FORGING BONDS BETWEEN ACADEMIC WRITING RESEARCH RESULTS AND TEACHING MATERIALS

The last four decades have witnessed the birth of numerous studies dealing with the research paper (RP), its rhetorical structure and contents, linguistic features, reporting verbs, review procedures, evaluative language, peer editing, transfer of academic writing skills, and many other features. In spite of the countless researches detailing academic writing features, not a small amount of textbooks on academic writing seem to ignore the results yielded by research conducted on this vital and crucial skill. A great number of academic writing textbooks seem to be unaware of the findings of research on academic writing practices. Thus, it is the purpose of this paper to briefly survey a number of academic writing textbooks claiming to be designed for teaching and developing university students’ academic writing skills and introduce the present author’s attempt in utilizing Swales’ IMRD and CARS patterns in teaching the overall rhetorical structure of academic research papers to tertiary students. The current author strongly believes that academic writing is an apprenticeship process. That is, the students should be shown samples of what they are expected to produce before they actually do it. Therefore, students were, individually, requested to find a journal RP, of 15 pages maximum, in the area they would choose for their research from any peer reviewed journal that uses APA style, print it, highlight only all the section headings, copy them on a separate sheet of paper and bring to the following class. In the second class session, students were divided into teams of 4, and were asked to share and discuss the research design patterns they identified. Then, they selected a representative team member to write the sections and subsections headings they found common in the research design on the whiteboard for all students to see. After this, a whole class discussion of the similarities and differences began. Then, Swales’ models were introduced for comparison with what they found. Using Swales’ models made it easy for students to think in an organized way and assign the information that they had gathered to their relevant sections/move(s).The students’ feedback was encouraging and the research papers they produced corroborated their positive responses