Page 346 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

332 CHAPTER 12
tional materials can be presented to other groups or the entire class in mock commercials or skits.
In a follow-up exercise, to contrast inflated and hedged prose, students can also write up academic descriptions of similar or different places, items, or people when writers need to scrupulously stay away from exaggerations and provide (real or imaginary) facts to support their claims.
(3) Distinctions Between Spoken and Written/Formal and Informal Registers
In addition to written promotional materials, audio- and videotaped com- mercials, infomercials,and/or casual conversation clips from movies, soap operas, talk shows, or situational comedies can be used to help learners identify important and numerous differences between formal and informal spoken registers. Distinguishing features of informal conversational and formal written texts can also be highlighted (i.e., academic essays cannot be written as if the writer were talking to his or her friends).
(4) Editing and Adding Appropriate Hedges and Weeding Out Exaggeratives
This is a very important exercise that can be used in stages throughout a course on learning to write academic prose. The learning goal of this prac-
tice
• • • • •
is to focus students' attention on:
Quantifiers: limiting the noun power
Adverbs of frequency and modal verbs: limiting the verb power Predicting the future and modal verb hedges
Identifying and replacing conversational hedges Avoidingexaggeratives and emphatics
Students can work in pairs, small groups, or individually to edit their own text or texts supplied by the teacher. The practice can be varied between work on "stripped-down" prose without any hedges or exaggeratives and text excerpts with added conversational hedges or exaggeratives that stu- dents need to find and correct.
(a) An example of a "stripped-down" text, in which students need to add hedges of various types (but not too many!):
These days, students plagiarize their papers by using the Internet. They do not write their own papers or do their own homework. Students easily access the companies that sell various course papers via the Internet. These students go to a website that sells papers and buy them. Plagiarized papers get excellent
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