The countries that make up the Middle East have intersecting though distinct and internally complex historical, economic, and linguistic histories. Disparate colonial histories and postcolonial legacies, the religious and socio-political positioning of Arabic as a regional language, and the influences of globalization and translanguaging create…

Genre analysis (GA) studies aim at creating a relationship between the text features and their underlying objectives, systematically built upon a series of moves. Highly motivated by the need to improve graduate students' skills in writing research articles (RAs) and adopting Swales' (1990) Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) framework;…

Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…

This article addresses the importance of giving greater pedagogical attention to writing for publication in higher education. It recognizes that, while doctoral research is a major source of new knowledge production in universities, most doctoral students do not receive adequate mentoring or structural support to publish from their research, with…

Academic writing competence comprises attitudes, knowledge, skills, and strategies that enable one to produce writing in accordance with the expectations of the academic discourse community. This paper introduces an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing course developed to help students from China acquire an adequate level of academic…

Writing, essentially a social act, is concerned with cognition and is allied to context. Most writing takes the form of dialogue and it is out of dialogic processes that language acquisition takes place. Writers and readers convene in the cognitive and social space that is at the heart of a discourse community. The social aspects of writing are…

A study of the discourse of book reviews in several academic disciplines examines how interaction of text and context varies across disciplines. Sixty academic book reviews in linguistics, chemistry, and economics were analyzed for rhetorical structure and for the communicative goal of the genre, that of evaluating knowledge production. The book…

What made the teaching and learning experiences of a five-week pre-freshman composition primer course for minority students and a ten-session seminar on contemporary American literature for a group of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) from black and colored schools in South Africa so radically different for the professor who taught…

This study analyzed the English discourse organization of sixty academic book reviews in three disciplines (linguistics, chemistry, economics) published in 1990, to help define book reviews as an academic written genre. Analysis revealed that although book reviews show regularities in information form, function, and content, some variation occurs…