Page 74 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

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versity course material): sociology of dating, microeconomics, consumer behavior, and psychology of learning, memory, intelligence, or motivation. Topics to avoid: personal matters and beliefs, experience narratives, reli- gion, and politics. All topics of major written assignments have to be cleared with the instructor if they are chosen by each individual student.
Discussion of content topics is a necessary prewriting activity for most writing tasks, as students are usually guided in selecting appropriate and manageable topics, narrowing the thesis, and choosing convincing sup- porting information. Content from readings can serve as a base forwriting assignments and tasks, as well as reading-based in-classwriting to prompts and/or expanded essay questions (15-30 minutes per week in the second half of the course).
Course Duration
The class meets for 50 or 70 hours per term (quarters or semesters), and, in all likelihood, it may be the last (or second to last) formal ESL writing class the majority of the students will ever take.
ATTENDANT WRITING CONCEPTS AND SKILLS (REMEDIAL, ASNEEDED)
High-Intermediate Proficiency Level or Review at Advanced Level
A number of features of academic discourse and text in English represent cul- turally bound concepts that are not shared in non-Anglo-American discourse traditions (including continental European). Thus, these features may seem particularly foreign and difficult to understand or relate to for a majority of L2 writers socialized in different cultures. For this reason, the concepts and written discourse constructs that underlie the production of academic dis- course in English often require additional and repeated teaching.
Language Work (As Needed)
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Academic register and audience
Lexical and syntactic accuracy, increased sentence complexity and clause use, and noun and verb inflections
Unity (rhetorical purpose: explication and/or persuasion), cohe- sion of paragraphs and ideas, and logical connectors
Avoiding lexical and discourse-level redundancy (concept of re- dundancy).
TLFeBOOK