I recently heard the sad news that John Swales had died.

University of Michigan Obituary

He was an important person for EAP and I am glad to have been doing EAP when his influence was at its height.

When I first started teaching EAP writing, the popular books were Janelle Cooper’s  Think and Link (1979) and Bob Jordan’s Academic Writing (1996, 1st edition 1980). Both were very useful to a new EAP teacher.

However, they concentrated on teaching short academic text types and academic functions and notions, such as (Cooper, 1979):

1. Sequencing
   • –Instructions, Processes, Past Events
2. Classification
   • –Lists, Diagrams, Texts, Definitions
3. Comparison & Contrast
   1. –Similarities, Differences, Concession, Analogies
4. Cause & Effect
   1. –Consequences, Explanations, References, Elaboration

Although this was a great development in the way we see and teach language, it seems to me, though, that this was still a synthetic approach (Wilkins, 1976). This approach is still dividing the language into parts – albeit larger parts, called cognitive genres by Bruce (2008) – which the learner has to put back together again.

But most student assignments are NOT definitions, comparisons or classifications by themselves. The assignments may require the students to make use of these cognitive genres as they combine these texts into larger complete texts with a clear purpose and audience, called social genres by Bruce (2008). However, the early textbooks did not provide any help for the students on how to do this. What was needed was the concept of genre, brought to a wider audience by, e.g., Swales (1990).

As EAP teachers we need to concentrate on our students’ purposes in writing, the genres that they need to produce and how these genres are realised. In order to do that, we need to investigate exactly which genres our students need and then do the genre analysis to work out the linguistic realisations of these genres.

We tried to do that in our Successful Academic Writing book (Gillett, Hammond  & Martala, 2009).

Swales’s Genre Analysis(1990) was very important in helping to answer my problem and write the book

BALEAP Conference, Reading, 2015:
Richard Smith, John Swales, Meriel Bloor, Andy Gillett

References

Bruce, I. (2008). Academic writing and genre: A systematic approach. London: Continuum.

Cooper, J. (1979). Think and link. London: Arnold.

Gillett, A. J., Hammond, A. C. & Martala, M. (2009). Successful academic writing. London: Pearson Longman.

Jordan, R. R. (1999). Academic writing course (3^rd ed.). London: Longman..

Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

.Wilkins, D. (1976). Notional syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.