
to the actual variety of writing assignments they will face in their
classrooms.
Changes in Practice
As informed writing instructors, we need to free students from the

grasp of the five-paragraph essay so that they can respond appro-
priately to the prompts that actually appear in their content class-
room assessments. What can we do?
1. As students begin to analyze writing tasks from content

classes, encourage them to draw selectively from their prior
knowledge, their “schemas,” of written texts.
There seems to be general agreement that drawing from students’

prior knowledge is central to initially engaging and assisting them
to move successfully into a task that they are undertaking (see, e.g.,
Kibler, 2011). In fact, Athanases and de Oliveira (2010) found that
drawing from prior knowledge was even more motivating to diverse
secondary students than providing scaffolding for a task. But how do
we structure classroom activities to jog students’ selective memories
and help them to apply their schematic knowledge appropriately?
The term uptake (see Freadman, 2002; Tardy, 2016) refers to a
person’s prior knowledge brought to a writing task—that is, “the
selection or rejection of previous textual experiences” (Rounsaville,
2012, p. 9). A novice writer’s uptake can result in a five-paragraph-
essay text replicated exactly as it has been taught if the writer ignores
the demands of the task and the content class in which it is situated.
However, this does not imply that students should reject their past
writing history. Instead, they should be encouraged “to sort through
a range of prior experiences, some helpful and some a hindrance” to
prepare for their current task (Nowacek, 2011).
By the late teenage years, students have a variety of writing expe-
riences stored from their past lives (see Rounsaville et al., 2008),
although the five-paragraph essay may be their most common
experience with extended academic writing. Other academic lit-
eracy experiences can include the knowledge of paragraph develop-
ment strategies (or modes), such as comparison/contrast or cause-
and-effect, found in a variety of genres, such as critiques, newspaper
articles, and professional research articles. Or their schemas might
consist of genres such as those mentioned in past research into first-
year college students’ literacy experiences: letters to the editor, song
lyrics, résumés, book reports, or recipes (Rounsaville et al., 2008).
For multilingual writers, intertextual memory is often quite
rich; therefore, they should be encouraged to selectively “translate”
from the prior knowledge in their first languages as they respond
to texts in English. Students who have written or read texts in
genres that cross international boundaries, such as an editorial or

a book review, can be asked to compare the conventions and con-
texts of these genres with those of the same genres in English (see
also Chapter 3). During my overseas workshops, I have encouraged
teachers to embark on this “textual translation’ as they explore tasks
in English, using the questions in Appendix 7A to investigate both
the contexts and the internal linguistic features of text exemplars
in two languages. From all appearances, the workshop participants
benefit from the analyses and will be attempting to approach their
pedagogy differently as a result.
In addition to book reviews and editorials, participants in my
workshops have completed in-depth comparisons in L1 and L2
of the contexts and conventions of “disaster scripts,” news reports
of plane crashes and natural disasters, as well as fables, abstracts,
and research articles in the disciplines. It seems clear, then, that
prior knowledge of texts can be useful for both uptake and genre
analysis.
2. Provide multiple opportunities for students to practice

analyzing and responding to timed writing tasks. If possible,
involve students by asking them to bring sample writing
assignments and test prompts from other classes to their
writing class. Otherwise, collect examples online, from faculty
on your campus, or from the Melzer collection (2014).
Ask students to work in pairs or groups to answer two questions

about these prompts from timed writing tests:
@ =What am I to doas a writer (e.g., explain, describe, list,

classify)?
@ With what content must I be doing these actions?
Often prompts have two or more such doing/content sequences,

so students should be warned to respond to them both. Figure 7.1
is an example of a two-part prompt and the grid that the students
complete in pairs or groups as they prepare their analysis.
FIGURE 7.1
Sample Prompt for an Introduction to Sociology
(Timed Writing Task)
Identify and give an example of each offour alternative solutions available in

cases offamily conflict.
Identify Four alternative solutions to family conflict
Give examples of Four alternative solutions to family conflict
The do words, which I call writing prompt directives, are central

to the successful response to prompts, so special emphasis is given
to them, thus building the students’ academic language repertoire
while they complete their analyses.
Prompt directives vary. Some require quite short, simple
responses (e.g., define, list); some require a visual (e.g., outline, por-
tray); some require integrating two or more experiences, texts, or
topics (e.g., compare and/or contrast, synthesize); and others require
critique or interpretation. Some may have a vague directive (e.g.,
describe, explain), which does not tell the students much about what
they should do.
How a writing instructor organizes the teaching of these direc-
tives will depend upon the needs and levels of the students and, of
course, the availability of in-class prompts. The students, acting
as literacy researchers (Johns, 1997), make interesting discoveries.
For example, here is a prompt that “Luc,” a bilingual Biology stu-
dent, found to be typical in the first-semester introductory classes
in his major, requiring a response quite different from those in his
ESL writing classes (Johns, 1991):
me Explain the Kingdom Monera and note its importance to
other organisms.
@ Diagram and discuss the taxonomy ofthe squid.
Luc brought the prompt to our writing class, and students worked
in groups to analyze it, using Figure 7.1. The focus, of course, was
on the directives, particularly a discussion of what noze and discuss

might mean for this task. Luc then completed his response to the
prompt for his peers and later for his biology instructor in an essay
examination. However, before he completed his response, he asked
the instructor what no¢e and discuss mean—that is, what the writer
is required to do.
3. Provide multiple and varied opportunities for students to

analyze and respond to prompts for out-of-class assignments.
Out-of-class assignments, though considerably less common than

in-class, timed essays (Melzer, 2014), provide opportunities for
richer text and context analyses than do timed essays. A list of
vetted questions for analyzing take-home writing assignments,
research papers, or other tasks the students are to respond to out-
side of their classes can be found in Johns (2007) (see Appendix
7A). These tasks may be more interesting since context and social
action can be considered, so issues of audience, writer role, and
situation are included in this list of questions. I have used this tool
for many years with a considerable variety of authentic take-home
prompts, and my students are grateful for the continuing practice
in prompt analysis. However, it is probably true that at this point,
the questions need to be expanded or revised to delve more thor-
oughly into the issue of genre and context. Tardy’s Beyond Conven-
tion (2016) provides questions that could be added, as they focus
on context analysis, assisting students to make discoveries about
the community (or individual) for whom they are writing and the
possibilities for innovation.
Concluding Thoughts
There are no periods in students’ writing lives that are more

appropriate for developing rhetorical flexibility and escaping the
five-paragraph essay than the first years of university. Writing
or introductory content classes are the perfect places to enhance
students’ awareness of authentic writing tasks while improving
their abilities for task analysis. This an important opportunity for

teachers, as well.
Reflections on student experiences from my Reading a Class
sessions have indicated that after considerable practice, students
are able to develop successful approaches to the analyses of situ-
ated literacy assessments: short answer tasks (essay questions) and
extended take-home tasks. They also discover that it would be self-
defeating for them to import the five-paragraph essay into these
writing situations. Rather than providing a security blanket for
writing of all types, this form-based text impedes student engage-
ment with the varied tasks they will confront in the university and
beyond. Instead, they should be encouraged to draw selectively
from previous textual experiences, gather knowledge of the current
writing context, and use the techniques described here to explore
and respond to authentic tasks.
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Appendix 7A
Analyzing a Prompt for a Take-Home,
Process-Based Writing Assignment
Questions about the context for writing
Audience: Who is the audience (or what are the audiences) for this paper?
Only the instructor, or is another audience specified? What are the
concerns, interests, or values of this audience? Note: The course lectures,
readings, and the syllabus objectives may reveal this information.
2. Context: In addition to the immediate context, such as the course, is another
context mentioned in the prompt, such as place of publication? If so, how
will that context influence your choices?
3. Writer's role: What “persona” is the writer to take on? A student in the
class—or someone else? What does this persona say about your knowledge
of the subject or your point of view—or about the language register you are
to employ?
Purpose(s): What does the prompt tell you about your purposes as writer
as you respond? Are you to inform? Make an argument? Tell a story? Or
are you to combine several purposes, such as persuade and tell a story or
compare/contrast and analyze?
Questions about the paper itself

5. Genre: In what genre is the text to be written? That is, what is the text
called? A proposal? A memo? An essay? A research paper? (And if it’s an
essay or research paper, what does that mean to the instructor?) Ask some
questions—and request one or more examples of good writing in this genre.
6. Paper organization: How should the paper be organized? What should
its structure be—and why? Is this the way the papers in the discipline
represented are structured?
7. Sources: What kinds of sources, or data, are acceptable? How many sources
are required? What role should the sources play in the text?
8. Length: How long should the paper be? Are there minimum and maximum
lengths?
9. Referencing style: APA, MLA, a style unique to a specific discipline?
Questions about evaluation

10. Rubric: How will the paper be graded? What features of the paper are most
important? Is there a penalty for lateness?
Wc ecddddecdeeeeeccecdeecdeccdecestcecdeecte C h a pte r 8
Preparing Students to Write

in the Disciplines
SILVIA PESSOA AND THOMAS D. MITCHELL
University writing varies significantly, both within and

across disciplines. This variety challenges EAP teachers who want
to prepare students for rhetorical situations they will encounter.
-Just as teachers of one or two courses cannot completely cover every
type of writing that will be assigned in undergraduate coursework,
in this chapter, neither can we. So, what can we do, given that the
chapters in this volume have shown that the five-paragraph essay
is inadequate?
Along with others in this volume, we argue that writing teachers
should prepare students to interrogate assignment expectations by
trying to determine the purpose and organization of the text they
are to produce and soliciting sample texts from their professors.
Johns’s questions for analyzing writing assignments (Chapter 7)
provide a strong starting point, but as she notes, “It is probably true
that at this point, the questions need to be expanded or revised to
delve more thoroughly into the issue of genre and context” (p. 145).
Going a step further, our chapter focuses on preparing students
150
8: Preparing to Write in the Disciplines 151
to unpack the language necessary to meet genre and assignment

expectations.
We elaborate on two strategies that can be useful to students
across many of the rhetorical situations they will encounter in their
disciplinary writing. First, students need to be able to recognize
when they are being asked to merely demonstrate their compre-
hension of class material, and when they are being asked to modify
class material for their own purposes as writers. To help students
recognize this difference, we unpack three language patterns that
are common in lots of disciplinary writing: description, analysis,
and argument. Unpacking the particular language features of these
patterns can help students determine when they are being asked to
describe, when they are being asked to analyze or argue, and when
they need to use these language patterns in combination (i.e., use
description in the service of analysis, and/or analysis in the ser-
vice of argument). Second, students need to be able to recognize
disciplinary frameworks—the analytical lenses that are particular
to each discipline—and understand that all disciplines have them.
Disciplinary frameworks are important for responding to rhetorical
situations that require analysis or argument; if students are aware
of disciplinary frameworks and know how to use them in writing,
students will be better prepared for diverse writing expectations
across disciplines.
The Research
Writing research shows that students engage in a variety of genres

across the disciplines, genres that differ substantially from the five-
paragraph essay. Thus, as argued by Ferris and Hedgcock (2005),
“The five-paragraph essay focuses on arbitrarily defined compo-
nents (e.g., ‘introduction,’ ‘body,’ ‘conclusion’) that do not provide
developing writers with the genre awareness they need to read and
produce authentic texts” (p. 132). This is because, unlike the five-
paragraph essay, “disciplinary styles are not just frames or shells
into which content can be cast, but habits of thought and com-
munication grounded in the objectives, values and world view of
each discipline” (Linton, Madigan, & Johnson, 1994, p. 65). Such
“habits of thought and communication’ are often realized through
particular language choices in texts with organization that is far
more complex than the five-paragraph essay.
As explained by Johns in Chapter 7, large-scale studies of writ-
ing across the curriculum demonstrate the diversity of genres that
are assigned to undergraduate students (e.g., Melzer, 2014; Nesi
& Gardner, 2012) and the complexity of writing expectations
that students face. These studies reveal that within a single dis-
cipline, sometimes students are expected to respond with peda-
gogical genres that primarily target subject matter comprehension
(e.g., short exercises, problem questions, essays), while other times
they are expected to write (apprentice or professional) disciplinary
genres that aim to enculturate students into disciplinary ways of
thinking and writing. Research also shows that the line between
pedagogical and disciplinary genres is not always clear: on the one
hand, students may be assigned to write a case analysis in an Infor-
mation Systems course in which they are expected to enact the role
of a student and the role of a mock professional within the same
text (Miller & Pessoa, 2016); on the other hand, students may be
“evaluated by some of the same implicit criteria that inform their
instructors’ own community-oriented genre practices” (Lancaster,
2012, p. 10) even when they are ostensibly assigned pedagogical
genres with little or no instruction about advanced disciplinary
literacy practices. Such community-oriented genre practices that
vary across disciplines include: rhetorical moves, citation, formulaic
language, metadiscourse, hedging, and evaluation (for an overview,
see Hyland, 2006).
To understand these disciplinary literacy practices, studies of
university writing in specific disciplines provide further details
of the diversity of writing assignments that students encounter
across—and within—disciplines. In the humanities, students are
often asked to write an “essay,” yet this is an underspecified term
that could imply a wide variety of expectations and require different
kinds of language resources to respond effectively. For example,

in History, students may be asked to write an explanation of the
causes of historical events, organized by cause-and-effect relation-
ships (Coffin, 2006). They may also be asked to write an argu-
ment that requires the incorporation of complex interrelation-
ships among ideas, evaluation of information and perspectives, and
attention to the possibility of multiple interpretations of a histori-
cal event using interpersonal language (Coffin, 2006). Although
both assignments may be called an essay, the expected responses
differ in their purpose (to explain vs. to argue), in how the infor-
mation is presented and organized, and in the language resources
needed to meet genre expectations. Similar to History, disciplines
such as Political Science and Philosophy often require argumen-
tative essays that are thesis-driven, but what is judged as effec-
tive language use differs for each discipline. In an Economics essay
assignment, students may actually respond with texts that closely
resemble policy proposals, beginning with an executive summary,
followed by an economic analysis of a case, and ending with rec-
ommendations (Lancaster, 2016). Taken together, these studies
illustrate some of the variation in the writing that students do in
the humanities. They show how different the expectations for an
“essay” may be within and across disciplines and how much more
complex than the five-paragraph essay this writing can be.
In the Natural Sciences and Engineering, students often pro-
duce laboratory reports, research proposals, and research reports
(Danielewicz, Jack, Singer, Stockwell, & Guest Pryal, n.d.; Glenn
& Gray, 2017). These genres require students to investigate a ques-
tion or hypothesis through experiments and observations and then
draw conclusions based on the research data. In a laboratory report,
the writer is expected to explain the purpose of the research, explain
the procedures followed to conduct an experiment, and present and
discuss the results obtained. In a research proposal, the writer is to
justify the need to study a specific problem and explain in detail how
the study should be conducted. Engineering students are asked to
write manuals—a genre requiring the writer to effectively instruct
someone how to operate a device or operate a system. These genres
in Natural Sciences and Engineering contrast sharply with ones

that require an overarching thesis sometimes supported by second-
ary sources, as required in the five-paragraph essay.
Students in Business and related fields also produce genres that
help them develop their own disciplinary identity (Zhu, 2004).
These include case analysis, business reports, business plans, design
projects, user manuals, business letters, and memos. Many of these
genres, such as the case analysis or the business plan, are problem-
solution texts, asking students to address real-world problems by
analyzing the situation, identifying obstacles, proposing recom-
mendations for action, and justifying their recommendations with
business solutions. This is important because of the high-stakes
nature of business plans: the absence of appropriate genre features
could, in the case of classroom writing, severely impact students’
grades, or, in the real world, decrease the likelihood of successfully
soliciting investment.
Clearly, undergraduate students encounter a variety of complex
genres. These genres require particular organizational modes and
language resources, ones that the five-paragraph essay does not
prepare students for. Despite the diversity of disciplinary writing
expectations, what is prominent across the disciplines is the need
for students to engage in analysis and argumentation. Thus, it is
important to unpack the language resources needed to accomplish
these purposes. By calling students’ attention to these resources, we
can prepare them for the variety of rhetorical situations they will
encounter.
Changes in Practice
Based on challenges with disciplinary writing we have observed in

our research, we think it is important to help students first consider
the pedagogical goals of an assignment. One of the most com-
mon ways we have seen students fail to meet assignment expec-
tations is by thinking that the instructor is interested in seeing
that they understood the material (knowledge display) in assign-
ments where they are actually asked to analyze and restructure
the material for their own purposes as a writer (knowledge

transformation). Thus, as a starting point, students should ask:
is the point of this assignment knowledge display, or is the point
of this assignment knowledge transformation (cf. Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1987; Young & Leinhardt, 1998). Once we understand
the expectations of the assignment, what kinds of language are
necessary to meet these expectations?
Knowledge display involves description, while knowledge trans-
formation requires analysis and argument (Humphrey & Econo-
mou, 2015).' When students use description, they are representing
knowledge from the discipline, the reading(s) in a course, or gen-
eral common knowledge as factual information. Such representa-
tions can be organized with a focus on entities (i.e., people, things,
and qualities) or events (as a narrative that unfolds in time). For
example, in a Biology text describing fungal infections of human
beings, a student may write: “Fungal infections of human beings
are often localized to the skin or lungs, although they might be
systemic. Infections involving the central nervous system, bones,
joints, or lymph nodes are distinctly less common” (Humphrey &
Economou, 2015, p. 41). This descriptive text is organized with a
focus on entities: fungal infections, skins, lungs, nervous system,
bones, joints, and lymph nodes. In an Information Systems course,
as part of a larger assignment, students may need to read a business
case and then describe the problems the company faced, organiz-
ing the description chronologically: In the early 1980s, the company
first started to experience problems. In 1985....
Knowledge transformation, on the other hand, requires analysis.
When students analyze, they are reorganizing information in some
original way for the purposes of the text, often by applying a disci-
plinary framework to a case or an example (Humphrey & Econo-
mou, 2015). A disciplinary framework may be thought of as a dis-
cipline’s agreed-upon classificatory and compositional schemes, or,
in other words, its analytical lenses. Analytical writing is organized
1 Our discussion of description, analysis, and argument draws directly on the Onion Model pro-
posed by Humphrey and Economou (2015). Their model uses the label persuasion rather than
argument. Their model also includes critique. Since undergraduate writing requires limited use
of critique, we focus on the first three discourse patterns.
by the elements of the disciplinary framework—that is, sentences

and paragraphs are often grouped together based on the relevant
components of the framework. Table 8.1 shows examples of disci-
plinary frameworks. In an English writing class, students may be
asked to analyze an author’s argument using the Toulmin model to
determine claims, grounds, and warrants. In a History class, stu-
dents may be asked to analyze the causes of World War II using
an explanation of historical events framework to examine multiple
and overlapping causes. In an Organizational Behavior class, stu-
dents may be asked to analyze a company’s problems by applying
the leadership framework to consider the effects of different lead-
ership styles. In an Information Systems course, students may be
asked to analyze a company’s strategic value through the lens of
Porter’s Five Forces. In a Design course, students may be asked
to analyze an object with the useful/usable/desirable framework.
In each of these examples, the student needs to parse the relevant
details from the source material and determine how they relate to
the elements of the disciplinary framework.
When students write argumentatively, on the other hand, they
make an explicit evaluation of or claim about ideas in the disci-
pline. Argumentative writing usually unfolds using a claim-reasons
framework. The writer takes a position and provides reasons to
support it, maintaining a consistent evaluative stance throughout
and using interpersonal resources to reference outside voices and
to guide the reader towards the position. While analytical writing
is organized around the disciplinary framework, argument requires
the author to generate a claims-reasons framework that structures
the text.
In advanced disciplinary writing, these discourse patterns—
description, analysis, and argument—are not discrete and rarely
happen in isolation. While some courses, particularly introductory
ones, may focus more on knowledge display (in short-answer writ-
ing assignments), much of the writing that students do as they prog-
ress at the university level requires them to transform knowledge
for their purposes as writers of apprentice or professional genres.
This requires that they analyze examples by applying a disciplinary
TABLE 8.1
Examples of Disciplinary Frameworks in Selected Fields
Disciplinary
Discipline Frameworks Elements of the Frameworks
English/ Toulmin’s Argument claims, reasons, warrants, rebuttal, backing
Composition Model
Stasis Theory existence, definition, value, cause, action

