Exploring changes in university students’ persuasive writings with the SFL-based genre instruction

Abstract Mastering persuasive writing represents a foundational competency for university students, particularly within academic and professional domains. However, numerous learners encounter enduring difficulties in fulfilling its intricate structural and linguistic demands, thereby necessitating pedagogical interventions supported by empirical evidence. This study aims to explore the changes students make in their persuasive writing practice with each of the three iterations of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-based genre instruction. Convenience sampling was adopted with participants consisting of 30 students from an intact class of the English Department in a Chinese university, who were divided into 6 groups. A constructed SFL-based genre teaching model of the four-staged teaching/learning cycle was applied to conduct the instruction. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the group writing compositions. After three iterations of the teaching–learning cycle, analyses of student writing data indicated that students showed increasing attention to the essential elements of the persuasive generic structure and growing use of lexicogrammatical features to realize the three metafunctions of language in context, although some difficulties remained in applying certain lexicogrammatical items. The findings indicated that students developed awareness of genres through the genre-based approach. Characteristics of SFL-informed pedagogy, including explicit instruction, collaborative writing, and scaffolding, were associated with students’ production of appropriate written texts.