This article attempts to apply some systemic functional linguistic (SFL) concepts to task‐based language teaching (TBLT) as a means of enriching the fields of learning, teaching, and evaluating writing in an additional language. The purposes are twofold. First, this article presents a concrete example concerning SFL‐initiated genre‐based tasks, which were designed for college‐level writers of English as a foreign language (EFL) so that they can learn genre, task, content, and language concurrently. Second, this article presents a descriptive study on how the systematically designed genre‐based tasks were experienced by the EFL writers, how their genre awareness changed as they experienced the genre‐based tasks, and how their meaning‐making choices for constructing a genre changed over time. This study's findings highlight the effectiveness of linking the conceptual framework of SFL to the methodological principles of TBLT in terms of the simultaneous development of linguistic knowledge and writing expertise.