Page 36 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

22 CHAPTER 2
Short writing tasks (also called expanded answers) found in many written in-class and out-of-class exams, laboratory reports, case studies, annota- tions of literature, and computer program documentation assignments constitute the most common type of writing across all disciplines and courses. Furthermore, short writing assignments are significantly more common in undergraduate than graduate courses and in in-class than out- of-class assignments.
English Composition Writing Tasks
English composition instruction often provides the model for teaching writ- ing in EAPs. According to the Hale et al. (1996) study, short writing tasks are far less common in English than in social or natural sciences (29% of all in-class assignments vs. 53% and 79%, respectively). On the other hand, out-of-class essays are required in 94% of all English courses, for example, compared with 53% in social and 47% in natural sciences. Among the as- signment types, summaries and unstructured writing genre defined as free writing, journal entries, or notes, all which consist of writing down one's thoughts and experiences, are found almost exclusively in English courses, as well as twice as many assigned library research papers as in other disci- plines. Major papers of 5 to 10 pages in length are assigned in 41% of Eng- lish courses and only rarely in social science courses. Similarly, 1- to 5-page essays are required in 82% of English courses versus 39% of those in social sciences and 21% in physical/natural sciences.
FEATURES OF ACADEMIC GENRE AND TEXT
Research into various types of discourse and text (Biber, 1988; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, &Finegan, 1999; Swales, 1990a) showed explic- itly and clearly that academic discourse and text are constructed differently thanothertypesoftext,suchasfiction,newsreportage,orpersonal corre- spondence. In fact, Swales (1990a) identified what he called "the academic discourse community" (p. 5), which prescribes somewhat rigid forms of dis- course construction and organization combined with similarlyinflexible ex- pectations of vocabulary and grammar uses. Biber et al. (1999) examined a large corpus of specific microfeatures of texts in diverse spoken and written genres, and their findings are described in a 1,200-page volume. Their analysis includes the cross-genre uses of nouns, determiners, pronouns, verb tenses, and semantic classes of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and clauses. Textual uses of practically all features indicate that written academic text is markedly distinct from many other types of texts, such as personal narra-
tive, conversation, and even academic lectures.
Other corpus studies investigated frequencies of use of various lexical
and syntactic features employed in academic and other types of text to eluci-
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