Language Proficiency and EAP Students’ Writing Quality: Contributions of Explicit and Implicit Genre-Based Instruction

Genre-based pedagogy provides an effective resource for writing instructors and practitioners in order to assist their students to produce particular texts (Bhatia, 2004). Regarding the benefits and the uses of genre-based pedagogy in second and foreign language acquisition, ongoing debates among the researchers of the field have been made in response to pedagogical and implicational practices associated with genre in various educational settings. Due to the importance of providing writing instructions for the students of medicine and the lack of literature in analyzing the impact of different treatments of genre-based instruction especially among students with different language proficiency levels, the present study tried to address this gap by taking a genre-based approach and using writing practice, to examine the impacts of explicit and implicit genre-based instructional techniques on medical students’ writing quality with different language proficiency levels. The initial findings of the study suggested that providing genre-based instruction both explicitly and implicitly can intuitively and effectively assist learners in providing more qualified writings. Moreover, the in-depth findings of this study supported the proposal that higher proficient second language writers get more advantage of both treatments of genre-based instruction than lower proficient second language writers especially when explicit genre-based instruction is provided.