Academic Writing and Genre: A Systematic Analysis

Description

The focus of this book is the use of genre-based approaches to teaching academic writing. Genre-based courses enable second language learners to integrate their linguistic, organisational and contextual knowledge in a variety of different tasks. The book reviews pedagogical approaches to genre through English for Specific Purposes and Systemic Functional Linguistics to present a synthesis of the current research being undertaken in the field. From this theoretical base, Ian Bruce proposes a new model of genre-based approaches to academic writing, and analyses the ways in which this can be implemented in pedagogy and curriculum design. Academic Writing and Genre is a cutting-edge monograph which will be essential reading for researchers in applied linguistics.

Ian Bruce is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

"The most valuable characteristic of Academic writing and genre is that it provides a rich and detailed discussion on the need for the inclusion of both social and cognitive genres. The author successfully manages to guide readers towards a general as well as comprehensive understanding of the necessity to deploy the dual processing theory of language learning and use. The textual organisation of the book chapters is also successful. Summaries are provided in the introduction section of each chapter to inform readers what to expect and how to form links between chapters. Headings and subheadings assist this scaffolding. Summaries are also provided at the end of chapters to review the chapter and to inform the reader about what is next to come. Moreover, the tables and figures assist the reader to link verbal and non-verbal information in order to make meaning by structuring the knowledge presented." -- Australian Review of Applied Linguistics -- Yilmaz Devrim, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia "The book is informative, clearly written and well organized. It is a significant contribution to the genre discussion in general, and to the teaching of academic writing in particular. Since it helps unveil the dynamics underlying the acquisition of genre competence, this book is a recommended reading to all those working in areas where genre classification has a bearing - from pedagogy to genre analysis, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, information studies, context-based information retrieval...This book is a valuable resource...." - Marina Santini, Linguist List, October 10, 2008 -- Marina Santini * Linguist List *