universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

2junior scholars (graduate students, new professionals) and senior scholars (experiencedresearchers, teachers, practitioners) strive to publish their findings in internationaljournals in English as a way to obtain academic recognition, research funding, andcareer progression. However, when submitting written work to international journals,nonnative academic writers constantly have to struggle to produce texts that can beregarded as publishable material in terms of content and form.Genre Analysts have been concerned with the problem of how to provideinexperienced academic writers (with little or no academic literacy in English) with theinformation they need to participate in academia. As a community that has its ownculture in terms of knowledge production and discursive practices (i.e., social practicesexpressed in language form and content), academia has a set of genres that, to a certainextent, maintain conventionalized forms and functions. Newcomers find it difficult toaccomplish their communicative objectives due to the lack of knowledge of thesegeneric conventions. In that respect, Genre Analysis pedagogy aims to investigate howdiscourse varieties function as academic genres, what their textual and rhetoricalcharacteristics are, who writes to whom, in what situations, to what purpose and effect.Therefore, in this study, ‘discourse’ is considered a multifaceted social phenomenon asdefined by Fairclough (1989; 1992b). This phenomenon encompasses three dimensions:an oral or written text, an interaction between people and the processes of producing andinterpreting text, and the social actions that result from the interplay between text andsocial interaction (Fairclough, 1992b:10).