Processes of Historical change and continuity; gradual and sudden
Change changes; political, economical, social, and
cultural changes
Explanation of multiple causes, types of causes, relationships

Historical Events between causes, long-term and immediate
consequences
Information Innovation process, product, disruptive, incremental,

Systems complementary, architectural
Porter’s Five Forces competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer
power, threat of substitution, threat of new
entry
Business Feasibility technical, economic, operational/
Administration organizational, schedule, legal/cultural
Organizational | Situational Leadership | directing, coaching, supporting, delegating

Model
Organizational Change freezing, moving, refreezing

Capital social, economic, cultural, linguistic
Assimilation upward, downward, segmented

Psychology Psychoanalysis transference, repetition compulsion, fixation,
cathexis, regression, identification with the
aggressor, and loss of possession of self
Positive Organizational positive individual attributes, positive
Psychology emotions, strengths and virtues, positive
relationships, positive human resource
practices, positive organizational processes,
positive leadership and change
Biology Life kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus,
species
Mechanisms of Fungal recognized mechanisms (infection, allergy,

Disease toxicity) and contested mechanisms (presence
of any mold)
Visual Design Elements | font, color, visual hierarchy, symbols,

alignment, proximity
User Experience useful, usable, desirable

framework and/or formulate an argument and defend it with evi-

dence. To do so, students often need to strategically blend descrip-
tion with analytical and argumentative language. However, many
students lack awareness or control of these skills, and faculty across
the disciplines often do not make them explicit. As previously
noted, a recurrent problem in disciplinary writing is that students
think that demonstrating their comprehension of the material is
sufficient to successfully complete an assignment (Humphrey &
Dreyfus, 2012; Miller & Pessoa, 2016). Thus, they rely predomi-
nantly on descriptive language and overlook the assignment’s
invitations to analyze by applying a disciplinary framework or to
argue by making and supporting a claim. In other words, students
think knowledge display is sufficient when knowledge transforma-
tion is expected and therefore may not meet genre or assignment
expectations. When analysis or argument is expected, descrip-
tion that is not clearly purposeful—neither part of a disciplinary
framework nor connected to a claim—is typically evaluated nega-
tively by instructors (Humphrey & Economou, 2015). Thus, it is
important to make students (and faculty) aware when and how to
describe, analyze, or argue in order to successfully accomplish the
purpose(s) of a text. In doing so, we also help students know what
. to do if their writing is judged as “too descriptive” or “not analytical
enough.”
Armed with knowledge of the language features and organiza-
tional modes of description, analysis, and argument, plus a con-
ceptual awareness of disciplinary frameworks, we open up new
opportunities to interrogate assignments and model texts with our
students. We can begin by having our students ask:
™ Does the assignment primarily call for knowledge display

or knowledge transformation?
@ Ifthe latter, what disciplinary framework will I need to
apply in my analysis?
™ Am I being asked to use analysis to support an evaluation
or claim?
Once we interrogate the prompt, we can analyze sample texts and

ask this question:
m ==What are the parts of the assignment, and do I need to
describe, analyze, and/or argue to effectively write each part?
For example, asking these questions of a business proposal assign-

ment would show that the main purpose is to persuade funders for
the need of a business in order to solve a real-world problem or to fill
a gap in the market. Thus, the student writer will argue the impor-
tance and urgency of the business idea. But in doing so, the student
will have to show their analysis of the market, using, for example, the
feasibility framework (see Table 8.1). The student will also have to
describe the vision and mission of the proposed business, its goals, the
team that will make the business idea come to life, the timeframe for
the implementation of the business, and the finances.
Table 8.2 shows examples of prompts/questions that invite
description, analysis, or argument. We underline the words that
may invite one of these three language patterns. At times, students
may be asked to describe, analyze, and argue within a single ques-
tion. Table 8.3 shows a sample question set from a case analysis in
an Information Systems class that invites the student to respond
with multiple discourse patterns.
Being able to recognize rhetorical situations that call for descrip-
tion, analysis, or argument is a challenge, and thus far we have only
provided a brief overview of how these language patterns might
operate in student writing across the disciplines. In the next sec-
tions, we further unpack these language patterns that are neces-
sary to engage in knowledge display or knowledge transformation
and meet genre and assignment expectations in two distinct fields:
History and Information Systems. In these closer examinations,
we show how description and analysis function to advance argu-
ments in each discipline. We illustrate how faculty can use this
meta-awareness of language patterns to successfully scaffold stu-
dent learning beyond the five-paragraph essay to a more accurate
understanding of disciplinary writing expectations.
CHANGING PRACTICES
TABLE 8.2
Examples of Prompts/Questions That Invite Description,
Analysis, or Argument
1. According to . Analyze the case 1. compelling

How
the author, what using the concept of do you find the
happened when the innovation. What kinds author’s evidence ©
four disease pools of innovation did the that migration was
started to converge? company implement? slowed by ecological
. Describe your . Apply the leadership factors?
experience visiting framework to the TV . To what extent can
the museum in detail episode you watched. noise be overcome
with a focus on the What characteristics of through good
use of, availability, and a good leader does the communication
access to technology. main character in the design? Support
. What went wrong TV show exhibit in the your argument
when the company episode? with two or more
attempted to grow? . Based on your analysis examples of visual
How did it recover? of the case, what is a communication and
. What problems main concept from analyze their design
did the company organization behavior elements (e.g.,
face with its that emerges from symbols, typography,
decentralization of the case and what are visual hierarchy)
the IT Department? 2-3 additional related to evaluate their
What structure was concepts? Use evidence effectiveness in
ultimately adopted? from the case to overcoming noise.
support your analysis. . How successful
. What were the main was the company’s
causes of World War II? implementation of
innovation?
#«w Description, Analysis, and Argument in History
This section presents three texts—a description, an analysis, and

an argument—that are based on student responses” to prompts in
a university History classroom (see Appendix 8A). The purpose of
showing these three texts independently is to, first, clearly unpack
the features of each discourse pattern and demonstrate how the
analysis incorporates description and the argument incorporates
* To avoid issues with obtaining permissions, we drafted these texts using the same language
features that we have observed in real student responses in this class.
TABLE 8.3
Sample Question from an Information Systems
Course Case Analysis Assignment
How to
Respond
What is mobile payment? How has mobile payment Description

evolved over time?
Research, identify, and explain four critical challenges
Analysis
facing the mobile payment industry.
For each challenge, identify and justify ways in which
Information Systems could provide an innovative solution. Argument
analysis; second, by basing our examples on writing from a class

where the professor expects students to use a structure resembling
the five-paragraph essay, we highlight how the language resources
that are important to “writing like an expert historian” are not cap-
tured by this structure without an awareness of the language of
argument and the ability to read the prompts effectively, a student
assigned to write an “essay” in response to these prompts might
respond with description or analysis when argument is expected.
In the History account (descriptive text in Appendix 8A), the
writer organizes the text by time, thereby limiting the portrayal of
history to a chronological sequence (e.g., Before the Christian era;
During the Christian era). The events are described using the sim-
ple past tense with no modality, suggesting the writer is presenting
them as factual. Similar to the explanation, the writer does explore
some cause-and-effect relationships (e.g., caused; increased); how-
ever, in this case, these relationships are constrained by the chro-
nology of events, and therefore multiple simultaneous or overlap-
ping causes or effects cannot be represented. This text also makes
frequent use of relationships of addition (e.g., also; in addition),
which is typical of the discourse pattern of description. Figure 8.1
shows the History descriptive text annotated for these features.
Because the explanation is answering the prompt, “How did dis-
ease influence culture?” the response is an analysis of events through
a lens (disciplinary framework) that focuses on multiple effects of a
FIGURE 8.1
Descriptive Text in History Annotated
History Account (descriptive language):

Prompt: What happened when the four divergent diseases pools began to mix at the beginning of
the Christian era?
| Time Marker At the beginning of Christian era,|there four divergent

>
, ee Hed 5
disease pools. [This led
led to
to|the possibility of more infections as a
result of communication over regions through trade practice.
Before the Christian era] epidemic diseases — frequent

deaths in Greece and contributed to Athenians’ failed attempt
—> | Addition
to conquer Sparta (Also China and Mediterranean|had different
epidemics like yellow fever and malaria. The condition of [cae
warm climate in Indialincreascdltiie infectious diseases.
7
; 5 : > { Addition
In addition. India{had smallpox infection at that time. Before
>
the Christian era, poe eset movg between these regions.
Infections only spread across the regions in exceptional cases.
During the Christian era) eradcleonsedlene spread of disease

:
when people from China and India(went}to the
Mediterranean...
historical phenomenon (Appendix 8A). The writer parsed relevant

details from the source text, then grouped and categorized them
using abstract nouns (e.g., social and class formations and relations)
to represent the effects, and fronted these abstract nouns in topic
sentences. Thus, the text is structured by these effects and charac-
terized by the cause-and-effect relationships that are necessary to
elaborate them (evident in the verbs and connectives, e.g., contrib-
uted to; as a result). The verbs are mostly in the simple past tense,
without modality, indicating that the writer is presenting these his-
torical effects as factual. The writer uses description to unpack the
concrete details of the effects, but these descriptions are in service
of the analysis (e.g., For example, in India; Farmers who were work-
ing in the fields). The language resources in this History analytical
text are annotated in Figure 8.2.
To understand the difference between analysis and argument—
and how analysis can be used in support of an argument—it may
FIGURE 8.2
Analytical Text in History Annotated
History Explanation (analytical language):

Prompt: How did disease influence culture?
->(Cau)
Disease{influenced| culture in three ways. It shaped
Effects) social class formations and relations] religious beliefs,]and the
Abstract Noun Groups
overall survival of a culture in the face of foreign invasion.
>| Past Tense
One way that disease influenced culturelwas)b the

Abstract Noun Groups
formation of social classes|and how the classes related|to each
C ause
other.
For example, in India, disease contributed to the formation of Unpacking
the caste system which led to an increased gap between the

farmer peasants and the upper-class rulers, religious figures,
and landlords.
Farmers who were working in the fields got infectious diseases

|
and parasites. |
they were classified as e g
“untouchables” to keep the higher classes from getting these z
diseases.
Another effect of disease on culture the shaping of
religious beliefs... Abstract Noun Groups
be helpful to keep the explanation in mind as we consider the argu-

ment. In the argument text in Appendix 8A, to take up the invita-
tion to evaluate (to what degree?), the writer must take a position
(e.g., Disease influences culture strongly, somewhat, rarely, etc.). To
effectively take a position and provide reasons for it, the writer
needs to structure the text with a claim-reasons framework. So
where does the analysis come in? To support the position taken in
response to the prompt (Disease influenced culture significantly), the
writer must do the same type of analytical work as the explana-
tion, but in this case, that analytical work needs to be embedded
within the claims-reasons framework. The writer uses interper-
sonal resources to bring in the outside voice of the source text (e.g.,
According to McNeill), explicitly articulate how the selected evidence
works in support of the claim (e.g., this shows), and attend to the
possibility of readers who might not immediately agree with the fit
between claim and evidence (e.g., Although it is possible... McNeill
FIGURE 8.3
Argumentative Text in History Annotated
History Argument (argumentative language):

Prompt: To what extent did disease influence culture?
Based on my reading of McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples,
Claim it is clear that disease influenced culture significantly) because
Beacons
it shaped and Abstract Nouns
the[overall survival of a culture in the face of foreign invasion.
fear
The influence cere
of disease on culture may
meeebe seen by considering its role
oe in
fear
the formation social classes
cere and how the classes
meeerelated to each other. oe Integrate evidence
from source text
For example, in India, MeNeill{provides
[provides evidence
evidence indicating
evidence indicating
indicating how disease played a
(_Cause _]
role in the formation of the caste system and{increased)the gap between the farmer
peasants and the upper-class rulers, religious figures, and landlords.

———* | Integrate evidence
According to McNeill,|“the caste organization in Indian society may have partly from source text
been a response to the kind of epidemiological standoff that arose when intrusive
Aryans... encountered ‘forest folk’ who had acquired tolerances for formidable local
> Connect evidence
infections” (p. 110). that the caste system may have been a strategy to to claim
{keep theupperclass away from the farmers who were more likely to be immune to
diseases that would harm the upper class. Thus, the peasants were classified as
.
“untouchables” to{keep]the higher classes from getting these diseases.
Although it is possible that there were other contributing factors to the formation of a
a
the caste system,
[McNeill
McNeillprovides
providesstrong
strongevidence
evidence that
that disease
disease shapedcultureinthis
in this way.
way. [Rebuttal ]
-> |Abstract Noun

The influence of disease on{religious beliefs}is particularly noteworthy(because)these
Reasoning
effects can be observed in diverse religions across several countries....
provides strong evidence).'The writer uses evaluations consistently

and returns to them repeatedly (e.g., significant; strong; noteworthy)
to keep the reader focused how the evidence relates to the overall
evaluative position. Thus, while the explanation and the argument
provide very similar information from the source text, the argu-
ment presents the analysis in support of a claim and uses language
that reflects the purpose of guiding a (potentially resistant) reader
to the evaluative position, rather than taking the historical infor-
mation as factual. Figure 8.3 shows the History argumentative text
annotated for the language features of argumentation.
«Description, Analysis, and Argument in Information

Systems
This section also presents examples from three texts, but they are
from the case analysis genre in the discipline of Information Sys-
tems. In unpacking the language of description, analysis, and argu-
ment in these texts, we illustrate how similar discourse patterns are
important in two substantially different genres and disciplines (His-
tory and Information Systems). We also provide a more detailed
look at the process of analysis that precedes analytical writing, and
the process of incorporating analysis into argumentative writing.
Appendix 8B includes excerpts from the three texts: a descrip-
tive text, an analytical text, and an argumentative text. The three
examples are based on responses to case analysis assignments that
we have been scaffolding in two courses (one first-year and one
upper-level) across various semesters. In both classes, the expecta-
tions for a case analysis are different. In one class, students answer
discrete questions that call for description, analysis, and/or argu-
ment (in isolation or combination). In the other class, students are
expected to write in an apprentice case-analysis genre that includes
the following parts: an introduction, situation analysis, analysis
using disciplinary frameworks, and recommendations.
In the first text in Appendix 8B, the writer presents informa-
tion as factual, interpreting the assignment as an invitation to dis-
play knowledge of the disciplinary framework and the details of
the case, rather than transform knowledge for the purposes of the
text. In Paragraph 1, the writer defines innovation and describes
the different types of innovation, displaying agreed-upon knowl-
edge from the discipline and organizing the information by enti-
ties (e.g., There are different types of innovation: product innovation,
process innovation, disruptive innovation, incremental innovation and
complementary innovation). In Paragraph 2, the writer uses verbs in
the past tense to narrate the story of the innovations LEGO imple-
mented, organizing the information chronologically (e.g., When it
was founded, LEGO used oil-based and non-sustainable plastic to make
its bricks. Recently, LEGO changed to more sustainable materials...).
Figure 8.4 shows this text annotated for its descriptive language.
FIGURE 8.4
Descriptive Text in Information Systems Annotated
Information Systems Report (descriptive language): rs
(Organized by Entities ee the process of implementing new ideas to create
value for an organization and it is crucial to the continuing
growth of an organization. There are different types of
innovation:
and Types of Entitie:
As the names suggest, product and process innovation relate
to... Disruptive innovation refers to... Incremental innovation Entities
is the process of producing small improvements or upgrades to
a company’s existing products, services, etc. Complementary
innovation refers to the process of creating new products that
‘complement’ a company’s existing products in order to
enhance the original product.
.
= Since LEGO was founded, the company ae Begreat deal
(“Organized by Time. 2
(wasFounded).EGOGed)
of innovation. When it(was founded,)LEGO [used)oil-based and
aime
non-sustainable plastic to make its bricks. Recently, LEGO
to more sustainable materials...

