Encoder-Message-Decoder: Invoking the Communication Model for Teaching Academic Writing
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation discusses approaches to teaching academic writing (AW) in English as a foreign language (EFL), with the primary focus being on teaching writing for publication to Czech doctoral students in the field of geography. Attempts at establishing effective EFL writing pedagogies have not completely succeeded in achieving their didactic goals as such pedagogies require of the instructors highly complex linguistic and discipline-specific knowledge. Following Hyland (2009), three general approaches to teaching AW are offered to help the instructors cope with these challenges, based on the traditional model of communication. Firstly, the ‘message’, i.e. the model research article or a student’s text, can be pedagogically explored using the Swalesian move analysis (2004) and syntactic borrowing. Next, the ‘encoder of the message’ or the author of the text, in this case the student, can be taught a number of strategies for the specific stages of the writing process (i.e., pre-, during, and post-writing), drawing on work of American and Czech scholars from the domain of expressivist and creative writing (Elbow 1998 and Fišer 2002, respectively). Finally, the ‘decoder of the message’ or the imagined reader(s) can be analyzed to better understand the crucial role the disciplinary discourse community (Swales 1990) plays when students write for publication in a higher-impact journal. The overall aim of the presentation is to stress the importance of raising students’ awareness of the many complex but often implicit linguistic, disciplinary, and cultural aspects of writing in English for publication. Specific activities applying the above-mentioned approaches will be discussed stemming from a 3-year-long European Union project called Geoinnovations which dealt with running an EFL AW course for PhD students of geography. |
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