Scaffolding the novice academic writer from both “top down” and “bottom up”

Abstract

Tertiary students in EFL contexts like China are often faced with a gap between their limited command of L2 (English) academic literacies and their much more developed L1 academic literacies. Instead of just focusing on the L2 limitations of the EFL academic writer, research can also look at how best one can help bridge this gap. There are two major dimensions to the task of academic writing: (1) the bottom-up dimension: selecting the appropriate kinds of lexico-grammatical resources—lexical phrases, and (2) the top-down dimension: planning the schematic structure of the text to achieve one’s overall communicative purpose through moves and steps, each with specific rhetorical functions. In view of the many Chinese university contexts where students are often taught in huge classrooms and accustomed to explicit instruction on general English skills with grammar exercises, this seminar will present a culturally appropriate pedagogical approach integrating genre-based pedagogies (Rose and Martin, 2012), lexical bundle studies (e.g. Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Cortes, 2004, 2013; Hyland, 2008) and move analysis of English for academic purposes (EAP) (Swales, 1990; Swale & Feak, 2004). The “teaching and learning cycle” of genre-based pedagogies (Rose & Martin, 2012) and corpus-informed explicit instruction are incorporated into an EAP genre-based approach for a better “text in context” exemplification of genre knowledge and genre-specific language features. Lexical phrases are focused upon as key EAP resources in the context of genre awareness including “general academic lexical phrases” (GALP) (e.g., 4-5 word “lexical bundles” such as “on the basis of”) selected through corpus frequency analysis, and “move-specific lexical phrases” (MLP) selected through qualitative genre analysis (Cai & Lin, 2012). MLPs are, in particular, taught as useful “frames” for expanding students’ repertoire of lexico-grammatical resources to realize different moves in a specific genre. This new distinction between GALP and MLP is made in an attempt to attend to both the frequency and variety of building blocks of academic texts in genre-based pedagogies, and also to model a good strategy for students’ own independent learning in different genres of academic writing.