ABSTRACT
Research and the teaching of writing have evolved over time. From a focus on product where the expectation was that children had to be “corrected” until they achieved adult-like writing performance, to an emphasis on process where children are expected to experiment on their way to achieving adult-like proficiency. More recently, there has been an interest in genre “largely a response to changing views of discourse and of learning to write which incorporate better understandings of how language is structured to achieve social purposes in particular contexts of use” (Hyland, 2007, p. 148). Genre research focuses on students’ products as evidence of the children’s linguistic, communicative, and cognitive knowledge (Fang, 1999). These products are not prescribed but are the result of the interaction between contextual and linguistic input.
