Page 14 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

xii PREFACE
The teaching of academic text building beyond the simple sentence is the focus of Part III. Chapter 10 outlines instruction in the functions and types of subordinate clauses: adverbial, adjective, and noun. In chapter 11, the classroom teaching of elements of cohesion and coherence (a famously neglected aspect of L2 writing instruction) is specifically addressed. Chap- ter 12 concludes with the teaching of hedges and their crucial functions in academic text.
The three chapters in Part I are different from the rest of the chapters in the book. Chapters 1 and 2 are intended to provide the background for the rest of the volume, and chapter 3 presents a sample of course curriculum guidelines to meet the learning needs of L2 teachers of writing and L2 writers.
The chapters in Parts II and III include the key elements of classroom teaching: what should be taught and why, possible ways of teaching the material in the classroom, common errors found in student text and ways of teaching students to avoid them, teaching activities and suggestions for teaching, and questions for discussion in a teacher-training course. Appendixes included with the chapters provide supplementary word and phrase lists, collocations, sentence chunks, and diagrams that teach- ers can use as needed.
As with all the material in the book, suggestions for teaching and teach- ing activities exemplified in one chapter can be perfectly usable in another chapter: If a particular activity works well for teaching academic nouns, it is likely to work well for teaching lexical types of academic verbs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to Robert B. Kaplan, who over the years has become a mentor and friend and whose idea this book was in the first place. I owe a debt to my long-suffering friends of many years who read earlier drafts of chapters and provided many helpful comments that greatly helped to im- prove the book: Mary Geary, formerly of Seattle University;Bruce Rogers, Ohio State University; Peter Clements, University of Washington; and Bethany Plett, Texas A&M University.
My devoted comrade and software executive, Rodney Hill, receives my undying gratitude for not only creating a large number of computer pro- grams that enormously eased my life, such as statistical tools, bibliography software, and text macros, but also enduring the reading of countless ver- sions of chapters and formatting the text and layout.
When the book was almost cooked, Jeanette DeCarrico, Portland State University; and Marcella Frank, New York University,served as reviewers and provided helpful comments and suggestions for the style and content. Naomi Silverman, Senior Editor at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, de- serves a special word of thanks for her friendship, invaluable support, pa- tience, and insight.
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