From reading to rewriting: proposals and strategies of genre-based pedagogy

Abstract

The present study focuses on the strategy of rewriting as an instrument to support pupils as they learn how to write well. It aims to contribute to our knowledge of the potential and the limitations of various strategies, all of which involving the activity of rewriting, that establish a relationship between reading and writing. The study focuses on one specific strategy, arising from genre-based pedagogy. In this approach, reading and rewriting other texts, taken as models, play a key role in learning how to write. The current study analyses the rewriting of narrative texts by fifth and sixth graders. More specifically, it analyses rewritings produced by the participants in the genre-based Reading to Learn programme, comparing them with rewritings of the same texts by students who did not participate in the programme. The results show a significant contrast between the two groups. The contrast is manifested in a higher level of specificity in the texts rewritten by the students participating in the programme. With regard to the other students, the rewritings reveal a higher degree of generalization, characterized by a series of the most striking events in the narrative thread. The article concludes that it is not necessary to restrain text rewriting to the narrative flow but rather to increase students’ consciousness of the opportunities that promote the appropriation of lexical-grammatical resources.

Reading; Writing; Genre-based pedagogy; Rewriting