Students’ perceptions of a scientific writing course: SFL Genre Pedagogy in an EFL context

Genre approaches to teaching have long been applied to improve students’ skills, and their effect has usually been assessed by looking into students’ productions. In this work, we examine students’ perceptions of the implementation of a genre-based writing course that incorporated tasks developed by the Reading to Learn Pedagogy (R2LP) (ROSE; MARTIN, 2008) for the teaching of Scientific Research Articles (SRA) in an EFL context. A scientific writing course in English was offered for 8 weeks on a weekly basis to researchers and Ph.D. students in Argentina. They were asked to answer surveys after every class and once the course finished. Surveys were analysed considering Attitude of the System of Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005), polarity and the entities evaluated. Joint writing and Detailed reading were entities frequently evaluated positively, mainly in terms of usefulness. Negatively appraised entities include contents and exercises, which were perceived as “difficult”. Our evidence suggests that the teaching of SRA writing to researchers through the R2LP in an EFL context is effective. More precisely, teacher-guided activities which were jointly carried out with students were found to be the most useful, making them suitable for a highly specialised audience like the one that participated in this study.


Introduction
For the last forty years, genre, genre pedagogy, and literacy have received increasing attention (HYON, 1996;HYLAND, 2003). Research carried out on authentic texts has informed genre approaches and theories of language and teaching from a social and situated perspective. Although the differences among genre traditions have become less sharp, as observed by Hyland (2003) and Swales (2009), it is possible to distinguish some features.
While the New Rhetoric has focused on the situational contexts in which SRA occurs, the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) school has paid attention to detailing SRA formal characteristics of organizational patterns.
The Systemic Functional Linguistics genre traditionknown as the Sydney School-shares much common ground with ESP and the New Rhetoric genre research, mainly the social world, academic and professional fields of interaction, and notions of context. However, a distinction can be made in connection to the wellgrounded, thoroughly detailed, and sound pedagogy for the teaching of genres that the Sydney School has developed (DEREWIANKA; JONES, 2012; ROSE; MARTIN, 2012;ROTHERY, 1989ROTHERY, , 1996, as well as its commitment to language and literacy education.
Genre traditions have largely focused, nonetheless, on English as a first or second language in contexts where it is spoken for daily communication.
The growing impact that the genre movement has had around the world has called for research on genre pedagogies in more specific environments of English as a foreign language (MANCHÓN; DE HAAN 2008).
This study addresses this issue by analysing students' perceptions of a genre-based scientific writing course in EFL, as it incorporated tasks described by the Reading to Learn Pedagogy (heretofore R2LP) (HALLIDAY; MARTIN, 1993;MARTIN, 2009;MARTIN, 2012), within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (HALLIDAY, 1978; HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014), which has received less attention than the other approaches to genre.
Much research has been carried out on teachers' and students' perceptions of teaching methodologies and class dynamics (BITCHENER; BASTURKMEN, 2006;SHEHADEH, 2011;STORCH, 2005). Students' views are of particular interest because it is possible to describe their attitudes and experiences first hand from users' perspectives. Except for some studies carried out in the Latin American context at secondary schools (SILVA, 2019) and at undergraduate ESP courses (CAVALCANTI, 2016), to our knowledge, no research has assessed the R2LP from the perspective of adult students in the context of postgraduate courses. Moreover, the students that participated in this study are researchers, and their opinion on a teaching pedagogy is valuable for a number of reasons. First, they may be considered to be "specialist informants" (SELINKER, 1979) as they are well aware of particular needs when writing science in English. They are also expert readers in their fields so they are competent to identify what language is appropriate in their areas and what patterns of language are recurrent for highly specific uses. Finally, and most importantly, they have all gone through different experiences, both for their disciplinary education and their foreign language learning, which makes them eligible to assess a particular pedagogy for the teaching of writing SRA.
In this work, we present students' reactions to what Tardy (2006) defines as an "instruction based study"; i.e. research which explores a specific teaching approach within a classroom (p. 82). We explore students' perceptions of a writing course which implemented the R2LP for the teaching of writing scientific texts in English as a foreign language to Argentinian university researchers and Ph.D. students.
We implement Attitude of the system of Appraisal to analyse the discourse that they produced in surveys in order to identify the entities that they assess.
Signo [ISSN 1982[ISSN -2014 The System of Appraisal is regionalised as three interacting domains -'attitude', 'engagement' and 'graduation'. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behaviour and evaluation of things. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred.
Resources that express evaluation in the Appraisal framework are not restricted to typical lexical word categories associated with evaluation such as adjectives, but also included are nouns, verbs and adverbs, as well as grammatical resources such as mood choice (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005). It is precisely this that serves for a thorough detection of evaluation in texts, as it was intended in this work.
Appraisal has been extensively used as theoretical as well as analytical framework for discourse research in English (BEDNAREK, 2008;HOOD, 2006;WHITE, 1998

Joint construction
One result taken from an SRA was selected to write about it. One of the teacher typed ideas on the computer, and the text was projected on a screen. This result was discussed against those of others. Implications of the results were also written in the text.

Individual construction
Students were asked to improve texts they had written before or to report on one new result, and discuss it. Source: Author's own elaboration.

