Solange ARANHA

solangea@ibilce.unesp.br | São Paulo State University

The purposes of this paper are:

• to discuss the importance of the concept of genre in teaching writing to Brazilian translation students;
• to show how this concept has been introduced to regular English writing courses at the university;
• to present some problematic issues by means of showing students writing production and their struggle to master in different fields due to the constraints of each genre.

The data presented are from students attending the third year of Translation studies in a public university in Brazil. The writing course is composed of three stages and the genre concept is introduced in the beginning of the second year when this course starts. The results show that the problematic areas are more concerned to genre adequacy than to any other linguistic factor, which leads us to emphasize the relevance of this subject in undergraduate courses.