This article explores the role of students’ prior, or antecedent, genreknowledge 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
students’ 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 students’ 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.