DEVELOPING ACADEMIC WRITING IN A BUSINESS-ORIENTED UNIVERSITY

This is the conclusion of DEVELOPING ACADEMIC WRITING IN A BUSINESS-ORIENTED UNIVERSITY by J.A. Foley : The purpose of this study was to see what effect the implementation of a genre–based approach to writing might have on the development of “academic” writing of university undergraduates. The focus was on the nominal group in Topical and Marked Topical themes position. The rationale behind this is that in each text there are different patterns of what comes first in the clause: this is how the genre, the overall social purpose of the writer and the mode, the interaction or planning of the language is constructed. In writing, where the text is generally planned and edited, and normally, some thought goes into the organizing of the text and making clear its overall direction. Writers, therefore, have to be careful to make the necessary connections in the first part of the clause to summarize and link what follows.

Shifting focus when writing is very important and careful planning may need signposts to indicate what direction the text is taking. When linguists say that something is “unmarked,” they mean it is the most common or expected. Conversely, when they say that something is “marked,” they mean
it is unusual and should be noticed because of the way it stands out; in other words, the text is taking a particular direction. Because choices are meaningful, when we find Marked Themes we look for the purpose behind the writer’s patterning; the purpose may be to draw the reader’s attention to a particular group or phrase, but more often than not it is to build a coherent text that is easy to follow.

A program, such as one based on the theory of “genre,” which scaffolds the students’ writing, can be useful, especially in an EFL context, to develop the language resources in different subject areas. Content knowledge and skills cannot be separated from the linguistic means, through which that knowledge and skill is manifest. Approaches to content-based language instruction (Chamot & O’Malley, 1987; Snow, Met & Genesee, 1989) can be enriched through an understanding of “content,” especially at university level. Consequently, as the difficulty of the concepts increases, we want the students’ learning of the language that construes those concepts to also become more
complex. For example, the movement from the presentation of a new idea in the rheme of one clause to the re-presentation of the same information in the theme of a succeeding sentence is a feature of academic writing that typically involves nominalization. Such forms of nominalization are often a dominant feature of many academic and scientific texts.

Consequently, writing programs need to be developed that explicitly teach the strategies that are expected of the students in their writing. Such programs have to develop the linguistic capacities (such as complex nominal groups and nominalization) that display the students’ knowledge. If students are unable to draw on the meaning-making resources of academic discourse, then they will be unable to fully demonstrate what they are capable of.

For further details, visit http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/view/163/113


Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 2 No. 2, January 2013, pp. 168-186