16.775, Review: Applied Ling/Writing/ESL: Hinkel (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-775. Mon Mar 14 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.775, Review: Applied Ling/Writing/ESL: Hinkel (2004)

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1)
Date: 14-Mar-2005
From: Elizabeth Erling < berling at zedat.fu-berlin.de >
Subject: Teaching Academic ESL Writing 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:37:04
From: Elizabeth Erling < berling at zedat.fu-berlin.de >
Subject: Teaching Academic ESL Writing 
 

AUTHOR: Hinkel, Eli
TITLE: Teaching Academic ESL Writing
SUBTITLE: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar
SERIES: ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
PUBLISHER: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2993.html


Elizabeth J. Erling, Language Centre, Freie Universität Berlin

Eli Hinkel's book offers an approach to teaching writing that emphasizes 
contextualized grammatical practice and vocabulary building. As Hinkel 
rightly notes, there is often too much emphasis on teaching the process of 
writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) courses instead of on 
teaching the practical skills that students need. Students with English as 
an L2 then enter the academic community without sufficient practice in 
scientific writing and are thus often not able to cope with the tasks set 
in their mainstream university courses. While the book was written with 
university ESL instructors in North America in mind, it is also applicable 
for anyone teaching English writing at an advanced level. It offers 
practical tips and activities based on corpus studies, research, and years 
of experience. As each chapter ends with a list of suggested teaching 
activities, questions for discussion in teacher-training courses, and 
appendixes that provide supplementary material, the book can be directly 
applied in both ESL academic writing courses and Master's level courses in 
ESL pedagogy.

Part I provides a theoretical background to the volume. Hinkel presents 
findings which show that ESL students' academic papers are often perceived 
as vague and confusing, rhetorically unstructured, and overly personal 
(4). She argues that this is a result of the process-writing curriculum, 
which emphasizes content and structure while only sparsely and 
inconsistently addressing grammar and lexis. Further investigation shows 
that there is a disparity between tasks which students are assigned in ESL 
courses and those which they have to complete in their mainstream courses. 
Hinkel thus recommends the teaching of more relevant academic writing 
tasks and presents an overview of essential language skills that every 
student must have to perform well in their courses. In order to ensure 
that students master these skills, Hinkel recommends that ESL instructors 
offer extensive, thorough, and focused instruction in English academic 
vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. She also recommends teaching the L2 in 
contextual lexicalized chunks, thus creating an awareness of constructions 
typically found in academic works. This section ends with guidelines for a 
course curriculum, suggesting ways to encourage students to work 
autonomously so they can improve significantly over a short period of 
time. She stresses the importance of raising students' awareness to the 
errors they consistently make by concentrating on four to six types of 
errors per assignment.

Part II goes into the specifics of teaching advanced grammar and 
vocabulary in a way that is directly meaningful and relevant for student 
writers. Here Hinkel provides the core information that ESL students need 
to be taught about English sentence and text construction, covering 
sentence structure and word classes. She not only describes what should be 
taught and why, but also suggests possible teaching strategies and 
exercises. Hinkel points out that even advanced students do not have the 
vocabulary range needed for their degree studies (96). She thus suggests 
providing students with lists of the essential nouns, verbs, and 
adjectives used in academic texts and stock phrases that they can employ 
in their writing, all of which have been compiled from various corpus 
studies (e.g. Nation's 1990 University Word List, Biber et al 1999). She 
then presents ways that instructors can teach vocabulary in semantic and 
contextually applicable clusters. This section also contains a chapter 
describing the English tense and aspect system and a context-based means 
of teaching it. Hinkel mentions that several linguistic constructions that 
are traditionally taught in ESL courses are actually relatively uncommon 
in academic texts and should thus have a low priority. For example, corpus 
studies by Biber et al (1999) have shown that the perfect and progressive 
aspects are seldom used in academic genres; therefore, Hinkel recommends 
that instructors spend less time on them and more time on more common 
linguistic elements of academic writing, such as the passive voice. This 
section also contains useful lists of other features of academic texts, 
like reporting verbs and evaluative adjectives, and exercises on how they 
are employed in written discourse.

Part III of the volume goes beyond the sentence level to address 
rhetorical features of the text that require specific instruction and 
additional attention in the ESL classroom, such as connective adverbial 
clauses, sentence transitions, cohesive ties, and hedging statements. This 
section gives advice on teaching rhetorical features that enhance cohesion 
and coherence in academic texts. These include chains from old to new 
information, demonstratives, enumerative nouns, linking words, parallel 
structures, and means of clarifying and giving examples. The final chapter 
of this section offers advice on how to help learners expand their hedging 
repertoire. Hedging involves the use of linguistic devices to show 
hesitation or uncertainty, display politeness and indirectness, and defer 
to the reader's point of view. As hedging is not usually addressed in 
sufficient detail in ESL writing courses, Hinkel suggests specific 
instruction in employing linguistic features like modal verbs, adjectives 
and adverbs, which can project politeness and caution into a formal, 
academic text. Addressing hedging in the classroom also helps students 
learn how to avoid making overstatements as well as familiarizes them with 
the difference between formal and informal genres.

As mentioned above, this book is extremely practice-friendly, as it offers 
concrete advice and exercises for ESL instructors teaching at an advanced 
level. Hinkel cogently argues that a shift in writing pedagogy is 
necessary in order to address the needs of the ever-increasing number of 
students who are using English as an academic L2. Her evidence is strongly 
supported by corpus studies, the results of which she directly applies to 
the language classroom. The only qualm that I have with this use of corpus 
data is that it is entirely based on differences between L1 and L2 
writers, which implies that L2 writers are deficient in comparison to 
their L1 counterparts. However, studies in contrastive rhetoric have found 
that while successful L2 English speakers may use the language 
differently, this does not necessarily imply that their use is in any way 
deficient (Prodromou 2003). Furthermore, Mauranen (2003) -- who has 
compiled a corpus of L2 academic English -- argues that Anglo-American 
standards should no longer be the reference point of a truly international 
discourse community, and differences in rhetorical style must be accepted. 
Hinkel's volume makes no mention of the fact that conventions in academic 
writing are "socially and historically constructed to support the 
interests of a dominant group within a given society" (Norton 2000:16), 
and no recommendation is included about how teachers can coach students to 
become aware of, or even resist, the ideologies that support this power 
structure. Nevertheless, the volume will be of great use to anyone 
involved with the pedagogy of academic ESL writing.

REFERENCES

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad S., and Finegan, E. 1999. 
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

Mauranen, A. 2003. The corpus of English as a lingua franca in academic 
settings. TESOL Quarterly 37: 3, 513-127.

Nation, I. S. P. 1990. Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. New York: Newbury 
House.

Norton, B. 2000. Identity and Language Learning. London: Pearson. 

Prodromou, L. 2003. In search of the successful user of English. Modern 
English Teacher 12: 2, 5-14. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Elizabeth J. Erling has a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from 
the University of Edinburgh and is a lecturer of English at the Language 
Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin, where she has taught Academic ESL 
Writing since 1998. Her research interests include the politics of the 
spread of English and the effects of globalization on language teaching.





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