Page 322 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

308 CHAPTER 11
nated before students are asked to insert punctuation marks (and/or combine simple sentences whenever possible).
(b) For students at the intermediate level of proficiency, the teacher may need to simplify authentic texts by replacing rare or advanced vo- cabulary items.
Retyped (but not copied) news media texts can also be useful for this type of practice.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. In addition to cohesive ties and lexical substitutions, in what other ways can text cohesion be established? Please consider the follow- ing examples: Which ones are cohesive and which ones are not? Why is it that some of these short contexts seem to be more cohe- sive than others?
(a) The end-of-the-year sales are a boon for merchants. The spring merchandise begins to ship in early February.
(b) Florida's Apalachicola Bay is one example of pollution dan- gers. In economic terms, water contamination means that vari- ous sea products are threatened.
(c) Only a few thousand people came to the opening night. The players were devastated.
(d) This paper will discuss the decline in the importance of the Constitution and the standards of behavior expected of gov- ernment officials.
(e) SincetheendoftheWWII,Europeancountrieshavenotbeen the same. The changes in the mindsets of Europeans following the war have had a broad effect on their policies.
2. From the point of view of rhetorical features, it appears that L2 writing produced by NNSs almost always differs from that writ- ten by NSs in their LI, English. Multiple reasons can exist for these divergences between the rhetorical characteristics of L2 and LI text. Can you identify the most important divergences and the reasons they exist?
3. In your opinion, what can be the reasons that textbooks for teach- ing writing to LI and L2writers alike emphasize particular features such as sentence transitions or examples, but not others (e.g., cohe- sive ties, lexical substitutions, or complex prepositions)?
4. In academic writing in English, it may be precarious to assume that the writer and reader share a good deal of common knowledge and are equally well familiar with certain universal truths. Yetto some degree such an assumption must be made for the writer to produce practically any piece of writing. How can new L2 writers strike a bal-
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