4.
Methodology In this case, "útil/es" (useful) [ATTITUDE: Appreciation: Valuation] appraises the entity "discusiones" (discussions). In the second type of question [2], no appraising element was included in the question. Therefore, the evaluative element was provided by students in answers.
Question: Please, provide any other comments that were not considered in this sheet. Answer: I thought the lesson was very good and interesting.
In [2], "buena" (good) and "interesante" (interesting) are the appraising elements that the student used to assess "la clase" (the class).

Results and discussion
The findings are presented in terms of the polarity of the evaluation, i.e., whether students assessed entities negatively or positively, and the entity referred to. We discuss in detail those which are more recurrent in students' discourse and resort to students' answers to give voice to their perceptions about the  [A difficulty I came across today was] the selection of verb tenses when there is more than one possibility.
In [3], the student mentions his difficulty in selecting the right tenses. In line with Silva's (2019) findings related to students' perceived difficulty of language content, many were the students who, similarly to this one, considered linguistic contents such as vocabulary and grammar to be "difficult". This may be connected to the fact that they were attending a course of writing in English, which is a foreign language to them, and it is precisely this what they needed to acquire to write about their fields.
As for Activities, Grammar practice was frequently assessed as hard.
Remembering the passive voice. Identifying the nuclei of titles in my discipline.
In [4], the student refers to a passive voice exercise and to the identification of constituents in nominalisations when analysing titles. Although both exercises were solved with classmates and teachers, these definitely represent a challenge for students.
In connection to the assessment of the R2LP, only one perception which may be related to this methodology was negative [5].
The exchange of ideas was sometimes confusing or distractive.
In this case, although an R2LP activity is not specifically referred to by the student, we may understand that the discussion and brainstorming carried out for Detailed reading seemed rather chaotic.
Although this may be an individual perception, it might be interpreted as her need to be part of an even more organised and sequenced lesson.
Another entity which was assessed negatively was "Participants", for both Students (40, 16.5%) and Teachers (13, 5%). In the case of Students, they usually thought that they did not have enough Only one student assessed the way in which a discussion was carried out, mainly in terms of order and chaos. Negative evaluations on Activities were oriented to how much time was spent on them or the ways in which they were carried out, evoking negative appraisal on teachers. This means that EFL teachers need to plan enough time to provide students with as much linguistic input as possible and create opportunities for practice. Additionally, although these students were competent readers and disciplinary experts, the negative perception of themselves and their linguistic abilities, language resources seem to be highly valued and quite a large amount of energy should be spent on them.

Positive assessment
Overall, students assessed the course positively more frequently than negatively. Among the most frequent entities, students mentioned the Lesson and its components (517 instances, which corresponds to 74% of the mentions), Participants (67, 9.5%), the  Students assessed the Lesson more frequently than any other element, which is in agreement with previous findings (CAVALCANTI, 2016). Within this category, "Activities" was mentioned 259 times, which corresponds to 37% of the total of entities, and to 50% of the Lesson. Thus, it is worth looking deeper into which activities students considered "useful", "clear", "interesting" and even "entertaining". Activities proposed by the R2LP were mentioned 90 times (17.5% of the Lesson) (53 for Joint writing and 37 for Detailed reading), Activities in general 38 (7%), Discussions 36 (7%), activities that developed Semantic sensitivity 34 (6.5%) and those which fostered Grammar practice 33 (6%), followed by Pair/group activities and Theoretical explanations, with 18 (3.5%) and 10 mentions (2%), respectively.
Looking into activities that the R2LP proposes, both Joint writing and Detailed reading were perceived as useful to improve students' writing. Teacher-student Joint writing was the activity most frequently mentioned [11].
The best of the lesson was jointly writing the introduction using the "skeleton" proposed. Because it showed how to construct an introduction which is one of the most difficult sections when writing a paper.
The student states that the "best" of the lesson was the joint writing of the introduction. The reason she provides is that this activity served as an example on the writing of this stage, which represents a real challenge for writers. In the same line, and in agreement with other findings (SILVA, 2019), in [12], the student mentions that Joint writing has contributed to establishing a basis on which to build future writing.
[An activity that was particularly useful was] The activities of joint writing in which we were given an example to complete, because it serves for practicing and provides a basis for future writing, until we have acquired training and polished our most frequent mistakes.
http://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signo Joint writing seems to foster students' confidence since they rehearse their skills in the classroom. Teachers accompanying researchers in writing may appear to be an unnecessary -or even "intrusive"-task to carry out considering their achieved degree of expertise in their own fields. However, practicing with the teacher in a scaffold manner seems to be useful for them, especially considering that they use English as a foreign language in the writing of a highly contested genre such as the SRA. Apart from Joint writing, Detailed reading also proved to be positive for students [13].
[ Teacher-guided Joint writing activities are also highly recommended to be incorporated as regular practices in courses like the one presented here. This is particularly appropriate in connection to English, an area of knowledge in which researchers are not experts and feel insecure of, but still need to learn about to be able to publish internationally. Since in our course Joint writing needed to be carried out in connection to a general topic which students from a variety of disciplines could contribute to, an interesting line of inquiry for further research may be to assess the extent to which this task enhances students' writing dealing with more specific disciplinary topics closely related to students' research expertise. It might be necessary to make a longitudinal study, with few students or individually, in order to register detailed perceptions that occur during this interaction.