Teaching academic English writing_ practical techniques

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, a great deal of time, energy, and re- sources have been devoted to teaching non-native L2 writers the rhetorical features of written academic discourse in English. In addition, to meet mar- ket demands and the expectations of professional training and preparation for English as a Second Language and English for Academic Purposes teachers, teacher-training and graduate programs have set out to address teachers' on-the-job skills that pertain to teaching L2 academic writers how to generate and organize ideas into coherent essays and compositions, as is expected of practically all students at undergraduate and graduate levels. There is little doubt that L2 writers need to be familiar with many rhetor- ical and discourse features of written English and that the teaching of col- lege- or university-level writing cannot do without them. In teaching L2 writing to academically bound learners, what has become of smaller impor- tance, however, is the language tools (i.e., the grammar and vocabulary that L2 writers must have to construct academic text, which in turn can be orga- nized into a coherent written academic discourse). To put it plainly, no mat- ter how well discourse is organized or how brilliant the writer's ideas may be, it would be hard to understand them if the language is opaque.