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Chapter 6Ann Hewings and Martin HewingsAPPROACHES TO THE STUDY OFDISCIPLINARY VARIATION IN ACADEMICWRITING: IMPLICATIONS FOR SYLLABUSDESIGN1 IntroductionN RECENT YE A R S , S Y L LA B U S E S for academic writing in higher educationI have increasingly focused on teaching students about the features of differing writtengenres. So, for instance, we find published material on laboratory and technical reports (forexample Dudley-Evans, 1 985), expcrimental rcscarch reports and other research papers(for example Wcissberg and Buker, 1990), theses and dissertations (for example Andersonand Poole, 1994) and essays (for example Roberts, 1997). The gcncral motivation of thisapproach is thc need to offrr appropriate dcxcriptions and models of generic texts so thatthc students’ ability to understand and produce them is improved. More specifically, studentsarc taught about thc textual features, both tcxt structural and sentence-level, that arecharacteristic of‘ each gcnrc.While this represents a valuablc development from earlier approaches which treated‘academic writing’ as an undifferentiated, homogeneous entity, it is important to recogniscthat variation is found not only from genre to genre, but also within genres. Evidcnccis accumulating that single genres vary over time (Bazerman, 1988; Dudley-Evans andHenderson, 1990; Selager-Meyer, 19959, vary from one cultural context to another (Taylorand Chcn, 1991), and varv from discipline to discipline (Berkenkottcr and Huckin, 1995;Prior, 1998).This essay is primarily concrrncd with the third of these and, in particular, thc methodsthat have been adopted for the study of disciplinary variation and the implications of findingsto date for syllabus design. Knowledge of disciplinary variation is liccoming especiallyimportant with the growing trend towards inter- and multi-disciplinary study in highereducation so that students may be required to work within a number of disciplines whichhave different views on the naturc of academic writing. We begin by reporting threc arcasof applied linguistic investigation which have explored the question of disciplinary variationin rather different ways and with rather different implications for syllabus design. First, wepresent Swales’s approach to genre anahis and discuss studies of disciplinary variation basedon this approach, in particular those which have explored variation in thc academic rmcarch