Writing beyond the academy: towards tasks that promote genre knowledge and transfer across contexts

Despite increasing expectations for scholars to communicate their research to the public, and the advanced communicative skills this expectation requires, research in genre pedagogy has almost exclusively targeted academic writing. Our aim was to design and trial a “multi-genre task”, a task sequence that incorporates working with academic and outreach genres concurrently. This task combined examples of two genres tied to different social contexts (a blog post and an abstract), comparison and reflection, and guided practice. Doctoral students in the UK and Sweden completed the task. Textual analysis of task responses showed that participants reformulated and recontextualised their writing – from academic to outreach and vice versa – on the content, lexical, grammatical and structural level. Interview data revealed that the task fostered the development of genre-specific knowledge, genre awareness, and prompted metacognitive insights on the students’ own writing. Our study provides new evidence of the dynamics behind the development of genre knowledge and awareness, recontextualization abilities across genres and contexts, as well as a task that promotes transfer.