Academic Writing in a Second Language

If one can write well in the ways discussed in this volume of sixteen essays one has somehow internalized and learned to use four systems: the English language (the “second language” of the title), Anglo-academic culture, the intellectual world of ones specialism, and the process of “skilled writing.” The activity is complicated enough to be studied in a variety of ways and this book occupies a pivotal position which makes it useful to a wide range of readers. The writers do not typically adopt an oppositional stance to the academy or develop abstract theoretical positions, but they are not uncritical or concerned mainly with lively classroom activities either. The most useful essays report empirical investigations which are illuminated by theory and in turn illuminate the teaching situation. The link between research findings and language-classroom tasks is preserved throughout. The book is divided into three parts: issues, research, and pedagogy. The four articles under “issues” are among the most stimulating. Schneider and Fujishima present a representative figure EAP teachers must worry about: the student who doesn’t improve despite declarative knowledge of the right strategies and plenty of hard work, and finally has to leave. The other articles really have to be evaluated in terms of what they tell us about his situation and what could be done. Leki describes a revealing investigation of how writing is evaluated, by students, EAP staff, L1 composition teachers, and subject specialists. The very different responses confirm that literacy is relative and situatioddiscipline-specific, and also, in contrast, that most people think it is absolute and unproblematic. One problem that students have, therefore, is that literacy strategies successful in one (US) context fail in another. Prior and Casanave both present detailed case studies of the interaction of beginning PhD students with their teachers and their subject, showing how the processes which from a distance can be described (metaphorically, as Casanave insists) as acculturation into an academic discourse (etc.) community dissolve in close-up into complex personal interactions. In Prior’s exhilarating and rich essay, I would highlight the way classroom interactions determine teachers’ interpretation of and response to written work. As I would interpret Prior’s carefully nonreductionist formulation, overseas students with poor English may be excluded, understimulated, and allowed to slip through on unchallenged poor work; students who rcact better to teachers get better responses. Casanave emphasizes the way the personalities and intellectual background of all