Supporting assessment of EAL/D student writing: A concrete example of exploring genre-based feedback in pre-service teacher education coursework

Providing useful feedback on student writing is a challenging task, requiring an understanding of the specific language expectations in assignments teachers give students. Studies have shown that teachers are more likely to give corrective feedback on surface-level errors than attend to meaning-making linguistic resources. The question is how to prepare teachers in pre-service teacher education to notice and respond to genre and register expectations. This paper shares one concrete example from an educational linguistics course in a master’s degree program in education with a secondary school teaching certification in the United States. Pre-service teachers from five different disciplines were instructed on basic concepts related to systemic functional linguistics and their utility in recognizing and unpacking the norms of disciplinary language. The paper explores how and to what extent nine of the pre-service teachers in the course targeted surface-level or meaning-making writing skills when using a genre-based rubric and when subsequently considering lesson activities. The analysis shows that the pre-service teachers incorporated genre-based ideas in their feedback but struggled to move away from teaching activities that focused on prescriptive, constrained skills. We conclude by discussing what genre-based activities can offer in initial teacher education and argue for the need for more explicit sharing of teacher education instructional strategies.