West Virginia University

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

L624: Second Language Writing

Fall 2005

Academic writing in ESL composition classes

-Academic discourse community-

Achim Zeidler

GERMAN/ TESOL

3rd Semester

Morgantown, WV, 12/11/05

This paper discusses the concept of Academic Writing and the role of the importance

in the ESL classroom. The different perspectives that have to be considered while teaching

writing for an Academic purpose and some teaching approaches will be mentioned and

evaluated. Thereby the focus will be on the different opinions and methods, as well as

constraints and problems that scholars investigated about the notion of Academic Writing.

There are a lot of discussions and some research has recently tried to define how the particluar

and varied academic discourse communities have to be considered in the curriculum of ESL

learners, but still there is a lot of uncertainty of how effective classroom teaching in

composition or content classes lead to a the demanded knowledge transformation that the ESL

students need in order to fit successfully into a special academic field and write with respect

to the expectations of that special audience. This paper tries to mention the most important

articles and findings in order to understand the notion of Academic writing and examines

some of the constraints students as well as teachers have to deal with and summarizes also

some opportunities of making students aware of specific styles, formats, and conventions that

are needed in their particular discourse communities and that can and should be involved in

ESL composition and content classes with English for an academic purpose to achieve a

desired participation in the higher-educational level through fullfilment of the writing

standards of educational and academical conventions and values of a particular discourse

community.

A working definition of Godev explains the notion of Academic writing: ,,The term ´academic

writing´ seems to escape any definition that may try to encompass every writing task likely to

be encountered in any of the academic disciplines." (Godev 2000, 636). The reason for this is

that the style of a given academic product is defined by conventions that are ultimately

dicipline specific as Spack pointed out. (Spack 1988, 32). Nevertheless there are four different

perspectives that have to be considered to get a wider understanding of the term academic

writing.

The notions of a) audience, b) task, c) communicative functions, and d) style are very crucial

in order to conceive a working definition of academic writing.

The four different perspectives have different views of and about academic writing. Gajdusek

& van Dommelen 1993, 202) as well as Silva (1991) stated that from the perspective of the

audience, academic writing is a kind of writing accepted by the faculty of a particular

discourse community when discussing a topic in a published material or when the members of

the special discourse community adress themselves to others of the same one orally. Silva

explained the notion of audience a little bit more explicit. His definition of audience says that

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"academic writing is prose that will be acceptable at an American academic institution."

(cited in Godev, 636).

The second perspective, namely the task perspective, and its connection to academic writing

is due to the fact that academic writing usually involves manipulation of infrmation that are

obtained from a specific reading assignment. This information from the reading source can be

incorparated in a summary, a research paper, essay questions or a critique.

Academic writing then also presents the notion of communicative functions, which is now the

third perspective and has a focus point of the communication forms that are involved in the

academic writing settings. Gajdusek and vanDommelen (1993) exemplified analysis,

synthesis, interpretation, an expressing and supporting of an opinion or point of view as the

most frequently and familiar of the communicative functions. (cited in Godev, 636).

Last bot not least, the fourth perspective of academic writing is concernd with its style. This

notion of style may be the most difficult one of the four perspectives due to the fact that

different academic discourse communities own their specific and particular styles of writing,

including word choice, terminology etc. However, Elbow (1991, 40) proposed a definition of

academic style: "Academic style conveys certain impersonality and detachment all working

toward the goal of seperating feeling, personality, opinion, and fashion from what is essential:

clear positions, arguments, and evidence." This definition is able to express the notion of style

in academic writing the best in my opinion because there is the point evolved: Style in

academic writing is a kind of writing that works with facts, with analysis that can be prooven,

with findings that bare validity and reliability and therefore are objective, shortly ­ writing

that is true and everlasting and prooved by science,society and discourse community to be

valid.

It was surveyed that about 90 % of the ESL/ EFL Students that had taken composition

classes went on with taking either culture or literatur courses. That means that students go on

with a particular type of academic writing. But here are some problems indicated by Godev

that says that "composition instructors are challenged by the lack of sophistication in students´

writing, literature/ culture instructors are not satisfied with students´ essays (and) students

diccover that the composition classes may not have them prepared for the next level." (637).

What are the origins of these mentioned problems? There is not only one right answer to this

question and the causes may differ and vary, but Godev mentioned out of own findings and

investigations that the main issue of the problem is due to the fact that the students´experience

in writing has been limited mainly to personal writing and that the experience in reading about

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