.
In neither of the Information Systems classes was the professor

purely interested in knowledge display. However, we have seen stu-
dents submit such descriptive responses to the assignment and fail
to meet genre expectations. Such descriptive text could be useful in
a case analysis as part of the introduction, particularly Paragraph 1,
because descriptions are often found in the introduction of longer
texts: “Description of ‘the way things are’ provides an orientation
to, or background knowledge of the topic under investigation or
of the study itself” (Humphrey & Economou, 2015, p. 41). The
introduction would then be followed by analysis and argumenta-
tion, as in shown in the other two texts in Appendix 8B.
The analytical text in Appendix 8B is based on a case analy-

sis assignment that asked students to respond to this prompt:
“Analyze the case using the concept of innovation. What kinds of
innovation did the company implement?” To respond effectively,
the writer had to engage in analytical work using the disciplinary
framework of innovation. The writer had to read the source texts
related to the LEGO case, identify which details were relevant to
innovation, and determine which of these were evidence of par-
ticular types of innovation (i.e., relate the details to the elements of
the disciplinary framework), as visualized in Figure 8.5.
The process of analysis in Figure 8.5 is not particular to this
course or this genre, but rather is indicative of what any student
FIGURE 8.5
Visual Representation of Analytical Process
to Write a Case Analysis
ee ee ee Baa
Assignment % Research Apply Disciplinary --——

Framework
Professor Textbook
Hi
Questions sl
o4 Articles, Element
Company Books, &
Website Outside
Information
must do to analyze using a disciplinary framework. We have found

that providing students this visualization helps them understand
what it means to analyze before asking them to represent an analy-
sis in writing. This visualization shows. how, for case analysis, stu-
dents need to consider the assignment questions and source text
(the case) in light of information about the discipline learned in
class and their own research about the company. The informa-
tion from the course includes the disciplinary framework, which
the students must relate to the details of the case that they gather
from the source texts and their research. The visualization shows
how to break down the case of LEGO into its parts and group
them according to relevant elements of the disciplinary framework
of innovation; while there are many elements in the disciplinary
framework of innovation (process, procedure, disruptive, comple-
mentary, incremental innovation), the student in the visualization
determined that complementary and incremental innovation were
most relevant to understanding LEGO’s innovation.
Once students engage in this analytical work, they are then
ready to write their analysis, as in the text in Appendix 8B. This
text is organized using the disciplinary framework of innovation.
The writer focuses on the types of innovation that are relevant for
the case under study and uses these relevant elements of the disci-
plinary framework to present and organize the ideas. The student
focuses on incremental innovation in Paragraph 1 and complemen-
tary innovation in Paragraph 2. These elements of the disciplinary
framework are presented as abstract nouns, fronted in the topic
sentences, and defined before the writer unpacks them with details
from the case in the paragraphs. This type of organization is what
makes this text analytical rather than descriptive. Failing to do this
reorganization and rearrangement of information would result in a
text that does not meet the expectations of the case analysis genre.
Figure 8.6 shows this text annotated for these features.
The argumentative text in Appendix 8B was written in response
to a prompt that asked student to evaluate how successful LEGO
was in implementing innovation. This text differs from the
FIGURE 8.6
Analytical Text in Information Systems Annotated
Information Systems Analysis (analytical language):
Innovation is the process of implementing new ideas to create value

Establish
for an organization and it is crucial to the continuing growth of an Disciplinary Framewor
organization.
Definition of
There are different types of innovation: Disciplinary
Framework
Abstract Nouns
and LEGO implemented two of these
types of innovation: incremental and complementary.
rae => Incremental innovation is the process of producing small [Abstract

ehneneuns
Nouns }
Disciplinaryby
| Organized de
to a company’s existing products,
Framework 4 Definition of Element
services, etc. of Disciplinary
Framework
As detailed in the LEGO case, LEGO implemented incremental
Unpacking of
innovation when it changed the materials used to make its bricks. Elements of
Disciplinary
LEGO moved from using oil-based and non-sustainable plastic to Framework with
Details from Case
using sustainable material to make its bricks.
Abstract Nouns
Complementary innovation refers to the{[process] of creating new

Definition of Element
Organized by of Disciplinary
| Disciplinary — products that ‘complement’ a company’s existing products in order
Framework
| Framework ,
to enhance the original product.
Unpacking of
LEGO used this type of innovation through licensing agreements
Elements of
Disciplinary
with other products, movie productions, and the opening of theme Framework with
Details from Case
parks [...].
analytical one in several ways. Most importantly, the argumen-

tative text is organized using a claim-reasons framework that
integrates the disciplinary framework-based analysis as support
for an evaluation; the text fronts an evaluative claim (LEGO was
successful in its approach to innovation) and then provides reasons
for this claim (e.g., LEGO’ use of complementary innovation was
successful because...). The writer uses abstract nouns to categorize
details of the case that support the evaluation (e.g., increase in

profits, the growth of the company’ customer base, and increase in the
number of customers) before unpacking them as concrete descrip-
tion that functions as evidence (One of the innovations that LEGO
implemented... was obtaining...). The writer uses interpersonal
resources, indicating an awareness of a reader who needs to be
aligned to the position taken in these evaluations. The writer inte-
grates outside voices from the case’s source texts and other outside
sources strategically (e.g., Theme Park Magazine has ranked LEGO;
According to the LEGO Group chief executive officer Knudstorp). The
writer then shows how the evidence presented supports the claims
and reasons (e.g., this shows that, this confirms that). The writer
also uses interpersonal resources to show a reader's potential reac-
tions have been anticipated and potential objections have been
countered with more evidence (e.g., Although some of the early
complementary products that LEGO produced did not sell well, the
majority of LEGO’ later complementary products were well-received
by the public, and it [Legoland in Orlando] has even gained popularity
in Orlando, Florida, despite the great competition from Disneyworld
and its associated parks). Figure 8.7 shows this text annotated for
these features.
Figure 8.8 summarizes the language resources for writing ana-
lytical arguments. EAP teachers can give this guide to students as
they prepare them to unpack the language expectations of disci-
plinary writing.
ww Suggested Activities
We recommend the following activities to prepare students for the
kinds of writing that they are likely to produce across the disci-
plines. These activities are aimed to help students identify whether
assignments ask for knowledge display or knowledge transfor-
mation and whether students will need to describe, analyze, and/
or argue. The activities also help students to identify disciplinary
frameworks and how to apply them.
FIGURE 8.7
Argumentative Text in Information Systems Annotated
Information Systems Argument (argumentative language):
o . _ in: ed LEGO was successful in its approach to innovation, particularly in its use Di nary
ee
Disciplinary of|complementary and incremental a
innovation] eee
Framework
Framework
Complementary innovation is the process of creating new products that
‘complement’ a company’s existing products in order to enhance the original
product.
LEGO’s use of complementary innovation was successful because it led to — | Reasons
an increase in profits and to the growth of the company’s customer base.
(easelsrofitvas |
One of the innovations that LEGO implemented that helped to{increasejits profit'was
obtaining licensing agreements to complement its products by producing Star Wars

> |Integrate evidence
characters.|According to professor McNally (2015),)since obtaining this licensing from source text
arrangement, LEGO has sold over 200 million Star Wars LEGO boxes and
“LEGO Star Wars continues to rank among the best-selling global toy lines” (p.
Connect
250) (Thisshows)the great success of this complementary innovation initiative. evidence to
claim
Another example of a complementary product that was a success is Bionicle, a line
of LEGO construction toys that has become one of the company’s biggest-selling
properties.
Although some of the early complementary products that LEGO produced did not
Alternative
sell well (i.e., Znap), perspective
the majority of LEGO’s later complementary products were well-received by the

———> | Rebuttal
public.
(This shows]that LEGO was successful in the use of complementary innovation as it

> Connect
increased the company’ profits. evidence to
claim
LEGO’s use of complementary innovation was also successful it
|
led to an increase in the number of customers... Reasoning
i + LEGO was also successful in its use of incremental td pig

Reasoning
1. Ask students to bring prompts from their disciplinary

classes to identify if students are being asked to display
knowledge or transform knowledge and to identify whether
they need to describe, analyze, or argue.
2. Ask students to research their discipline and the kinds
of disciplinary frameworks used and how they are being
asked to apply them for analysis or argument.
FIGURE 8.8
A Quick Guide to Analytical Argumentative Writing
1. Before you write, analyze the example/case/text/situation/phenomenon

by breaking into its important details into parts, grouping them, and
determining how they relate to the elements of the selected disciplinary
framework (see Figure 8.5).
2. Based on your analysis from #1, determine your overall position or
evaluation and clearly state this explicit evaluation (your claim) early in
your text. Remember, the evaluation should stay consistent throughout
the text.
3. Create a claim-reasons framework to structure your text: use your
analysis from #1 to present reasons for your claim. Remember, it might
be useful to use abstract nouns in topic sentences that you can unpack
with details to provide evidence.
4. Incorporate evidence to support your claim using phrases such as
According to, AuthorX argues; X magazine/newspaper reports.
5. Show how the evidence presented supports claims being made with
phrases such as This shows that, this confirms, this indicates.
6. Anticipate or acknowledge alternative perspectives, and counter them
with more evidence (using phrases such as even, might, seem, although
this...that, while this...that).
3. Refer students to online corpora of student writing such

as the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers
(MICUSP) or the British Academic Written English
(BAWE) and have them find examples of analytical and/
or argumentative student writing to identify disciplinary
frameworks and how they are being applied across
disciplines.
4. Engage students in analyzing texts for the difference
between description, analysis, and argument. This can
be done with individual texts or by comparing texts with
different discourse patterns. When presenting students
with texts to analyze, the teacher can provide the students
with the guiding questions in Figure 8.9.
FIGURE 8.9
Guiding Questions for Text Analysis
Guiding questions to analyze different kinds of texts:

i Does the question/prompt invite description, analysis, or argument?
a How effective do you find the text’s answer to the question/prompt?
ce How is the text organized? What is the focus of each paragraph? How
do the paragraphs relate to each other? What are some of the language
choices that tell you about its structure?
Guiding questions to analyze analytical texts:
i. Can you identify a disciplinary framework? What is it and how is it used
in the text?
. How is the text organized? What is the focus of each paragraph? How
3. What language reveals that the writer is analyzing and not describing?
Guiding questions to analyze argumentative texts:

uly What is the main claim of the text? How do you know?
Eds What is the claim of each paragraph? How do you know?
3. How is the text organized? What is the focus of each paragraph? How
. Can you identify a disciplinary framework? What is it and how is it used
in the text?
. What language reveals that the writer is arguing (and analyzing) and not
describing?
. What voices does the writer bring in to the text? What language reveals
the integration of multiple voices into the text? How are these voices
used for the main purpose of the text?
. Do you see any places where the language reveals the writer anticipates
potential disagreement from a reader?
Concluding Thoughts
We hope that we have made it clear that there is overwhelming evi-

dence that students write a variety of genres across the disciplines
that often have little resemblance to the five-paragraph essay. With
our activities that focus on whether assignments expect students to
describe, analyze, and/or argue, we hope to have provided a model
for writing teachers to prepare students for interrogating assign-
ments and models in courses across the curriculum and across the
disciplines. Such preparation is essential because faculty in the dis-
ciplines often provide limited guidelines and little scaffolding for
their writing assignments. The focus on the language of descrip-
tion, analysis, and argument is also important because students
are often asked to engage in the higher-level skills of analysis and
argument, but some struggle to do so and resort to description and
reporting without meeting genre expectations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This publication was made possible by NPRP grant # 8-1815-293 from the
‘Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation).
The state-
ments herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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Posesir23lld~2135:
Appendix 8A
Descriptive, Analytical, and Argumentative
Texts in History
Historical Account | Historical Explanation
(Description) (Analysis) Historical Argument
What happened when
the four divergent
diseases pools began to
mix at the beginning of How did disease To what extent did disease
the Christian era? influence culture? influence culture?
At the beginning of Disease influenced culture |Based on my reading of McNeill’s Plagues
Christian era, there were | in three ways. It shaped and Peoples, it is clear that disease influenced
four divergent disease social class formations and | culture significantly because it shaped social
pools. This led to the relations, religious beliefs, |class formations and relations, religious
possibility of more and the overall survival beliefs, and the overall survival of a culture in
infections as aresult of | of a culture in the face of | the face of foreign invasion.
communication over foreign invasion.
The significant influence of disease on culture
regions through trade
One way that disease may be seen by considering its role in the
practice.
influenced culture was by | formation of social classes and how the classes
Before the Christian influencing the formation | related to each other. For example, in India,
era, epidemic diseases of social classes and how | McNeill provides evidence indicating how
caused frequent deaths in | the classes related to each | disease played a role in the formation of the
Greece and contributed _] other. For example, in caste system and increased the gap between
to Athenians’ failed India, disease contributed | the farmer peasants and the upper-class rulers,
attempt to conquer to the formation of the religious figures, and landlords. According to
.| Sparta. Also China and | caste system which led to |McNeill, “the caste organization in Indian
Mediterranean had an increased gap between | society may have partly been a response to
different epidemics like the farmer peasants and the kind of epidemiological standoff that
yellow fever and malaria. | the upper-class rulers, arose when intrusive Aryans... encountered
The condition of warm __| religious figures, and ‘forest folk’ who had acquired tolerances for
climate in India increased | landlords. Farmers who formidable local infections” (p. 110). This
the infectious diseases. were working in the fields |shows that the caste system may have been a
In addition, India had got infectious diseases strategy to keep the upper class away from the
smallpox infection at and parasites. As a result, | farmers who were more likely to be immune
that time. Before the they were classified as to diseases that would harm the upper
Christian era, people did | “untouchables” to keep the | class. Thus, the peasants were classified as
not move between these | higher classes from getting |“untouchables” to keep the higher classes from
regions. Infections only _| these diseases. getting these diseases. Although it is possible
spread across the regions Aishoy thee ee that there were other contributing factors to
in exceptional cases. the formation of the caste system, McNeill
on culture was the shaping
During the Christian era | of religious beliefs... provides strong evidence that disease shaped
culture in this way.
trade caused the spread of
disease when people from The influence of disease on religious beliefs is
China and India went to particularly noteworthy because these effects
the Mediterranean... can be observed in diverse religions across
several countries...
Appendix 8B
Descriptive, Analytical, and Argumentative
Texts in |nformation Systems
Innovation is the process Innovation is the process LEGO was successful in its approach
of implementing new of implementing new to innovation, particularly in its use
ideas to create value ideas to create value for an of complementary and incremental
for an organization organization and it is crucial innovation. Complementary innovation
and it is crucial to the to the continuing growth of is the process of creating new products
continuing growth an organization. There are that ‘complement’ a company’s existing
of an organization. different types of innovation: products in order to enhance the original
There are different product innovation, product. LEGO’s use of complementary
types of innovation: process innovation, innovation was successful because it
product innovation, disruptive innovation, led to an increase in profits and to the
process innovation, incremental innovation and growth of the company’s customer base.
disruptive innovation, complementary innovation. One of the innovations that LEGO
incremental innovation LEGO implemented implemented that helped to increase its
and complementary two of these types of profit was obtaining licensing agreements
innovation. As the innovation: incremental and to complement its products by producing
names suggest, product complementary. Star Wars characters. According to
and process innovation professor McNally (2015), since obtaining
Incremental innovation is the
relate to... Disruptive this licensing arrangement, LEGO has
process of producing small
innovation refers to... sold over 200 million Star Wars LEGO
improvements or upgrades to
Incremental innovation is boxes and “LEGO Star Wars continues
a company’s existing products,
the process of producing to rank among the best-selling global
services, etc. As detailed in
small improvements toy lines” (p. 250). This shows the great
the LEGO case, LEGO
or upgrades to a success of this complementary innovation
implemented incremental
company’s existing initiative. Another example of a
innovation when it changed
products, services, complementary product that was a success
the materials used to make its
etc. Complementary is Bionicle, a line of LEGO construction
bricks. LEGO moved from
innovation refers to toys that has become one of the company’s
using oil-based and non-
the process of creating biggest-selling properties. Although some
sustainable plastic to using
new products that of the early complementary products
sustainable material to make
‘complement’ a company’s that LEGO produced did not sell well
its bricks.
existing products in order (i.e., Znap), the majority of LEGO’s
to enhance the original Complementary innovation later complementary products were
product. refers to the process of well-received by the public. This shows
creating new products that that LEGO was successful in the use of
Since LEGO was
‘complement’ a company’s complementary innovation as it increased
founded, the company
existing products in order to the company’ profits.
has used a great deal of
enhance the original product.
innovation. When it was LEGO’s use of complementary
LEGO used this type of
founded, LEGO used innovation was also successful because
innovation through licensing
oil-based and non- it led to an increase in the number of
agreements with other
sustainable plastic to customers.
products, movie productions,
make its bricks. Recently,
and the opening of theme LEGO was also successful in its use of
LEGO changed to more incremental innovation....
parks ....
sustainable materials...
Mdtitlidttildidétédddddtidiitidddddsiddddddddilddddisdddddiddddddidsiddiidddtiilidi, C nia pte r 9
Writing for Disciplinary ©

Communities
CHRISTINE B. FEAK
| learned to write five-paragraph essays and grammar in my English

program at [another] university. In my course we talked about thesis
statements and topic sentences. But where do those things go ina
patient observation or in my ethics case study analysis? Nowhere.
—Rima, first-year Nursing student pursuing
a Master's in Professional Practice
My advisor is unhappy with my writing. You know, when | was in the

English class, my writing teacher was saying how important essays with
five paragraphs are for university writing. It’s the basis. | can write those,
but they don’t help for the writing | do now. | think the only useful part is
that | need to have a clear beginning, middle and end to my writing.
—Minu, a second-year PhD student
in Art and Design
The epigraphs from these two students taking one of

my writing classes represent the frustration and disappointment
that many students face when they realize that their preparation
in writing five-paragraph essays for graduate school was woefully
178
inadequate. Rima and Minu had both spent time in full-time,

intensive EAP programs that had promised, among other things,
to help them develop the necessary writing skills for academic
studies in North America. [For reference, these EAP programs
may be referred to as pre-tertiary programs, pre-sessional, or path-
way courses in many countries (Dooey, 2010), but the comments
here refer only to programs in the United States.)] Despite being
in different programs, these students had quite similar experiences
in their writing classes. The students explained to me how in their
first-semester writing courses they worked on building proficiency
in writing five-paragraph essays, with an emphasis on personal
response-type writing; they reported learning about grammatical
structures that they could incorporate directly into writing assign-
ments, which were ultimately graded according to grammati-
cal accuracy and how well the five-paragraph format had been
reproduced. They reported that in their second semester they had
learned more about the academic essay format, which stretched
the five-paragraph essay to include source-based writing, sum-
marizing skills, being critical, as well as issues related to academic
honesty (plagiarism, paraphrasing, citing sources, and proper use
of quotations). They had been successful in their programs and
believed that they were indeed prepared to handle the writing
demands of their graduate degrees. After all, the writing instruc-
tors had stressed this focus. But just how their knowledge of five-
paragraph essays would contribute to that future writing was never
articulated.
The students’ programs had prepared them to be fairly good
puzzle solvers, the puzzle here being how to fit content and
ideas into a pre-determined structure. Although challenging, the
puzzle has one and only one solution—five paragraphs, regard-
less of whether the message is best conveyed in that form. What
the programs did not do is help the students develop strategies
for an un- or ill-defined writing goal (one in which they are not
told what to write or how to organize), a sensitive appreciation
of the rhetorical nature of academic writing, an awareness of how
writing is shaped by disciplinary and national cultures, and dis-

coursal expertise. They did not provide students opportunities to
develop strategies for adding a “rhetorical dimension’ to their writ-
ing that consists of knowing “when, where, to whom and how to
communicate” (Jacobs, 2007, p. 62). Missing also was an oppor-
tunity for these graduate students to begin the process of mov-
ing from being knowledge-consumers to knowledge-producers
(see Chapter 8).
The writing instruction described by my two students rests on
and perpetuates a widespread myth among many full-time EAP
programs that do not target the distinct needs of graduate students,
namely that somehow by crafting five-paragraph essays, graduate
students develop relevant transferable writing skills. Underlying
this myth is the assumption that academic writing can be learned
in an “un-disciplined” environment in which information recycled
from sources dominates and genre plays a minor, if any, role—a
flawed assumption that reflects a lack of awareness of or attention
to the unique writing needs of graduate students. Even if one could
convincingly argue that the five-paragraph structure has value, this
myth, of course, also assumes that students can determine what
relevant skills should be transferred to a new writing context and
‘that they can actually engage in successful transfer of prior learn-
ing. Whether transfer can or does occur remains an open ques-
tion, with some research suggesting that students can apply prior
learning in a writing course to new writing contexts (Carroll, 2002;
McCarthy, 1987; Walvoord, McCarthy, & Robison, 1990), but
most concluding that this is not necessarily the case (DePalma
& Ringer, 2011; Smit, 2004; Wardle, 2009) (see also Chapter 6).
Often, if transfer does occur, what appears to be carried forward
are misconceptions of graduate-level writing that emphasize infor-
mation recycling and “playing it safe” by writing for the primary
purpose of earning a good grade: showing mastery of elements
detailed in a rubric. This runs contrary to writing for an “interac-
tion of purposes” (Manchon, 2011), central among which is writ-
ing because one has something to say. The idea of papers needing
a thesis statement and topic sentences may also continue to loom

