Academic writing in ESL composition classes - Academic discourse community

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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various topics that are important for successful writing in different academic settings are limited and scarce as well (637).

Leki and Carson made a survey of ESL Students in the U.S. that indicated that Students experience writing differently due to the fact that the source of information drawn on in a writing text is different (Leki and Carson 1994, cited Leki and Carson 1997, 39). When Students have to write they mostly write about source of informationa as the following four: general world knowledge or personal experience; a source text or texts used as a springboard for ideas, a source text (external reality) and content of which the Students have to display knowledge.

This restriction and the types of writing that were reported from EAP composition classes and Academic Content Courses can be seen in a connection of the above mentioned problem with unexperience students in the case of writing successfully for academic purposes. The already mentioned survey of Carson and Leki sorted out six types of writing: Write about reading, respond to reading, personal, explain, argue, and total personal topics. Thereby five topic categories could be identified through this survey. 1. Writing about something you have read,

2. Responding to something you have read, 3. Writing about something you personal, 4. Explaining something, and 5. Arguing for or against something. (cited in Carson and Leki 1997, 40). The findings showed similar issues as the research of Godev mentioned and fostered the notion that ESL students write primarily about total personal topics in their composition classes and that a writing about a reading or a responding task to a reading assignment is scarce and limited as well. Scholars like Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes also found these mentioned criteria and a lack of reading ability or capacity in composition classes and plead for an improvement and a better frequential use of reading in the L2 (Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes 1991, 47). The proble with personal writing as it is exposured a lot in the ESL composition classes is that it is very different from the writing type and style that is needed for Academic content classes. The personal writing gives the Students the opportunity to choose one topic which is very realted to their own life or their experiences. As Carlson and Leki mention the personal topics are some of the students´ already accomplished background knowledge like “My childhood memory”, “My trip from Kuwait to the U.S.” or “Write about a wedding in Iran” (Leki and Carson 1997, 41) and are therefore not very difficult to express. Of course there is still the problem of using the target language instaed of the L1, but the Students do not have big constraints in organizing, structuring, transcribing, planning or evaluating these kinds of writing tasks. There is the main distinction reagrding to the differences between composition classes in an ESL setting and writing for an academid

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