Genre-based writing approach to facilitate Korean EFL students' enhancement in L2 writing

Genre-based writing approach to facilitate Korean EFL students' enhancement in L2 writing

Genre-based writing activities helped Korean EFL students to be familiarized with contents and form in each target text, which encourages them to develop their lexical and contextual knowledge. While reading target-genre texts, the students could notice contents (words) and form (organization) of target text and reflect them into their writing texts. The results of this study showed that reading target texts prior to the step of pre-writing facilitated Korean EFL students' lexical and textual knowledge development in L2 writing. In case of unfamiliar text, those students who read text before they write a target text use content words from the given text and formed a well-organized text type, Students who read a text similar to the writing text had higher scores in word use and organization than ones who were asked to write the text without the reading activity. However, grammar knowledge was not notably improved at all, which means writing activity serves to help L2 students increase their lexical knowledge and text structure. Genre knowledge, including form, organization, and narrative styles, could be fully developed through the exposure into the target text in that students could notice the target texts they write. Before writing the texts, reading the same types of target texts helps students notice the intro, body, and conclusion of each text and learn diverse words depending on contexts. Thus, EFL students who have frequent exposure into the target text can narrate their ideas in L2 fluently based on their genre knowledge.