Page 49 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING LANGUAGE FEA TURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING 35
throughout their entire lives,whereas most NNS students have studied EFL in their native countries and began their ESL/EAP studies as adults. The fact that NNS writers have a reduced English proficiency compared with their NS counterparts further underscores the need for thorough L2 training and instruction. In light of the fact that L2 writers' vocabulary and grammar ranges are usually greatly limited compared with those of NSs, for NNS stu- dents, producing academic writing proximate to that of NSs is not a trivial task. Without instruction in and learning how to construct L2 academic text, NNS students often find themselves at a great disadvantage in their aca- demic and professional careers (Horowitz, 1986a; Johns, 1981, 1997; Leki & Carson, 1997; Nation & Waring, 1997; Santos, 1984, 1988).
The curriculum outline for teaching the essential features of academic text in English is based on the research findings discussed in the bookSec- ond Language Writers' Text (Hinkel, 2002a). That volume presents detailed analyses of NNS students' texts and their quantitative comparisons to the types and frequency rates of textual features in NS students' texts.
Research has demonstrated that English-language academic writing is governed by several rigid conventions in its discourse structure and language features. Based on the findings of numerous studies and in simple terms, the teaching techniques and strategies discussed in this book aim for maximum gain for minimal work by capitalizing on the ri- gidity and conventionalization of written academic prose in English.
The fundamental principle of the L2 academic writing curriculum presented in this volume centers around acceptable and contextually relevant lexical substitutionswithin a limited range of lexical and syn- tactic constructions (i.e., text and sentence chunking and focused in- struction in replacement parts for chunk components).
DISCOURSE AND TEXTUAL FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING
To some extent, the uses of specific linguistic features may depend on the discipline for which an assignment is written. Predictably, an essay in his- tory, business case studies, or descriptions of experiments in psychology may contain a greater number of past-tense verbs than a paper that dis- cusses generally applicable observations and interpretations of research data. For example, most introductory textbooks in philosophy, sociology, economics, or biology include high numbers of present-tense verbs.
Despite some amount of variation that can be identified in the linguistic features of texts across disciplines and particular academic subgenres, many represent what Johns (1997) called "recurring features" (p. 27) of the aca- demic genre and text—that is, "formal features of text in this genre do not appear to vary considerably from class to class, nor ... have the genre re-
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