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

287With systematic information on text and context, nonnative instructors and students canseek to develop appropriate communicative skills that allow them to participate in theexchange of scientific information with English speaking researchers.Besides awareness of information structure, writers should also be aware of thetype of information considered relevant in their respective academic areas so that thesewriters may deal with variations within the genre.We can make an analogy between ESP teaching in Brazilian universities andacademic writing instruction to native speakers of English in American universities whocome from ‘less privileged groups’ (Bizzel cited in Hyon, 1994:68), in which languagepractices differ consistently from those adopted in academia. Because of lack ofknowledge of academic genres in both groups, they can be compared in that both canprofit from composition instruction in mastering academic discourse in English.Although international students doing graduate studies in American universities arehighly educated and represent the elite of their countries in intellectual terms, they needinstruction on how to deal with academic genres in all four abilities –– writing, reading,speaking and listening comprehension –– in English. As Hyon (1994:70) points out, aslong as there are groups that lack these resources, they tend to use ‘language that haslittle social power’ within academia, contributing to inequality of several kinds.7.5 ConclusionBRs provide (expert or junior) members of a specific disciplinary community withanswers to basic questions about a given book, i.e., what the book is about, who wroteit, how it compares with books by the same author, on the same subject, or in the same