large, despite our knowledge of academic writing genres that do
not require these elements. Consider, for instance, a project report,
a research article abstract, or a patient information pamphlet, the
latter of which is a fairly common writing assignment for Master’s
students at my university’s School of Nursing and, perhaps, others,
as well. No doubt, the misconceptions (and fears) about academic
writing that students carry forward into their majors and gradu-
ate programs—their literacy history (Kaufhold, 2015)—will affect
future writing success.
It is curious that five-paragraph essays remain entrenched in
the curricula of many well-intentioned EAP programs aimed
at preparing students for graduate school. There is no research
unequivocally demonstrating how skill in writing these types of
essays contributes to a student’s ability to write a funding proposal,
a biostatement, a journal article, or even a Statement of Purpose
for graduate school. Nor is there research that supports materi-
als development and pedagogy for this textual form. There is: no
Michigan Corpus of Five-Paragraph Essays; no proposed Five-
Paragraph Essay Word List in any particular discipline or in aca-
demia in general; and no five-paragraph essay move-step analyses
that lay out the importance of audience, purpose, and strategy. And
let’s not forget that the likelihood is zero (or almost zero) that any
assigned authentic reading in graduate or EAP programs will even
resemble a five-paragraph essay—a sure sign that the format is of
little value to graduate students.
It may be that the myth surrounding the value of these essays
persists, in part, because their nice, neat structure allows teachers to
easily determine lesson content based on some clearly articulated
“rules,” quickly identify the presence or absence of the required
structure (something that is easily graded), and avoid having to
deal with lengthy texts that may be time-consuming to evaluate
(again, easily graded). The myth may also persist because instruc-
tors can also point to standardized tests that reward students for
employing the five-paragraph structure (Crusan & Ruecker, this
volume), and good writing scores on tests must surely indicate that
instructors are focusing on the right kind of writing instruction
(Au & Gourd, 2013).
Taking a more generous perspective of instructors, I know of
many who would like to explore more relevant writing, but simply
have no means of doing so due to heavy teaching loads or a lack of
administrator support. To illustrate, in a professional development
workshop for EAP writing instructors helping to prepare students
for university studies, I once introduced the idea of travel reviews
of places in their community (similar to those on TripAdvisor). I
explained that such reviews would be an interesting, fun way to
introduce genre into the writing curriculum. I suggested that travel
reviews would also give students an opportunity to do some writ-
ing that matters, since the reviews could contribute to a website
for new students interested in exploring the community. I argued
that with a real audience (current and future students) and purpose
the students would have a greater motivation to write. When sev-
eral instructors expressed some excitement about trying this, the
program administrator stepped in and said, “Well, maybe not. We
can't just go and change everything.” Embedded in this comment
is not only an apparent unwillingness to question entrenched ways
of teaching writing and explore new possibilities, but also perhaps
anxiety about not knowing how to implement an instructional
approach for which there are no ready-made, published materials
(see the Conclusion). After all, what would the program do with-
out a book and rules to prescribe course content?
Regardless of these possible reasons or others, the claim that
the five-paragraph essay prepares students for their future aca-
demic coursework is highly questionable and flies in the face of
what we know about graduate student writing in particular. While
there is much to be said about our knowledge of graduate writing,
I will touch on three areas: (1) genre and graduate student writ-
ing in general; (2) brief discussions of the importance of creating
(relating) new texts from (to) old (intertextuality) and of consider-
ing how the norms of a discipline shape writing; and (3) content
choices (situatedness). I will then tie these concepts together in a
discussion of a student-written introduction to a paper for pub-

lication, which further highlights the fact that essay writing can-
not provide graduate students the tools they need to be successful
writers.
The Research
We have a rich body of literature on the writing needs of gradu-

ate students, none of which has pointed to an expectation that
they will write five-paragraph essays or clearly established a link
between these texts and the writing that these students will do.
Research has revealed quite a range of written genres in graduate
programs, especially PhD programs. Less is known about writing
at the Master’s level than at the doctoral level, despite the fact that
around 80 percent of all graduate students are pursuing Master’s
degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), but it
is still possible to illustrate the range and complexity of relevant
genres for graduate students. For instance, important genres for
Business PhD students at the University of Michigan, like most
doctoral students, include open genres (examples of which are easily
found and seen) and supporting or closed genres (which are difficult
to access and see). We can see in Figure 9.1 the usual disserta-
tion and journal article, along with teaching philosophies, research
statements, and manuscript reviews.
Genres important to graduate students in other fields, and per-
haps at both the Master’s and PhD levels, include autoethnog-
raphies, posters, patents, and grants (Curry, 2016). For Master's
level students, theses, the genres of PhD program applications
(statements of purpose, personal statements, research statements,
and perhaps diversity statements), professional philosophies,
patient brochures, and policy memos may be important. For stu-
dents entering an MBA program, case studies are a central genre
(Nathan, 2016).
Of course, a student would not be expected to have experience
with all of these genres at the start of an MA or PhD program,
FIGURE 9.1
A Sampling of Open and Supporting (Closed) Academic Genres
Important for Students in a Business PhD Program
Book reviews
() Book chapters () Research articles
Published Conference () Conference posters

abstracts
Statements of community
engagement
Responses to research
article reviews
but there is an expectation that students have the antecedent genre

knowledge (Artemeva & Fox, 2010; Rounsaville, 2012) needed to
facilitate their navigation of the genre network in their disciplines.
For instance, prior to starting a graduate degree program, a student
would likely have written a book review or have read a number of
journal articles in their chosen discipline. This is in keeping with
the notion of building new knowledge from old, which, in the case
of writing, can be considered a process of alignment (Negretti,
2015).
The many genres integral to graduate degree programs alone
should highlight the value of a genre-based pedagogy, which, com-
pared to the inflexible five-paragraph focus, is much more likely
to provide students opportunities to gain an understanding of the

regularities of academic writing as well as its rhetorical and social
purposes. In such a writing approach, students can also begin to see
how certain genres are related and cluster together and form a genre
set (Devitt, 2000), as seen in Figure 9.1, and how one genre may be a
response to another, as in the case of a conference Call for Proposals
(CFP) that gives rise to a submitted conference proposal, and in turn
leads to an oral presentation that may eventually become a published
paper—that is, a genre chain (Dressen-Hammouda, 2008). In other
words, there is a direction of interaction (Solin, 2004) that, in the
case of a CFP, is unidirectional in that the chain starts, but cannot
end, with the call.
wu Intertextuality
Five-paragraph essays can exist entirely on their own without links

to or incorporation of other writing. As Figure 9.1 indicates, how-
ever, most writing that graduate students must do is connected to
other writing they do; it is also connected to the writing of oth-
ers. Each individual piece of writing is created from and inter-
weaves the voices and content from other texts. This is the notion
of intertextuality (Hyland, 2004). It could be argued that weav-
ing in content from sources is important for some five-paragraph
writing tasks, particularly the use of source material to support an
argument. But choosing and inserting source material is quite dif-
ferent from graduate students’ need to use the discourses of their
disciplinary communities to participate in their conversations.
To participate, graduate writers are expected to recontextualize
what they have learned or read. This requires them to “condense,
reformulate and reshape” (Ventola, 1999, p. 109) the ideas that
have contributed to an ongoing disciplinary conversation about a
topic or issue. By referring to and embedding the words and ideas
of others into one’s own text, writers can achieve a variety of writ-
ing goals, which include participating in disciplinary debates, posi-
tioning themselves, developing their disciplinary voice and iden-
tity (Badenhorst & Guerin, 2016), and opening a space for new
knowledge. As intertextuality practices are complicated, it is rea-

sonable to expect that writing courses for graduate students would
focus on how to appropriate textual features from other texts
(Pecorari & Shaw, 2012) to achieve writing goals. In a simple five-
paragraph argumentation essay that is disconnected from a dis-
ciplinary conversation, however, references to other expert voices
are at best a superficial display of academic convention. With such
a simple understanding of intertextuality, graduate students will
struggle to present themselves as knowledgeable junior members
of their disciplines who are contributing to the knowledge and
conversations of their community.
ww Situatedness
Achieving writing goals is also dependent on having an awareness

of the factors that influence the features of a genre. Unlike five-
paragraph essays, the genres that graduate student writers need to
produce vary considerably, as they are shaped by the expectations
and processes of their disciplines and communities. They are shaped
in terms of whether they are open or not for public “consumption.”
Whether a genre is open and can be read by a broader community,
as in the case of a journal article, or is closed, such as a dissertation
proposal, the text will be shaped by the broader community norms.
This reflects the fact that genres are a/ways situated (Pecorari &
Shaw, 2012) and social. To illustrate the case of the influence of
norms on a genre, a dissertation proposal at my own university
may be 40 pages long (typical in Social Work), but it could be as
short as five (Applied Mathematics) or as many 175 pages (several
chapters of the dissertation in some sub-disciplines of Architec-
ture). This variation is not only a reflection of disciplinary norms,
but of departmental norms, as well as, importantly, advisors’ and
the committee’s expectations. The timing of the proposal varies as
well and is department-specific. In many cases, it may be written
well before any research is undertaken (many or most areas); or it
may be written after all the data collection has been done (Educa-
tion) or perhaps written only one month before the dissertation
defense and completion of the degree (Aerospace Engineering and

other Engineering fields). I still remember my state of disbelief
years ago when I first heard this from an Engineering student who
wanted to discuss his proposal and then shared that he would be
completely finished with the dissertation within the month—and
starting a post-doc position in three months.
The topic of situatedness is inevitably tied to the importance of
audience. Despite debates as to whether one can indeed construct
an audience (Magnifico, 2010), having some notion of who will
read a text influences decisions about how and what to write. As
graduate students go up the genre ladder (Swales & Feak, 2000) and
begin to engage more in open writing (university grant proposals,
conference proposals, and journal articles, for instance), the chal-
lenge of understanding the target audience increases. For instance,
funding proposals for a university scholarship open to all graduate
students will likely be read by someone who is not an expert in
the student’s field, an aspect of institutional situatedness that many
students have not considered, but can greatly affect their success. In
my Writing for Publication course, when we discuss the audience
of a paper submitted for publication, the students nearly always say
that they are writing for others in their “field.” This is not exactly
incorrect, but more experienced authors with an awareness of the
“situated nature of writing within particular discourses” are likely
sensitive to “the social practice of publishing which includes power
inequities and unequal access” (Badenhorst & Xu, 2016). With
this knowledge in mind, authors might strategically consider first
a narrow audience consisting of the journal editor and the review-
ers, as these individuals are gatekeepers to publication who have
expectations of how a research story should unfold.
To illustrate how knowledge of genre, intertextuality, and situ-
atedness are more important than knowledge of a template, let us
consider writing for publication. When I ask graduate students in
my writing classes to describe typical article introductions, most
(especially those in their second year and beyond) point out that
they consist of a background section, a gap in research, and a
description of the new research they have done. On the surface,
then, it would appear that my students have acquired a certain

amount of genre knowledge without ever having heard of genre in
relation to academic writing or Swales’ (2004) Create a Research
Space (CaRS) model. Despite this surface knowledge, their experi-
ence with writing templates for introductions may, in fact, interfere
with their writing success.
At this point, I would like return to Minu, who was featured at
the beginning of this chapter. In my writing class, it appeared that
Minu was developing an appreciation of intertextuality as more
than just inserting sources. She had abandoned the five-paragraph
essay in favor of genres as a means to do the work of a discipline
(Miller, 1994). She seemed to understand what writers are doing
in their texts, the moves and steps, especially those described in
Swales’ (2004) CaRS model of article introductions.
Doing the writing work of the discipline and having a basic
understanding of genres, however, does not guarantee the produc-
tion of a successful exemplar of the genre or its parts. Minu was
working on her first paper for publication. She was frustrated. The
research was finished. The methods and results were written. Now,
she was struggling with the hardest parts, the introduction and dis-
cussion. Her advisor did not like either of these in her fourth draft
- but did not elaborate why. The advisor simply said, “Try again ...
and get some help with your English.” It was at this point Minu
decided to discuss her writing experiences with me.
As an Art and Design student, Minu was writing up research
on how consumer products could be designed to prompt users to
engage in environmentally friendly behaviors. Her introduction is
shown in Figure 9.2. (Sections not relevant to the discussion here
have been omitted and sentence numbers have been added.) As
shown, Minu followed the CaRS model moves for introductions
(Swales, 2004), which we had discussed in class. In our discussion,
she described how her sentences fit into the moves, shown in Fig-
wre 9.33
Although the introduction had all the expected moves (stretches
of text that have communicative functions), Minu’s advisor stated
that that the introduction was poorly written. Like many advisors,
she was unable to articulate (or perhaps unwilling to spend the
FIGURE 9.2
Sample Introduction of a Novice Graduate Writer
Designing for a Sustainable Future
*Sustainability is a major, global concern.” The basics of this problem is

the culture of indulgence and technology that is not put to good use. >We
buy hybrid cars, but fail to take public transportation. “We install energy-
efficient heating and cooling systems, but keep our homes too cool in the
summer and too warm in the winter. *Therefore, sustainability is critical
for all of us because we do not want to focus only on our current needs
and ignore future ones. *If we do we will compromise the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs. “Recycling is critical for sustainability
(Paraskevopoulos, 2003).
8Recent research has demonstrated the importance of environmental and
resource consequences of the products and processes of business, especially
recycling (Kleindorfer, Singhal and Van Wassenhove 2005). [...]
*Other research has focused on the need to adopt sustainable recycling
practices in a coordinated manner across the supply chain (Pullman et al.
2009). [...]
Finally, recycling is important because consumers are increasingly
holding firms accountable for their sustainability practices (Krause, Pagell
and Curkovic 2001; Schroeder 2008) and expecting them to have well
developed recycling programs Laroche 2010). Research shows that
consumers expect firms to recycle, including promoting recycling and other
sustainability-oriented behaviors among their employees and customers
(Gimenez 2012).
2Given the importance of recycling, it is important to explore whether
we can decrease the environmental impacts that occur in the use phase of
products, through product features. “Few studies have investigated how
designs can change behaviors. “In this paper, we describe the results of
three studies that demonstrates the impact of design on the behavior.
(The next section described the three studies she had done, followed by the results
and discussion sections.)
time to articulate) how to improve it in a meaningful way, focusing

instead on sentence-level errors (Cheng, 2006; Feak, 2016). She also
seemed unaware that Minu’s current knowledge and writing ability
did not align with the scope and difficulty of the writing task at
hand (Feldon, Maher, Hurst, & Timmerman, 2015). The advisor’s
focus on language and her lack of commentary on the content and
FIGURE 9.3
Minu’s Move Analysis Following the Create
a Research Space Model
raidwaist
nd eel
a brief review of relevant literature
overall structure of the text were consistent with writing feedback

Minu had received in her EAP program, where she was able to
successfully apply the five-paragraph template and mainly worked
on improving her grammar. This feedback served to reinforce her
belief that language skills continued to be the source of her writ-
ing challenges. The important challenge here, however, was not
language, but rather how Minu was trying to enter the disciplin-
ary conversation. In her opening move she was trying to hook her
readers with something memorable without really understanding
who these readers are or where their interests lie. By focusing on
. sustainability and recycling, she had not oriented her work to her
intended disciplinary audience (the Art and Design Science com- _
munity). This is something she had never needed to consider. In
her essays for her pre-sessional writing classes, any source material
had been acceptable, regardless of which academic field it came
from, provided that it supported her ideas. She applied this same
approach to her introduction, and rather than contextualizing her
work in Art and Design, she was coming at it from the perspective
of Environmental Science, a field in which she had little expertise.
Minu was attracted to the idea of genres and moves, but she
construed them as very sophisticated templates, knowledge of
which would be sufficient to convince readers of the importance
of her research. Her lack of awareness that she needed to con-
textualize the work in a scholarly discussion in her field resulted
in an unreflective application of her genre knowledge. This was
quite similar to how she used the five-paragraph template in her
previous writing in that she was simply putting content into a form
rather than considering her audience, purpose, and strategy.
Minu’s paper was her first attempt at moving from being a lis-
tener or observer of disciplinary conversations to being a partici-
pant. Yet her introduction was not tied to the disciplinary debate on
the role of product designers in solving real-world problems, which
is precisely where she had hoped to make a contribution. This was
quite problematic because Minu’s target journal was Design Stud-
ies, which publishes research-focused design processes. Given the
target journal, I thought a good starting question for our meeting
to discuss the introduction would be why this section primarily
dealt with the importance of recycling and why product design-
ers were a mere mention. This then led us to how Minu saw her
intended audience and saw herself as a scholar. Did she see herself
as a sustainability expert with knowledge of product design or as a
product designer with an interest in applying her skills to solving
problems, such as the need for creative ways to promote recycling?
Our discussion proved to be a major turning point, as she real-
ized the importance of having a clear scholarly voice that reflected
her position as a design expert. Her next draft of the introduction
was completely reoriented to consider design processes, rather than
sustainability, and to the likely knowledge and expectations of her
intended audience. This revised introduction began as follows:
In the process of product design, an important factor is how users of the
product evaluate their perceptual properties, which is known as product
experience. In their general framework for product experience, Desmet
and Hecker (2007) propose three levels: aesthetic experience, experi-
ence of meaning, and emotional experience. While the aesthetic level
is clear and may be consistent among consumers, experience of mean-
ing and emotional experience consumers ability to assign personality, or
other expressive characteristics can vary greatly. Yet, they can influence yet
another level known as the behavior level (Norman, 2010). By extending
these various levels of experience to the context of persuasive sustainable
design, we can create designs that can prompt sustainable behavior. ...
While the introduction still needed work, Minu’s advisor was

