Moving across a genre continuum: Pedagogical strategies for integrating online genres in the language classroom

Drawing on a case study investigating the design and implementation of an ESP course for English majors in a Hong Kong university, this article discusses how the integration of online genres in a language classroom can contribute to a greater understanding of specialized genres and enable learners’ capacity to write across (Prior & Smith, 2020) semiotic modes and genre conventions. Data was collected from instructional materials, coursework and interviews of seven participants enrolled in the course that involves a process-oriented, genre-based (Hafner & Ho, 2020; Hafner & Miller, 2019) approach. Findings demonstrate that recursive contrastive analysis of online and offline genres can enable a more comprehensive and critical genre awareness that involves authenticity, multimodality, and interdiscursivity. Applying a material lens to this comparative analysis also enabled learners to discover how the design of platforms and their sociotechnical structures provide affordances and constraints that shape genre conventions and features. By drawing on learner knowledge of online genres familiar to them, these pedagogical strategies were able to bridge the out-of-school literacies and identities of learners with the disciplinary literacies and authorial identities that ESP seeks to develop. Recognizing the value of integrating diverse genres in an ESP course in ways that erode boundaries and highlight their connectedness, this paper proposes the notion of a genre continuum where rhetorical strategies and social purposes are shared across diverse genres using different modes and media. By facilitating a genre awareness that recognizes the fluid and deictic nature of genres, genre-based pedagogy can not only demonstrate synergies between online and offline genres, but also enable the acquisition of specialized genres through an awareness of the structures and features of non-specialized genres.