Exploring Low-proficiency EFL Students’ Genre Knowledge and Rhetorical Awareness: A Follow-up Case Study of Genre-based Reading Instruction

This study aims to explore the enduring impact of genre-based reading instruction on retention and application of low-proficiency EFL college students’ genre knowledge. A preceding flagship study of a two-cycle action research project (Cycle 1, n = 22; Cycle 2, n = 31) suggested explicit genre instruction positively affected reading comprehension and confidence. Building on these findings, the current study focuses on follow-up interviews to investigate how participants retained and applied the genre knowledge in their process of reading. Four students participated in an immediate oral demonstration of reading texts, which included two familiar and one unfamiliar (mixed genre) samples. The interviews were conducted in Korean, transcribed verbatim, and holistically analyzed. The findings revealed that students retained key features of genre knowledge, which was observed to prompt speedy and accurate perception of the key message. In the process, the students were also observed applying rhetorical knowledge -such as the context, the purpose, and writer-reader relations- as useful tools to guide the reading. They maintained this rhetorically aware reading behavior when encountering the mixed genre text, though not with more distant genres like newspaper articles. While most previous genre research has focused on writing or on higher-proficiency learners, few studies have examined how genre instruction could influence lower-level learners reading, particularly their retention and application of genre knowledge over time. This study helps fill this gap. It offers exploratory findings that explicit genre instruction can help low-proficiency EFL students process genre texts efficiently and develop rhetorical awareness over time.