pleased with the reorientation, commenting that she “now under-
stood what was driving her research and what her message was.”
Writing from a new perspective as a design expert, Minu had iden-
tified her audience and found her disciplinary voice. She was able to
use her genre knowledge to now enter the conversation in her field
and to open up an appropriate research space in design science in
which she established the need for her research. Perhaps even more
important, by contextualizing her work in the research on design-
ers and design processes, she was relieved of the burden that she
described as “pretending to be an expert on something I am not.”
As Minu and other graduate students are increasingly involved
in interdisciplinary work, the challenges of developing one’s voice
are becoming more apparent. Important in this work is determin-
ing which disciplinary voice will drive their research storyline
(Davies, Devlin, & Tight, 2010). Voices and identities emerge
through the process of writing (Badenhorst & Guerin, 2016), and
this is tied to developing knowledge of the complexities and messi-
ness of the genres of a discipline, especially their situatedness. If
graduate students approach research writing as largely a matter of
finding ways to populate moves and steps without consideration of
the situatedness of their writing and themselves, and as a matter of
finding the right template into which information is added, they
' may be only slightly better off than students with knowledge of the
five-paragraph structure only.
We might attribute Minu’s initial focus on sustainability and recy-
cling rather than product design to the fact that she was only two
years into her degree program. A more likely explanation, however,
is her lack of genre knowledge and awareness. Lacking a systematic
way to break apart and rebuild genres (Tardy, 2009), she defaulted
to using her knowledge of five-paragraph essays and hooking the
reader.
As is suggested in my discussion here, privileging five-paragraph
essays as a means to support graduate writers will result in instruc-
tion full of missed opportunities. It will not help students develop
strategies for addressing a relevant audience on a relevant topic,

position themselves as junior members of a field, enter disciplinary
conversations, and create a voice that allows them to confidently
participate. A genre approach can expose students to the knowl-
edge they need, but we need to be aware that some students may
construe genres as templates or patterns, a perspective that will hin-
der their disciplinary writing development. Attention also needs to
be paid to a range of genres, not only research articles or disserta-
tions, as well as to whether that support is best offered through
writing center tutorials, workshops, writing groups, “write-ins,”
dissertation boot camps, mini-courses, or semester-long courses.
It is also important to question the strong tendency in EAP and
other programs to either frontload writing instruction (prior to
program entry or in a student’s first semester) or backload instruc-
tion (at the dissertation stage). Rather than frontloading and/
or backloading support, what is needed is ongoing support from
the start to the finish of a student’s degree program and a focus
on a range of genres other than journal articles and dissertations.
Regardless of the genre of interest, students need to be guided to
understand their intended readers together witk. their expectations;
have a clear reason and purpose for writing that includes entering
into ongoing discussions of a community, academic or otherwise;
think about language not only in terms of correctness, but in terms
of establishing a voice and revealing what they know and what
they think, and develop strategies to achieve their writing goals.
They can begin building this understanding prior to enrollment
in a graduate program and continue building it each semester after
enrollment. A few ideas for writing support beyond the usual focus
on research genres are presented.
1. Introduce genre in pre-enrollment programs for graduate

students.
Rather than five-paragraph essays, a pre-sessional writing course,

in a language institute or elsewhere, should target issues of genre,
organization, rhetoric, audience, purpose, and strategy through
much more interesting and creative means. Take, for example, the
possibility of teaching about genre through familiar non-academic

genres, such as product reviews and travel reviews, which I men-
tioned earlier and are familiar to most students. Authentic reviews
can be analyzed, and a class could decide what authors are doing,
which moves (and possibly steps) are present, and what language
and content contribute to achieving a goal. After understanding
what authors are doing in their reviews along with why and how,
students can write their own reviews. They could even be asked to
include source material, if relevant. In the case of a product review,
students could incorporate the perspectives from other reviewers
(i.e., other voices) and compare, contrast, or evaluate them against
their own. They could bring in manufacturer specifications and
descriptions to evaluate whether the product functions as promised.
The students’ reviews could then be gathered to create a website
that can benefit other students. An advantage of this approach is
that this writing would allow students to tap into their own expe-
riences and do writing that engages them on grounds where their
personal experience and beliefs have relevance in relation to a com-
munity and its genre expectations. Another online genre to explore
would be LinkedIn recommendations for colleagues, instructors,
or other professionals with a presence on that site.
Moving from product or travel reviews, students could also cre-
ate information brochures focused on understanding and dealing
with issues that directly affect them (from influenza to issues of
equity and inclusion). This could very easily involve doing some
library research so that this skill is developed along with the impor-
tance of building new ideas from old ones.
It is reasonable to expect a pre-enrollment course to address
summarizing, paraphrasing, stance, and engagement, as well as
academic honesty. This can be done by focusing on annotated bib-
liographies that include a section where the students need to syn-
thesize and evaluate the state of research, perhaps leading to some
research questions. This could serve as an antecedent genre to the
later need to write a literature review.
These suggestions, however, raise the need for professional
development so that instructors can comfortably take a genre per-
spective in a writing course for prospective graduate students.
2. Introduce genres other than research papers and dissertations

to curate an online identity.
Writing courses can be created to help graduate students become

familiar with the genres that can help them curate their online
identity. Such a course could include short and long biostatements,
research statements, descriptions of research for a non-expert audi-
ence, and, for students in professional schools such as Social Work
and Public Health, professional philosophies, which would be
available for any reader to view. Also important here would be hav-
ing an effective LinkedIn profile. Despite the increasing impor-
tance for new scholars to have an online presence, a survey of pro-
fessional schools at my university revealed that less than half of all
doctoral students took advantage of the space available to them on
their department websites. Taking the time to create a strong online
presence can also support collaborations and future job searches.
The content could be written, or presented orally, or both. I created
such a mini-course for Business PhD students, whose evaluations
were overwhelmingly positive. Those that followed through with
the course writing reported having to think carefully about their
identity as junior scholars and what they wanted to project. One
student, Tae-Song, commented that he “felt like an expert when
[his] photograph, bio-statement, and research project descriptions”
were prominently displayed on the department website. Some
students in my mini-course were inspired to create videos, which
points to the importance of the relationship between writing and
speaking, as well. After all, we talk in order to write, and we write
in order to talk. Technical support for the mini-course came mostly
from the students, leaving me to focus on providing writing guid-
ance on the students’ writing.
3. Introduce high-stakes genres such as those related to job

searches and those that further one’s education or career.
A very interesting workshop series to consider is one focused on

the genres of the job search, which would include CVs, LinkedIn
profiles (again), cover letters, research statements, teaching phi-
losophies, diversity statements, and statements of community
engagement, as well as phone or Skype interviews and job talks

(including the all-important Q&A). Many new genres are emerg-
ing in the job search genre cluster (e.g., statements of community
engagement and community service statements) and even though
we may not know much about them, we can still discuss matters of
audience, purpose, strategy, and possible regularities. Such a course
would likely be attractive to undergraduates, Master’s, and PhD
students alike. A variant of this workshop series could explore the
genres of the PhD application process for Master’s students. Rele-
vant here would be CVs, research statements, diversity statements,
and personal statements. Skype interviews, increasingly a part of
the application process, could also be included. Such a workshop
has great value because the relevant genres here may fall outside
the scope of writing that writing centers will discuss with students.
Another professional development workshop or course focused on
manuscript reviewing would also be beneficial, not only for the
students themselves, but for the journals in their fields and disci-
plines as a whole, especially if we consider that most journals offer
little clear guidance on how to do this well.
Concluding Thoughts
Rather than focusing on five-paragraph essays and telling students |

what to do, we need to offer writing support that helps students
develop tools for analyzing texts and unpacking reader expectations.
Such courses need to provide opportunities for students to think
about the choices that are available to them as they write and the
effects of those choices on their writing goals. Having acquired a
set of tools rather than rules, graduate students can be prepared for
the many different genres they are expected to master. Exposure to
a range of genres, both research and non-research genres, can pro-
vide students a means to engage in mindful negotiation of knowing
“when, where, to whom and how to communicate” (Jacobs, 2007, p-
62), which is the essence of successful graduate writing.
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PA RT 3 Mlddidiiddddiiiddddiidddddididddidiiidditiddddiigddddiagddddiidddddasiadddiiiddiiiilldis,
Issues Beyond the

Classroom
LL a gedcdccdcCLQQCCAAQOO00ABO0000A099D9EA90A0AZ Chapter 10
Standardized Testing Pressures

and the Temptation of the
DEBORAH CRUSAN AND TODD RUECKER
The pressures of high-stakes assessment have increased

in recent years and are everywhere, whether one is teaching in a
secondary school in China or in an intensive English program at a
US. university. These pressures often wash back into the classroom,
restricting the way writing is taught. We recently wrote in a col-
lection focused on the politics of second language writing assess-
ment, “Too often assessment policies are imposed on teachers and
their classrooms by those removed from these contexts, leading to
policies that negatively impact the teaching and learning process,
often demoralizing teachers and students in the process” (Ruecker
& Crusan, 2018, p. 1).
One clear consequence of testing pressures on writing instruc-
tion has been a push to teach narrow forms of writing, which is
perhaps most commonly encapsulated in the five-paragraph essay.
As a case in point, Todd completed dissertation research at a Texas
201
high school populated by a large number of Mexican-American

students who spoke ESL (see Ruecker, 2013, 2014). The school was
under increasing pressure to increase scores on the state-mandated
test due to several years of being labeled as a “failing school” by the
state. In response to the writing task, which had prompts such as,
“Write an essay explaining how a person can feel connected to a
special place,” teachers felt pressured to ask students to write nar-
rative essays over and over again because that seemed to be the
easiest path to help students—many of whom were bilingual learn-
ers—pass the test. While these essays may not have always been
exactly five paragraphs, the idea behind them and the justification
for using them were similar to those commonly used for teach-
ing the five-paragraph essay: Our students don’t have the language
proficiency to produce more diverse types of writing, so this rigid
formula will help them get a passing score on the test, which will
help the school avoid sanctions. (Sanctions include the school being
shut down or being drastically reorganized.) When students from
that high school got to college, they were asked to write in a vari-
ety of genres, moving beyond the rigid formula for academic writ-
ing they learned in high school. Unsurprisingly, students struggled
with length expectations and how to integrate sources because
they had been confined for so long to a narrow form of writing.
A former high school teacher who was now a professor of edu- _
cation lamented the years she spent teaching the five-paragraph
essay to prepare students to pass a state test: “I now regret that
I spent more time helping them to write to pass the [state test]
than I did on helping my students to make the connection between
writing skills as tools to express their thoughts, values, and beliefs”
(Moss, 2002, para. 14).
This chapter draws on our own research and teaching experi-
ences as well as materials associated with major standardized tests
to explore how tests can limit instruction for language learners. We
do not deny that focusing on rigid formulas like the five-paragraph
essay may be an effective strategy to help students overcome testing
roadblocks; however, we believe that instruction too narrowly focused
on rigid forms limits students’ preparation for writing in college and
10: Standardized Testing Pressures 203
beyond. Ultimately, teachers need to move beyond teaching to the

test. It is vital for teachers to help students “distinguish between for-
mal templates and genres, between rigid rules and more variable and
situated conventions” (see Tardy, Chapter 2, p. 30).
The Research
«(Oo Standardized Tests Actually Measure Good

English Writing?
Timed standardized tests are generally not an adequate measure

of students’ ability to write in college. For example, Elliot, Deess,
Rudniy, and Joshi (2012) found that scores on the SAT® Writ-
ing section and the ACCUPLACER® placement test were poor
predictors of final grades in college writing classes, where students
typically have various opportunities to plan and revise their essays
that they aren't given in a 30-minute essay exam. The time con-
straints and word limits common to all such tests reduce the abil-
ity to assess the breadth and depth of writing abilities (Condon,
2013). The two writing tasks on the IELT'S™, for instance, require
responses of between 150 and 250 words. As a result, standardized
tests “rarely (if ever) capture students’ full range of knowledge, and
... they have been shown repeatedly not to illustrate fairly what
culturally and linguistically diverse students know and can do” (Gil-
liland & Pella, 2017, p. 7). While there is some debate on whether
or not there is a distinct difference between the types of writing
tasks found on standardized exams and those taught at universi-
ties (Harsch, Ushioda, & Ladroue, 2017; Llosa & Malone, 2017;
Malone & Montee, 2014), the problems and limitations posed by
time constraints are significant.
Nevertheless, standardized tests are often a more immediate
hurdle for students and teachers than students’ success in college
and beyond. Consequently, standardized tests can negatively and
narrowly shape the way writing is taught in schools, reducing all
writing instruction to test-centric rigid forms that have negative
effects on students’ writing ability (Brimi, 2012). This is particu-

larly true when teachers have had little or no formal training in
the teaching of writing, which is often the case in teacher educa-
tion programs (Albertson & Marwitz, 2001; Brimi, 2012; Johnson,
Thompson, Smagorinsky, & Fry, 2003; Ruecker, 2013; Scherff &
Piazza, 2005; You, 2004).
As previously mentioned, Todd explored how English instruction
at a high school serving high numbers of Mexican-American bilin-
gual learners focused narrowly on one particular form throughout
students’ four years of instruction. The problems with this approach
were described clearly by one teacher interviewed in his study:
Who does personal narratives in real life? Even in college in your intro to
English 101 you might do that as one of the activities but personal nar-
ratives shouldn't [dominate] our instruction or writing. And I think that’s
what’s going to happen. We’re going to have a whole generation of crappy
writers cause they’re not going to know what’s out there. What are the
other forms of writing? (Ruecker, 2013, p. 312)
The students Todd followed through their first year of college

agreed that the narrow writing experiences they had in high school
- failed to prepare them for the diverse writing tasks they faced their
first year in college. One frustrated student said:
Because in high school, it’s all like getting to like the TAKS, TAKS, TAKS,
TAKS (the Texas State Test at the time). They don't really teach you like,
oh, this is how you're supposed to write a paper. And like they teach you like
the introduction, thesis statement, and conclusion, and body paragraphs.
That’s it, the main part of an essay. But they don't tell you like, oh, you have
to cite this and you have to do that in APA style and long essays. Like we
never do long essays in high school like we do here. So it’s like it doesn’t—
and like it’s hard. The transition from the way you write in high school to
college is like really, really different. (Ruecker, 2014, p. 110)
As evident from this student’s comment, writing in college goes

well beyond writing an introduction, thesis, a few body paragraphs,
and a conclusion.
U.S. classrooms are not alone in their obsession with form-based

instruction designed to help students pass a high-stakes standard-
ized test. In China, the College English Test (CET) is a national
test of proficiency in English as a foreign language (EFL). You
(2004) argued that the CET drives writing instruction in China
and discussed the use of a model of writing referred to as fan-
wen, in which students are instructed to write a three-paragraph
essay: “introduction, disadvantages, and advantages” (p. 101). Chi-
nese teachers feel compelled to teach this rigid form so that their
students have a better chance of proving their English proficiency
through the CET and thereby opening the doors to college admis-
sion (see Chapter 3).
A narrow instructional focus on a form like the five-paragraph
essay, regardless of the good intentions behind it, skews and reduces
the definition of good writing in the eyes of students. Often this
writing instruction is the only direction students receive, so they
are mistakenly led to believe that rigid form equals good writing.
As Tardy states in Chapter 2, a genre-based approach is based on
a different reality: “Rather than employing ‘rules’ to be followed,
genres are marked by conventions—typified yet flexible ways of
carrying out one’s purpose” (p. 28). It is also important to remem-
ber that the “purposes of these assessments . . . are drastically dif-
ferent from the purposes of classroom assessment” (Farnsworth &
Malone, 2014, p. 97).
Along these lines, it is important to note that testing companies
have begun responding to critiques of their writing tests. While
focusing on a rigid form during test preparation may have been
rewarded to some extent on older test designs, newer tests, espe-
cially those that integrate different skills and different types of writ-
ing, are clearly attempting to ensure that test-takers can approach
the task in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples of this shift.
wu The TOEFL®
The Test of English as a Foreign Language includes two writ-
ing tasks, an integrated (read- and listen-to-write) essay (Writ-
ing Question 1) and an independent essay (Writing Question 2).
The independent essay typically requires students to write about

whether or not they agree with a particular statement. Test-takers
are given 20 minutes for the integrated task and 30 minutes for the
independent one.
Examples of the TOEFL’ cdepemeane task are:
1. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? —

A teacher’s ability to relate well with students is more
important than excellent knowledge of the subject being
taught. Use specific reasons and examples to support your
answer.
2. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
Always telling the truth is the most important
consideration in any relationship. Use specific reasons and
examples to support your answer.
Although writers are never instructed to write a five-paragraph

essay in The Official Guide to the TOEFL” Test (ETS, 2018a), it
is possible to interpret the language of the rubric to favor a rigid
formula with its emphasis on organization, unity, and progression
and the 25-minute time limit (ETS, 2018c).
However, the integrated essay, which asks test-takers to read a
passage, fares better. For example, a passage might discuss the inef- .
ficiency and inaccuracy of voting systems in the United States and
then ask students to listen to a portion of a lecture on the same
topic, usually presenting an opposing view from the passage. Then
test-takers are instructed to “summarize the points made in the
lecture, being sure to explain how they oppose specific points made
in the reading passage” (ETS, 2018b).
The integrated writing rubric awards scores from 0 to 5.To score
a 5, the writer must “successfully select the important information
from the lecture and coherently and accurately present this infor-
mation in relation to the relevant information presented in the
reading. The response is well organized, and occasional language
errors that are present do not result in inaccurate or imprecise pre-
sentation of content or connections” (ETS, 2018c). It can thus be
seen that a writer does not need to adhere to a rigid five-para-

graph essay form to produce a “well organized” response on this
rubric.
««« The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for

College and Careers (PARCC)
The PARCC is a Common Core-aligned exam developed by a
consortium of U.S. states that is used in Grades 3-11. Unless stu-
dents are eligible for accommodations (such as for being desig-
nated an English Learner or having a documented disability), they
are given 90 minutes to complete each of three units, each unit
containing a few reading passages along with an integrated writ-
ing task. The PARCC includes three types of source-based writing
tasks: the narrative writing task, the research task, and the literary
analysis task. A sample research task from the eleventh grade lan-
guage arts test reads:
You have studied three sources involving the establishment of American

independence from Great Britain. The sources are:
* “Declaration of Independence,” signed on July 4, 1776
« A passage from Patrick Henry’s March 23, 1776 “Speech to the
Second Virginia Convention”
" The transcript of the video “From Subjects to Citizens”
An important idea presented in the sources involves the colonists’ notions
of the purpose of government. Write an essay in which you explore the
perspectives offered in the source documents regarding government’s pur-
pose and its relationship to the people it governs. Use evidence from all
three source documents to support your ideas. (PARCC, 2018)
Here, the reminder to use “specific evidence” clearly aligns with an

overall emphasis in the Common Core source-based writing.
Although test questions like these are arguably moving toward
the genre-based approaches favored by writing scholars, some have
critiqued the Common Core for favoring the traditional modes
of writing (expository, descriptive, narrative, analysis) (de Oliveira,
2017; Johnson, 2013). Nonetheless, an attempt to focus on genre

is evident in the PARCC, which has different rubrics for the ana-
lytical/research tasks and the narrative task (PARCC, 2015). The
rubric categories are reading comprehension (excluded for the nar-
rative task), written expression, and knowledge of language and
conventions. Under written expression, the highest-scored essays
engage in such practices as using “clear reasoning supported by rel-
evant text-based evidence in the development of the claim or topic”
and being “effectively organized with clear and coherent writing.”
Essays that earn the highest scores are “consistently appropriate to
task,” indicating that the raters are more concerned about address-
ing the demands of the prompt rather than sticking to a rigid
form.
While acknowledging that the five-paragraph essay has its limita-

tions, a number of proponents find it to be a useful tool to start
students on their writing journey (Seo, 2007; Smith, 2006). We
agree with the idea that the five-paragraph essay or its variants
(e.g, the five-sentence paragraph) can be starting points to teach
students about organization, but many teachers or schools fail to
move their students beyond it, as we saw in the school Todd stud-
ied (see also Chapter 5). A continued focus on this one specific
template limits the very thinking students need to do as they read
and write. Instead of interacting with text, engaging in critical-
thinking activities, and focusing on meaning-making, students
may develop the idea that writing is only about structure, wedging
meaningless sentences into the correct format rather than figuring
out what they want to say. Undoubtedly, focusing on form risks the
exclusion of broader rhetorical. principles such as audience, pur-
pose, and voice (see Chapter 1). As the Conference on College
Composition and Communication position statement on writing
assessment (2014) states, “Writing is by definition social. Learning
to write entails learning to accomplish a range of purposes for a

range of audiences in a range of settings.” Clearly, then, perpetu-
ally following a rigid form significantly limits one’s ability to
“write.”
A point that is particularly crucial for L2 and struggling writers
is that conforming to a rigid form can reinforce a deficit model
of education, suggesting that students can’t handle more complex
tasks, so let’s lower expectations (Brannon et al., 2008; Campbell,
2014). Instead of teaching students to think, to act responsibly, to
give them space to make mistakes, and to take ownership, we are
training them to be rule-followers and unquestioning obedient cit-
izens. Study after study has pointed out the prevalence of formulaic
writing instruction in schools that have high numbers of language
minority students and are under pressure to raise test scores (Gil-
liland, 2017; Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013; Ruecker, 2013, 2014). Con-
trary to the claims of adherents to the five-paragraph essay, college
readiness is negatively affected by teaching only to the test. *
At times, writing teachers seem to be trapped by standardized
writing assessment, feeling locked into something that they know
is fundamentally flawed but that they have little ability to change
(see Chapters 5 and 9). Although it seems unlikely that teach-
ers can change the fact that so many high-stakes tests work from
a reductive understanding of the writing process driven by time
constraints, there are some practices writing teachers can engage
in to help students succeed on the tests without only teaching five-
paragraph essays.
1. Build assessment literacy.
It is important to promote an understanding of the place of assess-

ment in the work of teachers (Crusan, 2010; Crusan, Plakans, &
Gebril, 2016)—in particular, they need to be better interpreters of
test results. This requires understanding the various writing tasks
(book reports, lab reports, memoirs, narrative) that students will
encounter across disciplines (see Chapters 7 and 8) and what is
required in terms of writing for each task/genre (see Chapter 2).

