FAQ
Both the register and genre tools take a functional approach to writing instruction. They aim to make visible something students are otherwise expected to know without necessarily having been taught (how to write for school). A functional approach provides scaffolds so students can gain control over academic writing, rather than guess at it.
The register tool is aimed at demonstrating how English varies systematically across different situations. It can be helpful for conceiving of how informal language differs from formal, for instance, or how “spoken-like” differs from “written-like” language.
Each entry elaborates the different stages of a particular genre and the language features that go with them. Those stages come from research that has collected many texts of different kinds and described what they do and how they are organized. Genres are not templates.
Each genre in the tool has a model text written for at least one subject and one topic (see below for a list). The models show the genre stages and what they might look like when they are written. Treat the included models as a starting point for making your own model texts, in your field, on topics of your choosing.
Students should read your developed model and its schematic staging. The model should be taken apart (“deconstruction” in the Teaching and Learning Cycle) before anyone writes: what each stage does, and how you can tell where one ends and the next one begins.
The Teaching and Learning Cycle asks you to put three questions to the class before students draft on their own. These questions are what keeps a genre a description of how others have approached a specific writing task, rather than a rule that is to be followed.
This discussion need not be long, five to ten minutes orally with the class, and should be repeated whenever genres are a focus of teaching.
This tool is meant for teachers; it is not intended to be student-facing. The model texts are bare exemplars that serve only to show the shape of a particular genre. The models do not cover every genre that secondary students write, and not every teachable is represented. The models provided are intended to be scaffolds that can apply across multiple subject areas and grade levels.
Eleven genres appear in the tool. Ten subjects currently have a full worked example: a model text, a breakdown of the language features that produce it, links to the relevant “Know-Do-Understand” BC Curriculum, and a sample Teaching and Learning Cycle sequence.