Page 41 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

STUDENT WRITING TASKS AND WRITTEN ACADEMIC GENRES 27
quire students to keep personaljournals or carry outjournal-centered cor- respondence with the teacher are not designed to increase learners' academic vocabulary or grammar repertoire, with its almost requisite uses of passive voice, impersonal construction, and complex hedging. In fact such fluency-based activities encourage the use of immediately accessible lexicon and grammar structures without a means of language gains and perpetuate learners' misunderstanding and confusion with regard to the high degree of accuracy expected in formal academic prose.
A teacher of writing would do a disservice to academically bound NNS students by not preparing them for academic writing assignments, particu- larly those in the more common forms the students are certain to encounter later in their studies. Within these academic assignments and tasks, stu- dents must produce text that is academically sophisticated enough to dem- onstrate their understanding of and familiarity with the course material. Yet few ESL/EAP programs undertake to at least expose their students to vari- ous types of academic assignments and require production of written aca- demic (rather than personal) prose (Chang & Swales, 1999; Johns, 1997; Leki& Carson, 1997).
TYPES OF WRITING TASKS
The discussion of writing tasks in this section relies on the findings of Hale et al. (1996) to survey the writing requirements in eight comprehensive U.S. universities. Overall the types of writing expected of undergraduate and graduate students do not seem to vary greatly with regard to the rhe- torical and discourse patterns they elicit. Most assignments combine sev- eral rhetorical tasks (e.g., exposition and analysis in business case studies or historyessays).
The most common types of rhetorical formats found in in-class and out-of-class assignments represent (in declining order of frequency):
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Exposition (short tasks required largely in introductions and ex- planations of material or content to follow, and thus it is a compo- nent of all assignment types)
Cause-effect interpretation (by far the most prevalent writing task, found in over half of all writingassignments)
Classification of events, facts, and developments according to a generalized theoretical or factual scheme
Comparison/contrast of entities, theories, methods, analyses, and approaches (in short assignments)
Analysis of information/facts (in medium-length assignments) Argumentation based on facts/research/published literature (in medium-length assignments)
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