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

25genres commonly used in academic writing/reading instruction (see, for example,Swales and Feak, 1994; Dudley-Evans & Henderson, 1993; Bhatia, 1993). Suchdescriptive studies aim to provide writers (especially novice ones) with knowledgeabout the form, content, function, and contextual features displayed by texts that areaccepted as exemplars of a given academic genre by expert readers in each field (e.g.,refereed journal editors, dissertation committee members).Process-approachers have criticized genre-oriented approaches to ESL writing inacademic settings for being too form-focused and enforcing a reader-centered view ofwriting with the idea that text must match an ideal academic discourse community’sexpectations. One note of caution has to be given here regarding the word form. GAdoes not argue for strict attention to form as syntactically correct sentences as was theconcern of late sixties writing pedagogies, with topics assigned by the teacher andemphasis on well written paragraphs. Instead, GA approaches aim at what is beingexpressed in the text as a whole. The focus is on the reader and on the rhetoricallystructured unit of language functioning in a given context. Teachers aim to developstudents’ awareness of how to respond to academic disciplines, with their arguments andvalues, so that what students learn is a ‘socialization into the academic community’(Raimes, 1991:412).The conceptualization of an audience as an academic discourse community impliesthat each potential reader for whom the text is written represents a member of a groupwith its own socially constructed culture, set of values, interests in terms of object ofstudy and theories. The reader is projected as ‘an initiated expert who represents a