If teachers are able to make the writing criteria clear, students will
better understand what truly matters in writing, and that often that
is dependent on a number of variables, including the context. Fur-
ther, teachers should make certain that they do their part by not
assigning and/or grading formulaic writing.
Many teachers feel that they know nothing about assessment
because they are not savvy users of statistics. To be a good class-
room assessor and a teacher who can prepare her students to be
successful writers does not require an in-depth understanding of
statistics. It does require, however, the ability to write appropriate
assessments and their accompanying scoring guides or rubrics that
gather the kinds of data teachers can then use to inform their ped-
agogy (see Crusan, 2010, for more guidance in developing writing
assignments and rubrics). An assessment-literate teacher under-
stands that this is the true purpose for assessment.
In her assessment class, Deborah helps future teachers under-
stand the purposes of assessment through activities like this: She
asks her students—all of whom are prospective teachers—to work
in groups and list the ways in which their teachers have assessed
them. Then she asks them to think about the why: Why did their
‘teachers ask them to do whatever it was that they called an assess-
ment task? Deborah's students wrestle with this question, but they
ultimately realize that teachers don't give their students a test just
to give a test; they don't give a spelling test because it’s Friday.
Rather, they give tests for a reason, and that reason is to find out
what students know (or don’t) or can (or cannot) do. This exer-
cise raises students’ awareness about the purposes of assessment,
why assessment is important, and what counts as assessment
(everything).
Assessment literacy supports teachers in a variety of ways:
lm By becoming better interpreters of test results, teachers are

able to understand where their students need additional
support and to then subsequently design activities to
provide this support.
m As they become better rubric designers, teachers will be

better able to make their assessment criteria transparent,
which will help their students see what matters in writing.
™ By understanding characteristics of various genres (book
reports, lab reports, memoirs, opinion pieces, analytical
essays), teachers will better prepare their students for what
is required of each genre. They will also be better positioned
to support other teachers in providing better writing
instruction across the curriculum.
m™ As more confident designers of tasks and rubrics, teachers
will be able to work more efficiently when preparing for
and teaching classes.
2. Analyze the tests, prompts, and rubrics to determine the

range of acceptable and successful responses that go beyond
a single form.
Teachers should be familiar with the tests their students take and
must be careful not to assume that one formula will be appropri-
ate for the different tests. While the TOEFLs® independent task,
for instance, remains relatively conservative in its approach—lean-
ing more toward formula and less toward analysis—the TOEFLs®
integrated task and the PARCC writing tasks are trying to take a
more genre-based approach that integrates reading and writing.
Gilliland and Pella (2017) have offered a number of suggestions
on teaching students how to analyze testing prompts, in part by
asking questions such as:
1. What is this question asking me to do?

Is there a text type or genre associated with what this
question is asking me to do? For example, is the question
asking me to argue, explain, or recount?
3. How do I know that? (What specific language tells me
this?)
4. To whom am I writing?
5. Am I supposed to remain objective and inform or to take a

position and persuade?
6. Does this question refer me to a text?
7. What evidence from a text or set of texts should I use to
support my response? (p. 129)
Analysis work like this will help students and teachers think about
testing prompts in a more meaningful way.
A closer look at tests involves reading not only their writing
prompts but the rubrics used to grade them if available. Some
questions to consider when evaluating rubrics:
What elements seem required and part of the evaluation?

Does the rubric reference an ideal and/or required length?
Does the rubric reward creativity?
Does the rubric and/or the prompt define a particular genre
or range of genres that are acceptable?
In Chapter 7, Johns provides additional guidance on evaluat-

-ing timed, in-class and out-of-class prompts and, in Chapter 8,
Pessoa and Mitchell provide an extensive examination of an out-
of-class prompt. But teachers can also invite students to analyze
assessments they’re expected to take. For example, let’s consider a
tenth grade PARCC prompt for the analytical essay:
You have read two passages, one from Jacey Choy’s “Red Cranes” and one
from Junichiro Tanizaki’s “The Firefly Hunt.” Though Mie and Sachiko,
the main characters in the passages, have certain similarities, the authors
develop their characters in very different ways. Write an essay in which
you analyze the different approaches the authors take to develop these
characters. In your essay, be sure to discuss how each author makes use of
elements such as:
= the main characters,
= interactions with other characters,
"the presentation of the main character's thoughts, and

= the strong feelings each character experiences at the end of each
passage. (PARCC, 2018)
Assuming we already discussed different types of genres with our

students, we could start by asking about their experiences reading
and writing analytical essays and what characteristics these essays
tend to have. Is the language more formal or more personal? What
kind of moves do they make? Then we could take a look at the sug-
gested focal areas following the direction “be sure to discuss how
each author makes use of such elements as....” Here, we could raise
the question of the need to discuss each one of those items, leading
students to recognize that the qualifying statement “such elements
as” means that these items can be a starting point and guide, but that
students don't have to address everything listed. Which items are
most interesting to them? Which items can they say the most about?
Finally, we turn them to the last part where students are asked to
include “specific evidence.” What do the writers mean by specific evi-
dence? Does this mean quotation? Are there other ways of providing
evidence? Students who are more careful readers of writing prompts
will better understand the flexibility they have within prompts and
be better positioned to break out of a particular formula.
3. Develop more diverse writing assessments for classroom

and local use.
Integrated skills tasks are becoming increasingly common on high-

stakes assessments. Thus, it is important to construct integrated
writing assessments where a written or oral text is based on stu-
dent synthesis of information obtained through listening and/or
reading (Plakans & Gebril, 2015). It is evident that some tests
(TOEFL® integrated task) and the Common Core State Stan-
dards are already promoting this approach.
Another important assignment to include would require incor-
poration of sources, something we know is tested (see the exam-
ple of the PARCC test question). Frame this assignment so that
students compose in a particular genre as they draw from different

sources. For example, ask them to choose a topic and phrase the
prompt as a question (questions as prompts keep the inquiry more
open-ended): “If you could change one thing about your school,
what would it be?” Instead of assigning an argumentative essay in
the formula of a five-paragraph essay, ask them to write an edito-
rial/opinion piece for their school or local newspaper. Spend time
in class looking at examples of the genre (opinion pieces are longer
and can initiate a discussion for instance), and then ask students to
research the topic by looking for real improvements that have been
made in other schools. Require that they incorporate quotations
from the other sources. In addition to writing an opinion piece,
students could use their research in other genres, such as creating a
PowerPoint for a presentation for the class or even for their school
board or administration. This piece allows them to consider what
they might do differently when they speak to make their case, as
opposed to writing. Various rubrics can be designed to align with
these different assignments and either shared with students in
advance, or even better, developed collaboratively with them, which
helps them think through the characteristics valued in different
types of text (Crusan, 2010).
Developing integrated, creative assignments like this has several
benefits. First, it clearly illustrates that, in the real world, students
can't simply follow a template to address all the communication
tasks they'll encounter. Also, source-based writing is the predomi-
nant type of writing assigned at colleges and universities (Addison
& McGee, 2010). Asking students to simultaneously work through
reading and writing tasks and do the necessary synthesis needed to
cite sources better prepares them for the diversity of writing they
will face in college and beyond.
4. Push students to break out of the five-paragraph essay form

by re-envisioning writing assignments.
We sympathize with the overburdened and inadequately supported

teacher whose students arrive with different proficiency levels
and language backgrounds and understand that a five-paragraph
formula can be a useful starting place; however, we have deep res-

ervations about curricula that fail to push students beyond this
rigid form. As Gilliland and Pella (2017) have illustrated in detail,
teachers can successfully prepare language learners for high-stakes
standardized exams while following a rich genre-based approach,
so it is important for teachers to not become stuck in a rut of low
expectations and to work to move students beyond the rigid five-
paragraph form as quickly as possible. It is important to move
beyond teaching of a set of skills and instead adopt a pedagogy
that embraces and honors the many ways students can write, such
as “the growing prevalence of modes of communication on social
networks, and blends of images, sounds, and text” (Casanave, 2017,
p. 70).
Tardy (2016) has argued for “genre innovation” as an antidote
to prescription. She has defined genre innovation as “departures
from genre convention that are perceived as effective and success-
ful by the text’s intended audience or community of practice” (p.
9). Tardy challenges teachers to change genres from within, “mak-
ing the normalized forms and practices visible to learners” (p.128),
which helps learners change and appropriate as necessary. While
we have limited ability to change testing formats, we can teach
students that they will be rewarded for innovative approaches to
writing on tests. For instance, in a study of more than 1,000 essays
from eighth and tenth grade writers in Delaware, Albertson (2007)
found that two-thirds of top scoring students used an organiza-
tional approach other than a five-paragraph theme. Albertson also
found that higher scores were earned by writers who used a vari-
ety of strategies—those who used sufficient elaboration to clarify,
differentiate, explain, extend, and enhance the central idea. More
importantly, this indicates that students can prepare for the variety
of writing they will face in college and beyond while also preparing
to be successful on a particular test.
Teachers might even consider taking the tests themselves and
using innovative strategies in the writing portions; if you score well
and don’t write a formulaic (five-paragraph) essay—tell your stu-
dents! For instance, at a panel organized by the editors of this col-
lection, an audience member (Sheila Mayne of the University of
Pennsylvania) shared a story of how she deliberately flouted every

convention of the five-paragraph essay when taking the TOEFL®
and earned a perfect score. This empowerment can aid students as
they face standardized tests because they can envision themselves
as writers who have the abilities to tackle a variety of communica-
tive situations.
Gilliland and Pella (2017) have explained the ways in which
genre-based instruction can prepare students for high-stakes stan-
dardized writing tests; they listed language demands for multilin-
gual writers as a big challenge and a reason that they might stick to
the formula. To help these students over the hump and allow them
to recognize that form does not equal good writing, Gilliland and
Pella advocated for procedures that help students make meaning
from less familiar texts, exposing them to a variety of genres in the
hopes that they will take chances with their writing. These proce-
dures include:
@ facilitating students’ use of oral language to understand and

show their comprehension of written texts, such as acting
out scenes from stories.
™ responding to movie adaptations of literary works and radio
interviews with authors and actors to draw on students’ oral
language strengths.
M using creative writing and drawing to connect to the
themes of literary or informational texts.
™ focusing vocabulary lessons on words and phrases that
appear regularly in the test questions and instructions.
M practicing task analysis and outlining with released
test questions and test-taking strategy practice, such as
eliminating less likely distractors on a multiple choice item.
(p. 124)
When shifting to genre-based instruction, teachers need to pro-

vide examples of authentic writing. Everywhere we look, there are
models that demonstrate to students that there is no one way to

respond to a particular writing task. For instance, moving beyond
the “narrative essay,” Todd has had his first-year college students
read and write magazine-style profiles about people important in
a student's life or write a memoir focused on a particular aspect
of their literacy or language development. To follow Casanave’s
(2017) point about multimodality, the writing program Todd
teaches in often has students complete multimodal assignments,
such as a discourse community website in which students profile
the languages and genres used within a community that is impor-
tant to them, such as a sports club or something more personal
like their family. To prepare for these projects, students examine
not only existing student websites but published examples so they
can get a sense of what makes a website successful in real life. It
is important for teachers to pay attention to these authentic mod-
els when designing assignments, aligning both their prompts and
rubrics with what makes the focal genre effective.
Concluding Thoughts
As we have shown in this chapter, timed, high-stakes standardized

tests are highly limited in their ability to measure students’ abili-
ties to write in a variety of contexts and genres. Worse, some tests
(in the form of test scores) are increasingly being used to evaluate
teachers. In Todd’s state of New Mexico, the current teacher evalu-
ation system uses student test scores to calculate 50 percent of a
teacher’s effectiveness, which impacts teachers’ career trajectory and
their compensation. Sadly, externally imposed pressures like these
often perpetuate the teaching of rigid, form-based writing as a strat-
egy to boost test scores because students are given very little time
to plan and engage in creative approaches under the timed-writing
conditions of major standardized tests. Therefore, because of these
additional consequences, we urge all educators to join together and
continue to push back against policies that continue to limit the
richness of writing instruction in schools around the world.
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a
Where Do We Go from Here?
ANN M. JOHNS AND NIGEL A. CAPLAN
As we wrote, read, edited, and discussed the chapters for

this volume, it struck us anew just how detrimental the five-para-
graph essay or any rigid form is, especially for L2 writers. In hopes
of inspiring readers to act, we conclude this volume with four
topics: (1) questions that the book has answered about writing,
writers, and writing instruction; (2) questions that remain open
about genre-based writing instruction; (3) concrete suggestions for
what you, as informed faculty and administrators, can do to effect
changes in your writing curriculum or assessments; and (4) future
directions for textbook writing, teacher training, and professional
development.
Answers to the Major Questions Raised
«w\Nhat is good writing?

Each chapter in this volume addresses this question in some way,
and though the answers differ, we still can synthesize their claims:
Good writing serves the author’s purposes in a specific context
and addresses the audience for which the text is written, employing
the appropriate genre for the situation. Good writing persuades,
informs, entertains, advises, or serves other intended purposes
221
222 CONCLUSION
through choices of genre, content, organization, and language

that defy over-generalization or rigid attention to formulae. In
contrast, the five-paragraph essay is a structure devoid of situa-
tion and ambivalent to the complexities of purpose and context.
Its only possible purpose is to satisfy—often unsatisfactorily—the
perceived demands of an assignment or assessment (Chapter 10).
It is not good writing. 2
Indeed, the five-paragraph was never intended to be good writ-
ing. Instead, it was a response to complaints about bad writing
produced by students who were unfamiliar with the demands of
academic contexts (Chapter 1). To see the five-paragraph essay
as sufficient, therefore, is to condemn students to a pedagogy of
mediocracy, with adverse consequences for their academic and pro-
fessional futures.
Thus, good writing cannot be encapsulated in a single text or
simple definition. Since it is always situated, its definition must
be expected to vary across widely differing contexts and genres. As
the chapters in this volume tell you, good writing might: “bend”
forms and genres (Chapter 2); build arguments in academic dis-
ciplines through description and analysis (Chapter 8); explore sig-
nificant social issues (Chapter 6); describe a tourist destination
(Chapter 4); earn the writer a grant, conference slot, or doctoral
degree (Chapter 9); demonstrate students’ learning on a timed
test (Chapter 7); or demonstrate students’ ability to translate what
they know or can do into a second language (Chapter 3). But good
writing cannot be constrained in a single form with the unsubstan-
tiated hope that the skills learned will magically transfer to future
academic tasks (Chapters 4 and 6).
wu2, \Nhat do good writers do?

