Genre-based approaches are widely used in the pedagogy of academic writing. Although they are seen as particularly suitable for novice academic writers, there is ongoing debate about how explicitly genres should be taught. Some genre pedagogues argue that the conventional method of teaching genres — referred to as explicit genre teaching — may be overly formulaic and prescriptive. Consequently, they advocate for fostering genre awareness in novice academic writers. However, there is no solid empirical evidence to support these discussions, particularly from a developmental perspective. To address this research gap, we are conducting a longitudinal intervention study in upper secondary education to compare the effectiveness of the aforementioned genre-based approaches (explicit genre teaching vs. genre awareness approach) in the context of academic writing. In this paper, we focus on clarifying the concept of genre awareness. We begin with a brief introduction to genre pedagogy and demonstrate how the concept of genre awareness emerged as a critique of established approaches to genre pedagogy. Building on this, we present the first part of our genre-based treatments to illustrate how we operationalised the genre awareness approach in contrast to explicit genre teaching.