A Genre-Based Approach to Improve Argumentative Writing Performance for Thai Learners

This article presents the effective employment of a genre-based approach to enhance students’ writing proficiency when using the argumentative genre.The objective of this study is to develop learners’ argumentative writing by providing lessons based on a genre-based approach, principally focusing on the communicative purpose and the systematic organization with detail information arrangements and language features. The participants were a group of students from Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology. The teaching of an argumentative writing process included: 1) modeling, 2) joint construction, 3) text analysis, and 4) independent construction. For the data collection, 120 participants’ writing tasks were collected as the qualitative data. A discourse analysis was utilized to identify the results. The findings revealed that most participants were able to develop writing tasks as expected. However, there were some concerns as regards text organization and language features.