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

285to use academic genres more critically so that they may take part in the internationalscientific and technological interaction more appropriately and productively.7.4.2 Theoretical implications for EFL teachingIn university contexts, content teachers have tended to argue that the teaching ofrhetoric needs to be closely associated with the teaching of the subject-matter and thatEnglish faculty is insufficiently trained to respond to disciplinary writing. According tothis view, even in those cases that collaborative teaching between composition andcontent instructors occurs, English teachers would still have to evaluate texts whoseform and content conventions they have not mastered (Spack, 1988b:703). The logicalsolution for the problem would be to have “subject-area teachers teach their ownstudents to become writers in their respective disciplines” (ibid.:704).In opposition to this view, those professionals usually working with ESP arguethat English teachers should teach writing in the disciplines, pointing out that subjectmatterinstructors usually lack adequate training to teach composition. Their maincriticism is that content-area teachers may not be able to develop students’ awareness ofthe discursive and linguistic specificities of academic genres and thus will have to limitthemselves to general reading and writing tasks. The solution then would lie on thecollaboration between English and subject-area teachers in offering English courses thatfocus on students’ developing awareness of the issues involved in academic writtentasks (Braine, 1988:702).