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

20The controversy between those who see a dichotomy between form vs. functionhas divided researchers into opposing camps concerning approaches to the study ofacademic discourse in English. It is relevant to discuss these long-term controversiesbecause they are situated at the basis of Genre Analysis (GA) and because currentlyadopted views of genre attempt to and, to a certain extent, succeed in accommodatingthese and other seemingly opposing dichotomies into a framework that analyzesdiscourse in academic settings in a composite manner.2.1.1 Process vs. product approaches to writing instructionESP teaching has been centralized on the academic acculturation of nonnativelearners into university systems of English-speaking countries. ESP researchers havetraditionally studied textual features of discourse associated with specific academic andprofessional activities, using a particularly form-focused approach to written discoursethat gained projection and that can be traced back to the Discourse Analysis movement(Hyon, 1994).Whereas syntactic approaches to language studies had claimed that the sentencewas the highest level of analysis in the linguistic structure (Chomsky, 1980), and thatlinguistic analysis could not go beyond that level due to lack of linguistic patternsbeyond sentence boundaries (Benveniste, 1974), authors favoring discursiveperspectives have tried to systematize the regularities present above sentence level. Afterthe heyday of syntactic approaches in linguistic studies in the 70’s, discourse researchershave explored different types of text in terms of the information they convey and thepatterns of coherence displayed in these texts (see, for example, van Dijk & Kintsch