Page 12 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

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goal of this book, however, is to benefit language learners who aspire to suc- cess in academic degree programs beyond their ESL and English courses. Few EAP students set out to major in intensive English study and obtain de- grees in English composition, and practically all have other educational, professional, and career goals in mind.
This book deals with techniques for teaching L2 writing, grammar, and lexis that can inform L2 instruction and effectively target specific areas of L2 text that require substantial improvements. ESL teachers are usually keenly aware of how short the course and class time are. The scope of mate- rial is designed to be taught during one or, at most, two courses at the high intermediate and/or advanced levels of learner proficiency. In such courses, the teacher's goal is usually to provide the critical preparation for students who are almost ready to begin their studies in regular college and university courses. Teaching strategies and techniques discussed here are based on a highly practical principle of maximizing learners' language gains by em- ploying a few shortcuts. This book—based on current research and, in par- ticular, a large-scale research of almost 1,500 NNS (non-native speakers) essays (Hinkel, 2002a, Second Language Writers' Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features, Lawrence Erlbaum) in addition to 25 years of ESL teaching and teacher-training experience—workswith several sets of simple rules that collectively can make a noticeable and important difference in the qualityof NNS students' writing.
The philosophical goal of this book is to focus the attention of practicing and preservice ESL/EAP teachers on the fact that without clear, reasonably accurate, and coherent text, there can be no academic writing in a second language. The practical and immediate purpose, however, is to provide a compendium of teaching techniques for the grammatical and lexical fea- tures of academic language that "every teacher (and student) mustknow."
Several key differences between this book and many other books on teaching ESL should be highlighted:
• The decision about what a L2 writing course has to address and what L2 writers must know is based on the findings of research into academic text and the text produced by L2 writers. Therefore, the material sets out to address the gaps in current curricula for teach- ing L2 writing. In addition, the aspects of L2 that are traditionally included in L2 teaching, but hardly ever found in academic text, are highlighted throughout the book.
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Because academic vocabulary, the grammar of formal written English, and specific features of academic prose represent integral aspects of academic writing in a second language, curriculum and teaching techniques presented in this book work with these concurrently.
The curriculum and its elements discussed herein are not based on an incremental progression of material, such as "first, the course
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