Teaching Academic Writing to Master’s Students: A Genre-Based Approach

This article addresses the teaching of academic writing to master’s students in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes. Its point of departure is the internationalisation of Ukrainian higher education, which increasingly requires master’s students to present at international conferences, prepare research proposals and grant applications, and publish in peer-reviewed journals. Yet it appears that even students who have studied English for several years are not always explicitly aware of how research genres are rhetorically organised or of what readers in their disciplines are likely to expect. To address this gap, the article establishes the methodological value of a genre-based approach and proposes an instructional model suited to the EAP classroom. Conceptual and methodologically oriented, the study synthesises insights from the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition of genre analysis and from research on disciplinary variation and genre pedagogy. It contends that genre-based instruction offers a principled and transferable means of teaching three core research genres: the research article introduction, the abstract, and the literature review. Building on Swales’s Create a Research Space (CARS) model and its later extensions, the article advances a five-stage instructional cycle that progresses from building the field through deconstruction and modelling, joint construction, and independent construction to genre-focused feedback and revision. Moveand-step frameworks are presented for each genre, and a two-week module on the literature review illustrates the cycle in practice. The discussion weighs the gains of explicit genre instruction, notably heightened rhetorical awareness and transparent assessment criteria, against its principal risk, the reduction of genre knowledge to formulaic templates, and suggests how this risk may be mitigated. Finally, recommendations are offered for integrating genre-based instruction into master’s curricula, and avenues for further empirical classroom research are identified.