Chapter Ten: Academic Writing in Europe

We have seen that there are many ways of approaching the teaching of academic writing within the European context. The purpose of this final chapter is not to draw definitive conclusions concerning what should, or should not, be taught or what form such teaching should, or should not, take. The aim is rather to pull together the different strands explored in the previous chapters and set out some tentative principles that may serve to guide the design and implementation of specific academic writing courses, or of integrated courses including a writing component.These principles and guidelines will be arranged in terms of texts and processes, writers and teachers, classic approaches and innovative practices.TextsThe question as to what kind of text students should be writing should be approached with an open mind. The purpose of academic writing classes should not be to perfect international examination formats, but rather to help students to make their first steps as writers for academic or professional purposes in English. This means that writing teachers must collaborate closely with those responsible for the students' other courses, in order to establish what kind of text students should ideally be learning to write, and to map out the criteria that define a satisfactory text of this kind. In this, the writing teacher needs to cany out a practical genre analysis of the target texts, preferably including interviews with professionals in the subject area to find out how such texts are written and what aspects of the texts are particularly valued. For example, in a course designed to help students to write up an MSc project in English, it is not only important to look at previous examples of student projects and subject them to linguistic analysis. It will also be necessary to talk to the university teachers who supervise these projects, to find out whether a standard research paper structure is required, whether publication is intended, how far other people (teachers, colleagues) will intervene in the writing up of the project, and so on. Once a rounded picture has been obtained, it will be easier for the writing teacher to define his or her own role, and to give special weight to the salient features of the target text while teaching or evaluating student work.Moreover, since content teachers may have a wide range of possible objectives when setting required essays or papers, the writing teacher has to keep an open mind, and not try to impose Anglo-American models of what is regarded as good writing if this is at odds with the expectations of the students' other teachers. If possible, a fruitful dialogue should be opened in which writing teachers can both contribute their own opinions, based on their knowledge of texts and writing processes, and listen sensitively to course teachers' requirements.When academic writing courses are not linked to any particular faculty or course, the teacher's task is less well defined, and the benefits of increased freedom have to be offset against the drawback of having ill-defined objectives. In such cases, writing teachers should not take the reductive approach of focusing only on the lowest common denominators of formal written style, paragraph structure, and so on. Instead, they should try to encourage students to apply analytical metacognitive skills to the academic or professional texts that they encounter, by directing practical genre-analysis activities crossing a range of disciplines, or organising their courses around broad, generative topics that can be approached from a variety of disciplines in order to foment in-depth study within an interdisciplinary context.ProcessesThere is no one way to write, but there are some approaches to writing that are effective for large numbers of people. When teaching writing, we must make our students aware of the benefits of planning, drafting and editing, because the process approach breaks down what appears to be a mysterious, even unattainable, skill into relatively manageable component parts. …