Teaching strategies to enhance metacognitive knowledge: a proposal to analyze a mini-essay genre

This article describes a teaching strategy designed to enhance metacognitive declarative knowledge about the writing task through genre analysis. To do so, first, we conceptualize the notion of discourse genre and state how important is for students to master it in order to proficiently write academic texts. This strategy proposes a reading comprehension process that focuses on making inferences about the generic structure of a particular text they will write. Second, we explain how to apply it during classroom instruction, and we propose an example with mini-essay genre. Finally, we state how helpful this strategy has been in academic writing courses.