Good writers thoroughly assess the writing task and situation for
which they are producing a text. Depending on the context: writ-
ers may analyze a prompt from their classroom (Chapter 7); they
may study the habits of mind and communication of a discipline
(Chapters 2, 8, and 9); they may consider models of good writ-
ing from a genre written in a related context (Chapters 4 and 9);
Conclusion 223
they may attempt similarity transfer across contexts (Chapter 6);

or they may complete several, related context assessments or text
analyses while planning for and drafting their work. Whatever the
case, this collection shows that planning for writing involves read-
ing closely; studying the audience, discipline, and writing context;
analyzing an appropriate genre; setting goals; and choosing effec-
tive language. By contrast, the five-paragraph essayist often starts
with little but form and proceeds to fill in slots, even if those dif-
fer from the moves or stages that would make the text effective
(Chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9).
ww 3, \Nhat should writing teachers be doing in the

classroom?
The final section of each chapter offers specific teaching strate-
gies for elementary and secondary classrooms, IEPs, first-year and
upper-level Composition classes, disciplinary courses, or graduate
school. Although the details inevitably vary, the pedagogical prin-
ciples do not. Here is what we believe all writing teachers should
be doing:
Y Assigning target situation analyses: What students need

to accomplish as writers will vary considerably by context.
As noted by several contributors to this volume, writers’
genre analyses will include, when relevant, examples of
pedagogical, professional, or “outside world” genres and the
contexts in which they are appropriate, as they plan their
writing.
Y Encouraging “rhetorical flexibility”: We need to introduce
our student readers and writers to multiple genres and to
multiple texts from each genre, enabling them to analyze
varied texts and contexts, reflect on their past experiences,
and adapt to different tasks, goals, and assessments
(Chapters 1, 7, and 10). This involves teaching students
how to read as writers, drawing their awareness to genre
conventions, as well as to ways in which these conventions
can be reimagined or stretched (Chapter 2).
224 CONCLUSION
V Presenting genre not as fixed mode but as a “thinking

tool”: Tardy (Chapter 2) defines genre as “a metacognitive
tool for linking ways of writing with rhetorical situations,
including task goals, reader and writer relations and
roles, outcomes, and community values and expectations”
(p. 30). Authors in this volume provide examples of
the tools they use to assist students to think about and
reflect upon their literacy experiences. We believe that all
writers, starting with the early grades and earliest levels of
language proficiency, can engage in this analysis through
appropriately supported interactions with well-formed and
complete prompts, model texts, and contexts.
Y ‘Teaching language in the context of writing: The
exclusive focus on the five-paragraph essay leaves little
space for the teaching of grammar as anything other than
error reduction and an overreliance on a few of the many
transition words and phrases available. However, from a
genre perspective, language needs to be in focus throughout
any writing assignment as teachers help students to make
the linguistic choices that will effectively communicate
meaning, establish stance and positioning, and organize
their texts (Chapters 1, 5, and 8).
¥ Thoughtfully scaffolding writing tasks: Scaffolding may
take many forms, depending on the needs and levels of the
students. Some of the volume’s contributors argue for the
Teaching/Learning Cycle (Chapters 1, 4, and 5), during
which texts are modeled and students write collaboratively
before attempting a text in a new genre on their own.
Others suggest devoting considerable time to comparing
and contrasting texts in a disciplinary genre (Chapters
2 and 8), “curating an online identity” (Chapter 9), or
“reading a class” (Chapter 7). However, we do not accept
the argument that presenting students with a universal
formula is a scaffold: It is a crutch that will hold writers
Conclusion 995
back rather than a support that will bring them to new

understandings of what it means to write well—and what it
means to be a good writer in different genres and contexts
(Chapters 5 and 6).
Y Analyzing and critically evaluating writing assessments:
Students’ writing is assessed, of course, and it is important
that students understand and respond to these assessments
(Chapters 7 and 8). However, as Crusan and Ruecker argue
(Chapter 10), misperceptions about high-stakes writing
tests should not drive instructional decisions: Drilling
the five-paragraph essay is neither good test preparation
nor good teaching. While structure and organization
are important to texts and tests, most high-stakes and
classroom writing assessments demand much more from
students, including development of ideas, synthesis of
sources, and effective cohesion. The five-paragraph essay
“keeps you from thinking too much” (White, 2008, p. 525),
but most tests reward the very thinking that the five-
paragraph essay can discourage.
What Questions about Developing Genre

Curricula Have the Chapters Left Unanswered?
«uw, \Nhat theoretical stance on genres should

drive instruction?
Even though there are at least three theories of genre in the litera-
ture (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010), all of which are represented in this
volume, many teachers have found that melding the best or most
useful elements of the three is the most useful approach. Some
authors in this volume have done just that to achieve their peda-
gogical ends. The goal is successfully situated writing—not neces-
sarily theoretical purity.
226 CONCLUSION
wu 2,How should we select and organize genres for the

classroom?
As the contributors all note, much depends on who the students are:
their ages, proficiencies, academic levels, and goals as writers and stu-
dents. One challenging group of courses are the “general academic
English classes” in which many students are enrolled at the pre-
university level or in first-year Composition classes in colleges and
universities. In our work for these classes, we have selected examples
of book or movie reviews, opinion editorials, abstracts, accessible
research articles, blogs, emails, resumes and personal statements, all
of which include language and rhetorical modes (e.g., comparison/
contrast, cause/effect) that can be found in many writing assign-
ments. However, your students may have other needs. For example,
students may be enrolled simultaneously in a disciplinary course,
and its genres could be selected as targets in the writing course.
The most important point is that students be exposed in all writing
classes to a variety of genres and to multiple texts in each genre.
Whatever genres are selected, we recommend nof calling them
essays as much as possible. Though we understand that faculty
across the disciplines often employ the term essay for a variety of
text types (Johns, 2008), we believe that assigning an essay may be
too confusing for students as you attempt to disentangle them from
their prior five-paragraph essay experiences. Most pedagogical and
disciplinary genres are not, in fact, essays (Chapter 1). Naming the
genres carefully encourages students to see writing as situated in
contexts rather than predictably formulaic (see Chapter 4 for one
possible taxonomy, for example).
«3, How should we approach teaching? What steps

should the writing process take?
In genre-based teaching, there are many possibilities for writing
processes, depending upon time limits, writer familiarity with
genre, context, audience, and other factors. An example unit plan
Conclusion 227
appears in the Appendix at the end of this Conclusion to use as a

starting point, and sections of other lessons appear throughout this
volume.
Fighting the Good Fight
We understand that essays with fixed structures, promoted by

many textbooks, are so embedded in some programs that assisting
colleagues, material developers, publishers, and administrators to
make changes is very difficult. Nonetheless, we also believe that
only through the efforts of individual teachers, teacher groups, and
the students themselves (or their parents) will changes be made.
So here are our suggestions for promoting changes in writing cur-
ricula and assessments:
1. Become informed members of department committees

or other curriculum-related groups and make reasoned
arguments for curricular change. Start small. Identify a
single assignment you can revise with a willing colleague so
you can demonstrate the affective and pedagogical benefits
of a genre-based curriculum (see Caplan & Farling, 2017,
for an example of a successful collaboration).
2. Introduce your fellow teachers to genre-based tasks, a
number of which appear in this volume. Often, teachers
just need to be presented with an alternative so they feel
more comfortable as they discard the “security blanket” of
the five-paragraph essay.
3. Bring syllabi from other writing programs that are genre-
based to demonstrate how such a curriculum, and its tasks,
can be organized. Or, demonstrate using your own lessons
and classroom activities how a more rhetorically flexible
curriculum can be successful.
228 CONCLUSION
4. Forma reading group or book club with your colleagues

where chapters from this volume and their pedagogical
implications are discussed. During or after the reading
group meets, offer to work with curriculum developers to
change the class syllabi and goals. You might even inquire
about whether one of the volume editors or contributors is
willing to call in to your meeting by video chat!
5. Present the arguments against the continued reliance
on the five-paragraph essay or other fixed, non-evolving
text types at professional meetings. Then take your
presentation back to your home department and ask to
present it there.
6. Among those in power or most vocal at your educational
institution, find individuals who would be most open to
change in the curriculum and who also see the weaknesses
in your department’s current goals for writing. At the
university level, we have found that some of the most
amenable to change are faculty from the disciplines, who
immediately recognize that students are not prepared for a
variety of genres by the writing classes currently taught.
7. Ask administrators, test-developers, and, if possible,
publishers to meet with students in your classes about
your current writing curriculum. Our students can
sometimes be much more convincing than we can be
when they contrast their writing classes with the actual
writing experiences they have in academic classes and their
professions.
8. Don't adopt textbooks that teach the five-paragraph
essay. Publishers tell us that they continue to offer these
textbooks because the market demands them. By applying
some of the teaching suggestions in this volume and
carefully selecting reading and writing materials that do not
prioritize the five-paragraph essay in place of their existing
textbooks, the writing community can exert pressure on
publishers to produce more authentic and interesting
materials.
Conclusion 229
9. Invite a genre expert, perhaps one of the contributors to

this volume, to come to your campus or school (in person
or virtually) to talk to teachers and give practical advice
about classroom pedagogies. As you have probably realized,
we are all passionate about this campaign!
Future Directions
«mw Research, Professional Development, and Textbooks

Since teachers often teach the way they were taught, there is a need
for more research and professional development in genre-based
writing instruction for different classroom contexts. Good books
already exist that help teachers learn how to teach both familiar
genres and those they have never tried to write (e.g., Cheng, 2018;
Ferris & Hedgcock, 2013; Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013; Tardy, 2016).
However, there are still gaps, especially for first-year Composition
and pre-college writing textbooks written specifically for ESL and
multilingual students that teach genres and not five-paragraph
essays. Similar books do exist for graduate student writers (Swales &
Feak, 2012), monolingual and more advanced Composition classes
(e.g., Miller-Cochran, Stamper, & Cochran, 2016), and to a lesser
extent IEPs (Caplan & Bixby, 2014). While a writing textbook is
not a necessity for a writing course, too often the textbook becomes
the curriculum, especially when teachers lack the time, resources,
training, or authority to design a more effective course. At least
then there should be the option of choosing a coursebook that is
not organized by structure (sentence, paragraph, short essay, longer
essay) or rhetorical mode (process, description, comparison, etc.).
In addition, it is vital that pre-service teaching education pro-
grams, including Master’s in TESOL degrees, specifically address
L2 writing (beyond “literacy”). It is understandable that under-
prepared teachers would flee to the perceived safety of the five-
paragraph essay. The problem is especially acute in U.S. higher
education, where many instructors stand in front of first-year writ-
ing classes with very little training at all and often none in writing
230 CONCLUSION
pedagogy and L2 Composition. More colleges and universities need

to reassess their hiring policies, adjunct working conditions, and
graduate teaching assistant training and support. As an initial step
in addressing these issues, we suggest ways to use this volume in
pre- and in-service teacher education and professional development.
«Tips for Teacher Education Courses and Study Groups

As has been demonstrated throughout this volume, genre-aware
instruction can be approached in various ways, emphasizing par-
ticular processes for reading and writing (Chapters 1, 4, and 5) or
studying genres in the disciplines (Chapters 2, 8, and 9) or in-class
activities (Chapter 7). However, there are certain topics and basic
principles upon which all of the volume authors agree. Thus, dis-
cussions might be organized around these questions, drawing from
a variety of chapters in this volume:
1. How is genre defined? Why is it argued that a genre-based

pedagogy should be central to the teaching of writing?
2. Why is the five-paragraph essay not a genre? What is lost
by treating it as a genre?
3. What are the elements of the text and context that must be
considered in genre analysis?
4. How can you incorporate the following essential elements
of genre-based instruction in your current or future
teaching context?
. analyzing and writing a variety of genres
. promoting rhetorical flexibility among student writers
using multiple model texts from each target genre
. teaching genre conventions (what identifies texts from a
ao»p,
single genre) as well as genre evolution and variation
e. emphasizing the vital role of writers, audiences, and
writing conditions
f. guiding students’ research into genres (purpose,
organization, and language choices)
Conclusion 231
g. focusing on the language necessary to achieve writer

goals and produce successful texts in target genres
h. scaffolding assignments to build genre awareness and
expertise prior to independent writing (see Appendix)
i. inviting students to reflect upon experiences with genre
analysis, writing processes, and production
You and your colleagues or teachers in training can use these ques-
tions as a way to focus on the issues that the contributors identify
as critical and apply them to your own teaching context.
«uu \Nhat Would It Take to Truly Change Practices in

Writing Classrooms?
We recognize that no one book will end the practice of teach-

ing the five-paragraph essay. We also understand the concern of
teachers and administrators who are not ready to adopt the most
comprehensive reforms that we and our co-authors advocate in
this volume. However, we all need to start “nibbling at the edges”
and adopting some of the relevant practices discussed in this col-
lection. In addition, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods
research is needed to test the strengths and weaknesses of different
approaches to teaching different genres.
But practices must change in programs that perpetuate the five-
paragraph essay. The evidence reviewed throughout this book is
clear: The five-paragraph essay is not good writing, it does not
teach good writing, and it is detrimental to our students.
REFERENCES
Bawarshi, A.S., & Reiff, MJ. (2010). Genre:An introduction to history, theory,
research, and pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press/WAC Clearing
House.
Caplan, N. A., & Bixby, J. (2014). Inside writing 4. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
232 CONCLUSION
Caplan, N. A., & Farling, M. (2017). A dozen heads are better than one: Col-
laborative writing in genre-based pedagogy. TESOL Journal, 8,564-581.
http://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.287
Cheng, A. (2018). Genre and graduate-level research writing. Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.
Ferris, D. R., & Hedgcock, J. (2013). Teaching L2 composition: Purpose, ae:
and practice (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Johns, A. M. (2008). Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest. Language Teaching, 41(02), 237-252. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0261444807004892
Miller-Cochran, S., Stamper, R., & Cochran, S. (2016). An insider’s guide to
academic writing:A rhetoric and reader. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Essential tasks and skills (3rd ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
White, E. (2008). My five-paragraph theme theme. College Composition and
Conclusion 233
Appendix: Genre-Aware Writing |nstruction:

An Assignment Sequence
This assignment sequence is intended as a guide for instructional

planning. The arrangement and format of the activities will depend
on the time available and the level of the class. The example is a unit
of instruction to teach editorial writing that would be appropriate
for high schools, intensive English programs, developmental writing
courses, or first-year Composition, depending on the choice of texts.
Classroom
Activity Example Genre: Editorial
What are students going to do at the end of the unit? For example, will they write
u nit outcome | an editorial for a campus or local newspaper on a topic related to class readings?
Activate prior |Groups talk about what they think an editorial is and does.
knowledge
Assess the By skimming the headlines of recent editors, students are led to discuss the context
writing of the genre: who writes and reads editorials? Why? When? On what topics?
situation
pushes genre boundaries.

Analyze Using guided questions, help students identify the purpose, audience, and moves or
models stages of the texts and decide which moves are required and which are optional or
flexible.
Investigate Guide students to identify language choices (vocabulary and grammar) at different
language stages of the text, using students’ proficiency to determine appropriate targets for
instruction.
Collaborative |Teachers following the Teaching/Learning Cycle write a new exemplar of the target
genre together and/or have students write a text in pairs or groups, e.g., an editorial
to the student newspaper arguing for or against a controversial policy.
Language Here or elsewhere, the teacher focuses on a useful point of grammar and/
mini-lesson or vocabulary, such as the use of modal verbs and evaluative adverbs (clearly,
unfortunately, etc.) to hedge and boost claims in an argument.
Evaluative The teacher presents or creates with the class a rubric that clearly states the evaluative
criteria criteria to define a good editorial at the students’ level in terms of content (claims and
evidence), stance (a strong position is advocated and defended through appropriate
language choices), organization (the text follows the genre conventions or bends them
in effective ways), and presentation (level-appropriate accuracy, proofreading, and
formatting).
Individual By now, students have chosen a topic on which to write (individually, in groups, or as
writing a class) and have gathered enough information to write from a position of knowledge.
They draft, peer review, revise, and edit their editorials, using the rubric, model texts,
and collaboratively written editorial as scaffolds.
The teacher guides the students in a discussion of the genre, other genres it is similar
to, and skills they have learned which may transfer to other tasks in the future.
ut or IS O S
VUsIUULLUMIULUL ADULULUddd ddd dddtddddtdddtthtd C on trib
Nigel A. Caplan, Associate Professor at the University of Dela-

ware, is an ESL teacher, researcher, and materials writer. He has
written or co-authored several writing and grammar textbooks,
including Grammar Choices for Professional and Graduate Writers
(Michigan). His research interests include genre-based writing
pedagogy, disciplinary literacy, and graduate communication.
Ulla M. Connor, Chancellor’s Professor of English, Barbara E. and

Karl R. Zimmer Chair in Intercultural Communication, and Direc-
tor of the International Center for Intercultural Communication in
Indiana University School of Arts, teaches and conducts research
on intercultural rhetoric in second language writing and intercul-
tural communication in healthcare settings. She is the author or
editor of 10 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters.
Deborah Crusan, Professor, TESOL/Applied Linguistics, Wright

State University, has continually championed, researched, written
about, and taught assessment of the four skills with a particular focus
on writing assessment. Among her publications is her recent book The
Politics ofEnglish Second Language Writing Assessment in Global Con-
texts (Routledge), co-edited with Todd Ruecker. She is also author of
Assessment in the Second Language Writing Classroom (Michigan) and
various articles and book chapters on writing assessment.
Luciana C. de Oliveira is Professor and Chair in the Department

of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Miami, Florida. Her research
focuses on issues related to teaching emergent to advanced bilin-
guals (EABs) at the K-12 level, including the role of language in
234
Contributors 235
learning the content areas and teacher education, advocacy and

social justice. She served as President of the TESOL International
Association (2018-2019).
Estela Ene is an Associate Professor at Indiana University -

Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), where she serves as
Director of the EAP Program and Director of the TESOL MA
Program. She conducts classroom-oriented and corpus-based
research on L2 writing in ESL and EFL contexts. She has written
about pedagogical practices, teacher training, and language policy;
the writing processes of multilingual writers; and CALL (specifi-
cally e-feedback). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Second
Language Writing, System, Assessing Writing, the CALICO Journal,
ELT], AJELT, ITL-International Journal ofApplied Linguistics, and
the Wiley Encyclopedia ofApplied Linguistics, among others.
Christine B. Feak is a faculty member at the English Language

Institute, University of Michigan, where she is the lead lecturer
for dissertation writing and writing for publication courses. She
is co-author (with John Swales) of Academic Writing for Graduate
Students and the new English in Today’s Research World book series
(Michigan), which focus on the writing of research genres and
subgenres. In addition to teaching and textbook writing, she also
serves as co-editor of English for Specific Purposes, an international
peer-reviewed journal focusing on topics relevant to the teaching
and learning of discourse for specific communities.
Dana Ferris is Professor and Director of the University Writing

Program at the University of California, Davis. She previously
directed a large first-year program for multilingual university writ-
ers in which genre-based pedagogy was a central characteristic.
Her publications include nine books and over 50 articles and book
chapters. She is also the current co-editor of the Journal of Second
Language Writing and was the founding editor of the Journal of
Response to Writing.
236 CONTRIBUTORS
Hogan Hayes is an Assistant Professor at the Sacramento State

University. He has been teaching writing for fourteen years. His
research interests include learning transfer and portfolio-based
assessment.
Ann M. Johns, Professor Emerita, Linguistics and Writing Stud-

ies, San Diego State University, has devoted more than 25 years
to researching, developing, and teaching genre-based pedagogies.
Her publications include five books and over 100 articles and book
chapters.
Thomas D. Mitchell is an Associate Teaching Professor of Eng-

lish at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where he teaches
courses in academic reading and writing, technical writing, and
discourse studies. His current research focuses on scaffolding aca-
demic literacy development through interdisciplinary collabora-
tions. His work has been published in international journals such
as Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education,
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and English for Specific
Purposes.
Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, Associate Professor of English and

Director of the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, teaches Com-
position, ESL, and writing teacher education at the University of
New Hampshire. Her publications include The ELL Writer: Mov-
ing Beyond the Basics in the Secondary Classroom (Teacher College
Press) and Writing Across Language and Culture: Inclusive Strategies
for Working with ELL Writers in the ELA Classroom (NCTE).
Silvia Pessoa is an Associate Teaching Professor of English at

Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Through interdisciplinary
collaborations, she supports academic writing development using
genre-based pedagogy and systemic functional linguistics. Her
work has appeared in numerous book chapters and journal articles.
Contributors 237
Todd Ruecker is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Compo-

sition at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on
exploring the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of edu-
cational institutions and developing innovative ways to support
student and teacher success. His work has appeared in a variety of
journals and he has published four books, including The Politics of
Second Language Writing Assessment in Global Contexts (Routledge),
co-edited with Deborah Crusan.
Sharon L. Smith is a doctoral candidate specializing in literacy

and language learning for multilingual students in the Department
of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. Her research
focuses on best practices for literacy and language instruction
to support linguistically and culturally diverse students in the
elementary school context.
Christine M. Tardy is Professor of English Applied Linguistics at

the University of Arizona, where she teaches undergraduate and
graduate courses in TESOL and applied linguistics. Her primary
interests are in second language writing and genre theory and
pedagogy; her publications in these areas include three books and
numerous articles and book chapters.
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Note: italicized page numbers contain tables or figures
abstract outlining, 57 argument writing within genres,

activity phases, TLC: collaborative 32-34, 69-70. See also argument
construction, 74, 81, 82, 83; writing within disciplines
independent construction, 74, assessments, 133-134, 209-211;
81, 82, 83; joint construction, development of, 213-214
73-74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83; text assignment analysis, 137, 142-145,
deconstruction, 73, 75—78, 144, 149, 150, 158-159
83, 85, 106. See also Teaching/ assignments, out-of-class, 140-141,
Learning Cycle (TLC) 145, 146
advocating for better writing audience, writing for, 16, 35, 108,
instruction, 109-111 182, 187; within disciplines, 58,
analysis of mentor texts, 35 144-145, 190, 191-193; lack of
analysis of writing tasks, 142-145, in five-paragraph essay, 71, 91,
144, 149, 150, 158-159 192-193
analysis writing within disciplines,
151, 154-156, 158, 159, 168, benchmarks, scaffolding and,
174; evaluations and, 164, in 108-109
History class, 160-164, 163, Beyond Convention (Tardy), 145
176; in Information Systems
class, 160-164, 165-170, 166, Caplan, Nigel, v, 25-26
167, 169, 177; learning when to CaRS (Create a Research Space),
uses 60; 1 / Opel 7725173 188, 190
argument writing within case analysis genre, 165-170, 166,
disciplines, 151, 152, 154, 156, 167, 169
158, 159, 174; claim-reasons cause-and-effect relationships,
framework, 163, 169; in History 161-162
class, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, CCCC (Conference on
176; in Information Systems College Composition and
class, 165-170, 166, 167, 169, Communication), 208
171, 177; learning when to use, CEFR (Common European
POOMIOSLT 197 2,073 Framework), 49
240 INDEX
CET (College English Test), 49, descriptive writing within

205 disciplines, 151, 155, 156, 158,
claim-reasons framework, 163, 169 159, 174; activities for learning
class culture, 133-134 when to use, 170, 171, 172,
“classroom genre,” 28, 29 1 73; example prompts for, 160,
closed genres, 183, 184, 186 in History class, 160, 161, 162,
collaborative construction phase, 163, 164, 176; in Information
TLC, 74, 81, 82, 83. See also Systems class, 165-170, 166,
Teaching/Learning Cycle 167, 169, 277
(TLE) disciplinary frameworks, 44, 46,
College English Test (CET), 49, 157, 168, 186; genres within,
205 152-154, 165-170, 166-167,
college readiness, 102, 110, 209 169, 174, 184, 188, 190; writing
Common Core State Standards, for audience and, 58, 145,
65, 68-72, 69, 75-76, 207, 213 190, 191-193. See also analysis
Common European Framework writing within disciplines;
(CEFR), 49 argument writing within
Composition in nineteenth century, disciplines; descriptive writing
5-6 within disciplines
“Compositions—Write ‘em Right!” dynamic transfer, 123-125, 127
(Pudlowski), 25-26
Conference on College Elbow, P., 3
Composition and English Journal, The, 6,7, 8
Communication. See CCCC English theme, 5-6, 9, 12
context, writing within, 13, 16, 130, ESL writing textbooks, 2-3, 12, 14
145, 190, 192; cultural context essay: ambiguity of term, 138-139,
and, 44-47, 52-59, 56, 57 152-153, 161; definition, 8, 48;
conventions compared to formulas, history of, 8-10. See also five-
vii, 28, 30, 37-39, 38, 104, 203, paragraph essay
205 evaluations, analysis writing and,
CR (contrastive rhetoric), 52 164
criticisms of five-paragraph essay. explanatory writing, 68-70, 69
See five-paragraph essay,
criticisms of five-paragraph essay, appeal of: as
cultural context of writing, 44-47, accessible starting point, 208,
52-59, 56, 57 215; develops thesis-driven
writing abilities, 93; ease of
demographics, prevalence of five- teaching and grading, 11,
paragraph essay and, 10-11 20, 94-95, 181; familiarity,
Index 241
3; history of, 5-12; quick to textbooks and, 12; graphic

write, 95; standardized test organizers and, 101; inflexibility
compatibility, 58, 93, 181-182 of, vi, 7, 9, 66; mentor texts and,
five-paragraph essay, criticisms of: 33; prioritized over content, 7,
boring to teach and read, 130; 66, 91, 100, 179; in response
form prioritized over content, to chaotic compositions, 6;
7, 66, 91, 179; homogenizing, standardized testing and,
98-99; inflexible, vi, 7, 66; 201-203, 205, 217; teaching
lack of consideration of uses for, 34-36. See also five-
audience, 71, 91, 192-193; paragraph essay
lack of preparation for future
writing tasks, vii, 141, 146, gatekeeping, writing and, 100-101
178-179, 192-193, 202-203, genre, characteristics of, 56, 59,
209; lack of purpose, 91; 67-71, 69, 128, 151-154;
lack of research supporting flexibility, 28, 72, 184-185, 205;
effectiveness, 116-119, 178, purpose-based, 27-28, 32-33,
181; lack of situatedness, 3, 67, 76, 77, 193; rhetorical
10; lack of transference, vii, classification, 26, 29
125, 131, 180; limits creativity genre, definition of, 27, 28, 67
and development, 51-52, 66, genre-based writing instruction,
119, 208; lowers expectations 14-18, 17, 85, 102, 103-104,
of student writing, 209; 107, 216-217; argument
oversimplifying, vii, 52, 66, 90, writing, 32-34; bridges from
102; “starting place” fallacy, 2, five-paragraph essay, 25, 34-38,
PG F19:-125, 1302085 35; case analysis and, 165-170,
five-paragraph essay, regional status 166, 167, 169; challenges of,
variations, 42—46 20, 97-98, 182; Common Core
five-paragraph essay, structure of, State Standards and, 65, 68-72,
vii, 6, 24-25, 35; hook, vi, 19, 69, 75-76; comparison between
190, 192; thesis statement, vi, L1 and L2, 143; within
19,126, 181 disciplines, 152-154, 184, 188,
formulaic (formal) writing 190; elementary education and,
structures, 24-26, 29, 44, 95, 65-66; genre analysis, 20; in
111; compared to conventions, graduate programs, 183-185;
vii, 4, 28, 30, 37-39, 38, 104, importance of, 187-188; of
203, 205; distinguishing job search, 195-196; open and
between templates and genres, closed genres, 183, 184, 186; in
30-39, 31, 32, 35, 38, 203; pre-enrollment programs for
eight-legged essay, 45; ESL graduate students, 193-194;
242 INDEX
stages, 76-77; templates international writing instruction

distinguished from genres, and student writing, 2, 42-51,
30=39,:31)32,.35,. 38, 203 55, 137-138, 205
“genre innovation,” 215-216 internet identity genres, 194, 195
Gilliland, B., 99, 211, 215, 216 internet resources for mentor texts,
grading. See assessments; rubrics w/2
graduate writing, 178-196, 189, intertextuality, 142-143, 182,
190 185-188
graphic organizers for five- introduction writing, 188-189,
paragraph essays, 90, 101 194
IR (intercultural rhetoric), 52-55,
Hamilton: The Revolution (Miranda, 59
McCarter), 36 Iran, writing instruction in, 50
Harklau, L., 99-100
high-stakes assessment. See job search genres, 195-196
standardized testing Johns, Ann M., 15, 44, 150, 152,
Hillocks, G., 95, 98, 99 ae
History class, writing for, 160, 161, joint construction phase, TLC, 18,
162, 163, 164, 176 73-74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83. See
hook, vi, 19, 190, 192 also Teaching/Learning Cycle
(TLC)
independent construction phase,
TLC, 74, 81, 82, 83, See also Kachru, Y., 45
Teaching/Learning Cycle Kaplan, R. B., 45, 52
(TLC) knowledge display, 154-155, 156,
independent essay (TOEFL®), 158, 159, 165-166, 170, 171,
205-206, 211. See also 172,473
TOEFL® knowledge transformation,
inductive writing instruction, 18, 47 154-155, 158, 159, 165, 170,
informational writing, 68-70, 69 LJipLI20I 73
Information Systems class, writing
for, 160-164, 165-170, 166, “large culture,” 53-56
LOT 1G IMIR AG learning transfer. See transference
integrated essay (TOEFL®), Leki; 1.107
205-206, 211, 213. See also lower-level track writing, 89, 93,
TOEFL® 98-100, 209
intercultural rhetoric (IR), 52-55
International Education meaningful writing assignments,
Association study of written 12-16, 20, 71, 103-104,
composition, 44 107-108, 110-111
Index 243
Melzer, D., 138, 139, 140 PellajiS.52119'2153216

mentor texts: definition, 104; PhD application genres, 196
discipline classes, within, 150, prompt directives, 144-145
159; genre-based writing prompt examples for research
instruction and, 33-35, 150, papers, 140-141
159, 214, 216-217; online Pudlowski, Victor, 6, 7, 8-9, 25-26,
resources for, 172; scaffolding 28
and, 103-107, 111; selection purpose, writing with: in genres,
of, 105-107; use in TLC, 18, 27-28, 32-33, 67, 76, 77, 193;
75-78, 85 lack of in five-paragraph essay,
metalanguage, 30, 75, 84, 137 91; in student writing, 6, 13-14,
Michigan Corpus of Upper-level 16, 39, 43-44, 47, 182
Student Papers (MICUSP), 34,
35, 172 “Reading Your Classes” modules,
modeling, teacher, 79, 81, 84-85, 135-136, 146
128 reflective writing, 108-109
model texts. See mentor texts research paper prompt examples,
Montaigne, Michel de, 8, 12 140-141
rubrics, 98, 180, 210, 211-213,
narrative writing, 9, 68, 69-70, 71, 214; PARCC, 208; TOEFL®,
202, 204 206-207
near transfer, 121, 124 Ruecker, Todd, viii, 201-202, 204,
Nichols, Duane, 7, 8—9, 10 208, 217
nineteenth century composition, Russell, D. R., 28, 58, 120-121,
5-6, 10 138
online identity genres, 194, 195 sample texts. See mentor texts
online resources for mentor texts, scaffolding (five-paragraph essay
Gs as crutch), 90-91; changes in
open genres, 183, 184, 186 practice, 103-111; misguided
opinion writing, 69-70 intentions, 97-103; scholarship
organization, signals of, 126 on, 92-93; students directed
outlining, 34, 56-57, 128, 129 toward, 93-97
out-of-class assignments, 140-141, scaffolding (tools to gradually
145, 146 increase student independence),
92, 103, 110-111, 128, 130; for
Partnership for Assessment of case analysis, 165; vs. drawing
Readiness for College and from prior knowledge, 142;
Careers (PARCC), 207-208, evaluative criteria as tool, 82;
211-213 inquiry-based learning and,
244 INDEX
108-109; mentor texts and, take-home tasks, 145, 146, 149

103-107, 111; TLC, 72-74, 79, Tardy, Christine M., 14, 145,
81-85, 104 215
secondary L2 classroom writing Teaching/Learning Cycle (TLC),
experiences, 90-91 105-107; collaborative
sequenced writing assignments, 107 construction phase, 74, 81, 82,
short answer tests, 139, 140, 146 83; independent construction
similarity transfer, 121, 124, 125 phase, 74, 81, 82, 83; joint
situatedness, 29, 136-137, 145, 182, construction phase, 18, 73—74,
186-192, 189, 192, 209; lack of 78, 79, 80, 81, 83; principles
in five-paragraph essay, 3, 10 of, 83-84; scaffolding and,
“small culture,” 53-56 72-74, 79, 81-85, 104; text
source-based writing, 207, 213-214 deconstruction phase, 73,
standardized testing, 214; analysis 75-78, 83, 85, 106
of, 211-213; consequences and templates, writing. See formulaic
criticisms of, 201-203, 205, (formal) writing structures
217; EFL curriculum and, text analysis, 173, 196
48-51, 58 textbooks, 2-3, 6, 10, 12, 14
standardized testing, five- text deconstruction phase, TLC,
paragraph essay and, viii, 16, 73, 75-78, 83, 85, 106. See
58, 93, 95, 181-182, 201-202; also Teaching/Learning Cycle
changes in practices, 208-217; TLS
PARCC, 207-208, 211-213; theme, English, 5-6, 9
scholarship on, 203-205; thesis statements, vi, 19, 126,
TOEFL®, 50, 205-207, 211, 181
213, 216 timed writing tasks, 122, 139-
structure of five-paragraph essay, 141, 143-145, 144, 203, 217
vi, 19, 24-25, 35, 190, 192; TLC. See Teaching/Learning Cycle
structure of five-paragraph (TLC)
essay, Vi-vii, 6, 19, 24-25, 35, TOEFL®, 50, 205-207, 211, 213,
126, 181, 190, 192 216
“survival genre,” five-paragraph transference, 119, 126, 127, 128,
essay as, 91, 96 129, 130, 136-137; five-
Swales, J.M., 27, 188 paragraph essay’s lack of,
Switzerland, writing instruction vii, 125, 131, 180; types of,
variations within, 46 120-125
“Sydney School,” 67
Systemic-Functional Linguistics ungraded writing assignments,
(SFL), 27, 67 109
Index 245
voice, writing, 173, 185, 191-193 writing structures, formal. See

formulaic (formal) writing
Wardle, E., 12, 13 structures
White, E., 11, 225 writing textbooks, 2-3, 6, 10,
writing for audience. See audience, 12,14
writing for writing-to-learn activities, 109
writing instruction, advocating writing with purpose. See purpose,
for improvements in, 109-111 writing with
writing instruction, genre-based.
See genre-based writing zone of proximal development
instruction (ZPD), 92
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This volume was written to make the case for changes in second language
writing practices away from the five-paragraph essay and toward purposeful,
meaningful writing instruction.
° If you have already rejected the five-paragraph essay, it offers validation and
classroom-tested alternatives.
e If you are new to teaching L2 writing, it introduces you to critical issues to
consider as you plan your lessons and as you consider/review the textbooks
and handbooks that continue to promote the teaching of the five-paragraph
essay.
e If you need ammunition to present to colleagues and administrators, it
presents theory, research, and pedagogy that will benefit students from
elementary to graduate school.
e If you are skeptical about the claims, you are invited to review the research
presented here and consider what your students could do beyond writing a
five-paragraph essay if you enacted these changes in practice.
Part 1 discusses what the five-paragraph essay is not: it is not a very old,
established form of writing; it is not a genre; and it is not universal. Part 2 looks
at writing practices to show the essay’s ineffectiveness in a variety of settings
from elementary school through university. Part 3 looks beyond the classroom
at testing. At the end of each chapter, the authors—all well-known in the field of
second language writing—suggest changes to teaching practices based on their
theoretical approach and classroom experience.
The book closes by reviewing some of the major questions raised in the book,
by exploring which questions have been left unanswered, and by offering
suggestions for teachers who want to move away from the five-paragraph essay.
An assignment sequence for genre-aware writing instruction is included.
Beyond Convention: Genre Innovation in Academic Writing

Christine M. Tardy
Genre and Graduate-Level Research Writing

An Cheng
ISBN 978-0-472-03732-2
www.press.umich.edu/elt | 0.0.0.0 ",99
University of Michigan Press eS
HA, a
|ta
Ann Arbor |
9"780472"037322 +

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Changing

for the the Five-

University of Michigan Press

@) Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03732-2 (print)

2022 2021 2020 2019 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

PART 1: Understanding the Five-Paragraph Essay

2: Is the Five-Paragraph Essay a Genre? 24

3: Does Everyone Write the Five-Paragraph Essay? 42

PART 2: Writing Practices Beyond the 64

5: Rethinking the Five-Paragraph Essay as a Scaffold 89

6: Transferable Principles and Processes in 116

7: Writing in the Interstices: Assisting Novice 133

8: Preparing Students to Write in the Disciplines 150

9: Writing for Disciplinary Communities 178

PART 3: Issues Beyond the Classroom 200

CONCLUSION: Where Do We Go from Here? 221

NIGEL A. CAPLAN AND ANN M. JOHNS

At the 2017 TESOL Convention, Nigel, as chair of the

First, though, we need to establish a definition of the five-para-

Chapter 9) or stages (e.g., de Oliveira & Smith, Pessoa & Mitch-

undergraduate classes across the disciplines (Pessoa & Mitchell),

While we do not all define the problem in the same ways or

jee ecn gene ia be yrdly cease vont wy itenail deaths i

bi ul i » am 4 mere tty Uve' pti :

; i™ . | mf daprende @ ivi d phe

GM 1it.. 2's Seth ale: h iescnt Dai ih ast.

‘ vs é' Hiling Wee ar te ~~ ee art

Uiriay A eer im a4 agreed to poche.

oc)» heeciod sppaith age oo

Have We Always Taught

I grew up in England, where I did a lot of writing, but never

formulae, banal models, and vapid prompts. It was not a successful

reducing writing to its form, but expressivist approaches are equally

To clarify why the five-paragraph essay feels so established, this sec-

««w Gomposition in the Nineteenth Century

themes as fixed, even formulaic (Nunes, 2013), others promoted a

«ww Enter the Five-Paragraph Essay

While the structure of a complex theme was non-negotiable, it

to Tremmel (2011), the earliest prescriptive statement of how a//

wuu\Nhat Was New about the Five-Paragraph Essay?

Defenders of the five-paragraph essay have argued that it is the

A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of

Arguably five paragraphs is indeed a “moderate length,” although

writing into argumentative “essays” with theses, topic sentences,

«ue§<Response to Shifting Demographics

increase in university enrollment that included the admission of

Wardle (2017) argues in her elegant critique of the five-paragraph

1. Make writing assignments meaningful.

Benjamin Franklin, no less, proposed a composition curriculum in

By contrast, too many writing assignments today are automatically

to write. It is, therefore, vital to design courses that build knowl-

2. Organize writing courses around genres not modes.

IEPs are often preparing students for something else (undergradu-

Most genres entail multiple modes of writing: A literature

3. Draw attention to purpose, audience, and context as well as

Teaching without the five-paragraph essay does not mean aban-

Mode*/Level Elementary Intermediate

Narrative story, news report, case study,

newsletter restaurant or company

Problem/ Frequently- public-service business

Comparison email comparing | review comparing | synthesis

Argument™* advice column, | discussion board | literary/film