Sunya: Week 5

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Academic Literacies

Hi Everyone,

I would like to share my thoughts on the topic of English for Academic Purpose (EAP) and Academic Literacies. I think the topic provides an overview of key approaches for the teaching of academic writing. This gives me a hope that there might be a good approach that can be used for teaching academic writing. The one that I am most interested in is the rhetoric function approach. I think that this approach has a potential for the teaching of academic writing because it seems to focus beyond traditional sentence grammar unlike most academic writing courses designed to help students develop an idea or argument within longer sections of texts. This approach seems to influence the way in which exposing students to a range of rhetorical patterns that frequently appear in academic writing such as comparison and contrast. The model of point-by-point organization provides paragraph structure in which the body of the essay appears to consist of four paragraphs after the thesis statement and each paragraph has a topic sentence that provides a clear indication of the comparison-based organisation of the paragraph and supporting content. This model is regarded as a logical unit of discourse.

In addition, it is not all true that this explicit modelling of linguistic form restricts individual expression. Whether students are in high school, college or university academic writing is something that cannot be avoided throughout the academic career. When student write his/her academic papers he/she comes across similar components and writing structure again and again. Most importantly, what is required is that he/she presents information in his/her academic papers in such a way as to make reading for the readers comprehensible and logical in a coherent way. However, this model might be restricted in one genre without examining how rhetorical patterns occur in different genres. I think that description in an art historical essay will generally take a different linguistic form than description in scientific report.

Furthermore, the rhetorical functions approach provides students with a range of structural words and expression used to construct rhetorical patterns. For example, similarly, likewise, also, too are sentence connectors. However, structure words for writing comparison do not do comparison and contrast but I believe verbs that do.

It seems that writing is a key assessment to assess students passing or failing courses according to the way in which they respond to and engage in academic writing task (Lillies, 2001). Second Language Students often have problem as primarily linguistic but he/she needs to learn how to produce writing that will satisfy the norms of the academic communities into which he/she wishes to enter. This will involve reaching a satisfactory level of linguistic competence and mastering the academic writing conventions those communities follow. However, different academic disciplines have different conventions. A teacher cannot know the conventions of all his/her students’ specialisations. How do we teach? The rhetorical function approach will be considered teaching academic writing. Although, explicit modelling of linguistic form might restrict individual expression, it gives students something to work on.

Lillis, T. (2001). Student writing. London Routledge.