Page 47 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

Curriculum for Teaching the Language Features of Academic Writing
OVERVIEW
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The importance of accuracy in academic writing Recurrent features of academic discourse in English The benefits of written academic discourse conventions Instructed L2 grammar and noticing
Vocabularysize and academic text
Incidental learning of grammar and vocabulary Self-editing skills development
Unimportant features of academic text
The
teaching academic writing courses that focus onjust the core, academic sur- vival-level skills students need to be successful in their university work. To this end, the L2 writing course curriculum needs to be designed around the key areas that deal with accuracy in grammar and lexis, intensive vocabulary instruction, and fundamental editing of one's own text. In addition, the chapter also discusses the benefits and shortfalls of incidental vocabulary learning and the grammatical and lexical features of academic text that are customarily taught in ESLclasses,but that maybe relativelyunimportant.
The essential elements of the course that must be addressed can be de- signed to be flexible within the curriculum structure, and the amount of effort and time devoted to each can be adjusted for a particular group of students. This chapter presents an overview of research to show why core components of the course are critical in teaching L2 academic writing and lays the groundwork for the teaching approach developed in the subsequent chapters on sentence and phrase structure, nouns, pro-
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purpose of this chapter is to establish a research-based framework for
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