The aim of the genre-based pedagogy is to focus on students' academic needs and enable them to read and write successfully (Martin, 1993, 2009). Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to understand the range of written genres and other writing skills that students need to use in their academic studies. This study has aimed to design an alternative and effective way of teaching writing to English Language and Literature students within the genre-based pedagogy considering their academic needs. The present study attempts to investigate the process of building metacognitive genre-awareness and show how it influences English Language and Literature students' ability to interpret and compose academic texts. The present study is designed as a case study, and mixed methods of data collection and analysis have been adopted. Several sources of data coming from both the teacher herself and the students such as classroom observation and teacher's journal, students' written texts (portfolios), students' diaries and interview with students have been used to have a deeper understanding of the process of genre-based writing instruction. The results of the study indicate that most of the students acquired, at least, metacognitive awareness of the declarative type, they seem to move their writing ability up and there is a general improvement in their writing performance. (C) 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL).