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Molle & Prior's article calls attention to genres features that have been documented but
have remained put aside in EAP discourse. Therefore, they show the importance of integrating
genre systems into activities and emphasise the need for a multimodal and semiotic approach to
the EAP learning process by investigating international graduate students' needs through
contextualised analysis of genres’ type that students were required to produce over the course in
variety of areas. Ethnographic methods were employed in their study, including interviewing
students and instructors, collecting course documents (such as syllabi, handouts, and evaluation
sheets) and student texts, and observing some classes.
As mentioned in Molle & Prior's article, many experts involved in academic writing agree
that genre-oriented is essential to preparing students for the writing they will be required to
produce during their academic careers. This statement then raised three questions: Which genres
should be taught in the EAP classroom? What kinds of features will be best characterise these
genres? And how are genres best taught or learned? The first and second questions have been
attempted to be answered by experts by conducting a needs analysis. However, as Molle and
Prior’s study progressed, it became clear that the theoretical approach prompted did not match the
collected data. They found three anomalies in the analysis that contradicted different understanding
from typical genre theory and need analysis. These anomalies regarding the nature of genre in the
disciplines clearly called into question the key tenets of the particular EAP programme that the
research sought to revise. They also challenged the research's initial conceptualisation, raising
intriguing concerns about how to conceptualise genres, needs analysis, and genre-based instruction
in light of these observations.
Molle & Prior (2008) initially collected data from Architecture, Civil and Environment
Engineering (CEE), Music, and Psychology at a major public university in the United States. These
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disciplines were chosen because they have a high number of students in the EAP course, and the
departments also represented different types of fields (professional vs more conventionally
academic). Unfortunately, participants by the psychology department were too limited to support
in-depth analysis. Therefore, four courses observed are two in architecture, one in CEE, and one
in music. The instructors who participated in the study were all native English speakers from the
United States and faculty members in the students' departments.
Molle & Prior (2008) highlights that although the examples investigated came from various
fields, and genres were clearly dynamic and strongly situated in specific contexts, it was also clear
that key dimensions of genres (e.g., variability, embeddedness in systems, multimodality, and
hybridity) characterised discourses across diverse contexts. As a result, these genre characteristics
cannot be neglected by an EAP curriculum designed to prepare students for the writing activities
they may experience over their academic careers. They suggest that the EAP writing program
classes for graduate students, which mostly still privilege the linguistic features of texts rather than
the practices of a genre system, could promote better attention based on these aspects of
multimodal genre systems.