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

24ESL reading, learners that possessed and activated the appropriate backgroundknowledge or schemata (Rumelhart, 1980:34) when processing text structure were foundto retrieve more information (Carrel, 1984:464-65). In ESL writing, students using textstructure were found to develop a faster and more accurate understanding of thehierarchical relationship between the ideas in the text, while citing more coherently andclearly, in their own writing assignments, information from the literature in theirdisciplines (Carrell, 1985; Graetz, 1985; Edge, 1985).2.1.2 A reader-oriented approach to writing instructionIn an attempt to foster students’ critical thinking, without leaving aside theimportance of discourse form, ESP researchers (e.g., Swales, 1981; Dudley-Evans,1986) have resorted to a social-contextual approach to academic discourse, becomingthe precursors in GA investigations of key academic genres (Spack, 1988a:33). In thesocio-contextual approach, the institutional structure of knowledge is ‘demystified’(Bizzel, 1982:196; Dudley-Evans, 1994:228) through the study of academic discourseconventions and the interconnections between discourse and community. The recentpublication of books on academic writing in disciplinary contexts (Swales and Feak,1994; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Peck MacDonald, 1994) serves as example of theeffort made by genre analysts in the direction of explicating academic genre conventions.With its origin closely associated to ESP research, and later incorporating conceptsof rhetoric, GA has provided a framework for the study of academic and professionaldiscourse patterns through the description of the rhetorical organization of different