Page 37 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

STUDENT WRITING TASKS AND WRITTEN ACADEMIC GENRES 23
date the differences between the academic and other types of written gen- res. For example, these examinations focus on various hedges, modal verbs, epistemic adjectives, adverbs, and nouns (Collins, 1991; Hoye, 1997; Hyland, 1998), as well as classes of collocations, idioms, synonyms, adverb clauses, and text-referential cohesion (Partington, 1996). These studies ex- panded the current knowledge base regarding specific structures and lexi- cal features of written academic text, as well as other common features of text such as noun and prepositional phrases, stock phrases, and collocations (Kennedy, 1991; Kjellmer, 1991; Renouf & Sinclair, 1991).
For instance, analyses of large corpora have led to the development of pattern grammar to identify combinations of words that occur relatively fre- quently in academic texts and that may be dependent on a particular word choice to convey clear and definable meaning (Hunston & Francis, 2000). Because of great strides made in corpus analyses in the past few decades, to- day much more is known about frequent patterns of verb, noun, and adjec- tive uses and variations in their meanings, as well as the syntacticand lexical contexts in which particular lexical and syntactic features occur.
Although findings of text and corpus analyses of the written academic genre may not be directly applicable to classroom instruction and studies of student texts, they provide insight into discourse and text conventions of published academic and other types of texts. Furthermore, they often help explain how written academic prose is constructed and, by implication, can inform writing instruction and pedagogy. An additional benefit of corpus studies is that they shed light on how enormously complex and frequently lexicalized the uses of language and text in the academic genre actually are.
TEACHING ACADEMIC TEXT FEATURES
Several researchers have identified English composition essays and the pedagogical essays (Johns, 1997) ubiquitous in English for Academic Pur- poses (EAPs) programs to be dramatically different from those students are required to write in the disciplines. Among other researchers, Horowitz (1986a) identified some of the writing tasks in undergraduate humanities courses. According to his findings, these included:
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summary/reaction to ajournal article or reading
annotated bibliography in such disciplines as biology, lab, and ex- periment reports
connections between theory and data
synthesis of multiple literature sources
various research projects
Horowitz further noted that these assignments do not include invention and personal discovery and "the academic writer's task is not to create per-
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