Use of Genres: Classroom Teaching Frequency and Usefulness in the Workplace

Abstract

Genres are integral to and critically important for any ESP writing course. As part of the needs analysis to design an ESP writing course, classroom teaching frequency and professional usefulness of writing genres for engineering students were matched and correlated. The four groups comprising students, teachers, operational and managerial engineers were compared in terms of their responses to the teaching and usefulness of genres. Accordingly, post hoc analysis was carried out, and means were compared wherever the differences were found to be significant. It has been established through this research that needs analysis of all the important stakeholders- students, professional engineers, teachers – should be done because there are gaps in their respective perceptions regarding the use of genres in an ESP course and through such a triangulated assessment, the gaps can be minimized.