This article explores the role of students' prior, or antecedent, genre knowledge in relation to their developing disciplinary genre competence by drawing on an illustrative example of an engineering genre-competence assessment. The initial outcomes of this diagnostic assessment suggest that student ability to successfully identify and characterize rhetorical and textual features of a genre does not guarantee their successful writing performance in the genre. Although previous active participation in genre production (writing) seems to have a defining influence on student ability to write in the genre, such participation appears to be a necessary but insufficient precondition for genre competence development. The authors discuss the usefulness of probing student antecedent genre knowledge early in communication courses as a potential source for macrolevel curriculum decisions and microlevel pedagogical adjustments in course design, and they propose directions for future research.Key words: antecedent genre, diagnostic assessment, disciplinary genre, engineering communication, genre awareness, genre competence, New Rhetoric genre theory, prior genre knowledge, rhetorical genre studies, targeted instruction

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Artemeva, N., Fox, J., (2025), "Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students' Antecedent Genre Knowledge", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.19)

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1. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

Original publication: Artemeva, Natasha; Fox, Janna. "Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students' Antecedent Genre Knowledge." Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012. DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.19. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in DW/R is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license