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

21(1983) in Cognitive Psychology; de Beaugrande & Dressler (1981) in Text Linguistics;Charolles (1983), Halliday & Hasan (1976, 1985), and Coulthard (1985) in DiscourseAnalysis; Dudley-Evans (1986), Swales (1981) in GA).Evolving at about the same time as Discourse Analysis research programs, ESPapproaches concentrated on the explanation of structural features of texts to nonnativeacademic writers and readers, describing the connection between the structure andpurpose of different types of academic texts (Hyon, 1994). Emphasis was put on theformation of science and technology international students proficient in English, withthe assumption that nonnative learners need to learn about the kind of language used intheir disciplines to be able to function as full-fledged members of the academiccommunity (Spack, 1988a:36). Furthermore, with its focus on text structure, ESP offereda shift away from the practice usually adopted in the 70’s that concentrated almostexclusively on the writer’s psycholinguistic processes involved in text production(Raimes, 1991:409).In the writer-centered process approach, students should focus on meaning, findingtheir way out of a written assignment through the use of thinking and rewriting skills inthe elaboration of multiple drafts. Writing was considered a vehicle for reflection andself-expression and writing tasks usually involved personal self-generating essay topics(Spack, 1988a:32). The process approach was itself a reaction against traditionalprescriptive approaches to writing instruction adopted in the 60’s (Raimes, 1991:409),with its emphasis on the encoding of previously conceived thoughts into syntactically