English writing instruction in Norwegian upper secondary schools

This article presents a study of current English writing instruction practices in a selection of Norwegian upper secondary schools and discusses how this draws upon ideas within genre-pedagogy. The data comprises individual and focusgroup interviews, observation reports and some teaching material. The study shows that English teachers focus on teaching genre requirements and adjustment of language to task and context. However, despite agreeing on the importance of teaching how to write specific text-types and to adjust to the situation at hand, there seems to be different opinions about how detailed instruction should be. Some teachers fear that too explicit instruction may hinder creativity, while others emphasise the need to learn how to structure a text, and to open up for creativity within certain writing frames. In spite of the differences, the practices revealed in this study comply quite well with genrepedagogy. From the findings in this article, it seems like there is a need to develop and make available teaching material in English to be used in writing instruction, and also to improve the English teacher education with regard to the teaching of writing.