Page 39 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

STUDENT WRITING TASKS AND WRITTEN ACADEMIC GENRES 25
is valued in writing classes that emphasize personal growth and experience is distinct from that necessary in academic writing in the disciplines. They further stated that EAP writing instruction has the responsibility for prepar- ing students for "real" academic courses because without adequate expo- sure to the demands of academic writing students are essentiallyleft to their own devices once their EAP training is completed.
Johns (1997) explained that the narrow focus of writing instruction in EAPs and its focus on experiential essays is often based on the principle that, "if you can write [or read] an essay, you can write [or read] anything" (p.
122). She pointed out that in mainstream courses the expectations and grading of writing are different from those of ESL/EAP faculty. In fact she commented thatwhenNNSstudentsareexposed tolargelyonetypeofwrit- ing task, they come to believe that "this is the only way to write." Such lim- ited experience with writing actually does students a disservice and causes problems in their academic and professional careers.
Like Horowitz, Johns emphasized the importance of text in students' ac- ademic writing. She emphasized that faculty often complain that students do not use vocabulary and data with care. However, in her view, because per- sonal essays are highly valued in ESL and EAPwriting instruction and be- cause many instructional readings are in story form and/or simplified specifically for NNS readers, students are not exposed to the precision often expected in much of the academic prose. Furthermore, considerations of academic objectivity often conveyed by lexical and syntactic means, such as uses of personal pronouns and passive voice, are in conflict with those fea- tures of text encouraged in personal essays.Johns emphasized that formal academic register requires writers to be guarded and personally and emo- tionally removed from the text. She underscored that the hedged and de- personalized register of academic text is rarely addressed in ESL/EAP
writing instruction, but should be if students are to attain the proficiency necessary for their success in mainstream academic courses.
In other studies, Dudley-Evansand St.John (1998) also stated that "the process approach [to teaching L2 writing], although extremely valu- able in helping students organize and plan their writing has failed to tackle the actual texts that students have to produce as part of their aca- demic or professional work" (p. 117).They also noted that in the United States, most of those who advocate a process approach see the teaching of generalized strategies of planning, writing, and revising as sufficient and believe that a detailed analysis of academic texts lies beyond the job of the writing teacher (Raimes, 1993; Zamel, 1983). However, according to Dudley-Evans and St.John, the considerations of end-product quality in L2 writing is important in academic and professional writing, and com- bining the strengths of both the product- and process-oriented ap- proaches to the teaching of writing can lead to overall improvements in L2 writing instruction.
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