Genre Approach to Writing: Explain how you would use a genre approach to teach writing in the primary classroom. Make specific references to strategies, tasks and resources employed.

The genre approach, "involves the direct teaching of a range of genres through a cycle that includes modelling, joint construction and independent construction". (Green and Campbell 2003, 209). This approach to teaching writing stemmed from a specific criticism of process writing- that students were producing a surplus of narrative genre to the detriment of developing writing competency in other genres. Critics in the 1980s and 90s claimed that "children needed to be taught explicitly about the structural …

…risks within their independent writing. The components of a comprehensive reading and writing program are interdependent and support each other (Hornsby 2000, 282 handout). Many issues, concepts and understandings of the way in which children learn to write must be taken into consideration when planning to teach writing in the classroom, and as the genre approach to writing covers a large number of them, it will be an asset to include in any primary English literacy program.