The process of developing disciplinary genre awareness through training academic writing skills: A case study

In this qualitative study, through studying the thought patterns of two master candidates of the International Relations discipline, the process of development in their disciplinary genre awareness has been investigated. In so doing, academic writing skills were taught to the two cases of the study in a period of 18 months. In this period, one of the researchers held regular training sessions. The theoretical framework used for this study was the interaction model of Hyland (2005) and the methodology in the phase one to three of the study was descriptive ethnography and in phase four it was analytical and quantitative. Several rounds of interviews, stimulated recall sessions, field notes, and document analysis were used to collect the data. Based on the definitions provided by IELTS organization, the two cases improved from the level of limited user (band score 4) to the level of good user (band score 7). Finally, the result of the investigation of the stages of development in the disciplinary genre awareness of the participants was presented in a model of development. This study can shed light on the future perspective of curriculum design for academic and ESP writing courses.