This paper reviews how genre-based pedagogy has been conceived by researchers in the different scholarly traditions, and offers a particular view of genre-driven pedagogy and its practical applications in the English as a Second Language student classroom. This view of a genre-based teaching approach largely consists in a prior discussion with students of the socio-cultural context in which a particular academic genre occurs. This discovery process of the social circumstances that surround a genre can help students understand more readily the communicative purpose of a specific genre. A second complementary stage should be the explicit teaching of functions and language structures of typical academic texts, with a special emphasis on cross-cultural variation. By making learners aware of the similarities and differences in the rhetorical strategies preferred by the members of different disciplinary communities, L2 writers may feel more confident about the rhetorical options they can choose depending on the context and type of audience they are addressing.
