Tài liệu Teaching academic ESL writing part 2 docx

X PREFACE

goal of this book, however, is to benefit language learners who aspire to suc￾cess in academic degree programs beyond their ESL and English courses.

Few EAP students set out to major in intensive English study and obtain de￾grees in English composition, and practically all have other educational,

professional, and career goals in mind.

This book deals with techniques for teaching L2 writing, grammar, and

lexis that can inform L2 instruction and effectively target specific areas of

L2 text that require substantial improvements. ESL teachers are usually

keenly aware of how short the course and class time are. The scope of mate￾rial is designed to be taught during one or, at most, two courses at the high

intermediate and/or advanced levels of learner proficiency. In such courses,

the teacher's goal is usually to provide the critical preparation for students

who are almost ready to begin their studies in regular college and university

courses. Teaching strategies and techniques discussed here are based on a

highly practical principle of maximizing learners' language gains by em￾ploying a few shortcuts. This book—based on current research and, in par￾ticular, a large-scale research of almost 1,500 NNS (non-native speakers)

essays (Hinkel, 2002a, Second Language Writers' Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical

Features, Lawrence Erlbaum) in addition to 25 years of ESL teaching and

teacher-training experience—works with several sets of simple rules that

collectively can make a noticeable and important difference in the quality of

NNS students' writing.

The philosophical goal of this book is to focus the attention of practicing

and preservice ESL/EAP teachers on the fact that without clear, reasonably

accurate, and coherent text, there can be no academic writing in a second

language. The practical and immediate purpose, however, is to provide a

compendium of teaching techniques for the grammatical and lexical fea￾tures of academic language that "every teacher (and student) must know."

Several key differences between this book and many other books on

teaching ESL should be highlighted:

• The decision about what a L2 writing course has to address and

what L2 writers must know is based on the findings of research into

academic text and the text produced by L2 writers. Therefore, the

material sets out to address the gaps in current curricula for teach￾ing L2 writing. In addition, the aspects of L2 that are traditionally

included in L2 teaching, but hardly ever found in academic text,

are highlighted throughout the book.

• Because academic vocabulary, the grammar of formal written English,

and specific features of academic prose represent integral aspects of

academic writing in a second language, curriculum and teaching

techniques presented in this book work with these concurrently.

• The curriculum and its elements discussed herein are not based on

an incremental progression of material, such as "first, the course

TLFeBOOK