John Swales (1938-2025)

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 (3rd 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.

Affinity Publisher

Microsoft have recently announced that Microsoft Publisher will reach the end of its life on October 13, 2026, and will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 or supported after that date.

I have used Publisher on and off for many years. I started with desktop publishing using PessWorks on my Amstrad computer in the late 1980s. I soon graduated to a PC and started using Page Plus from Serif. That continued until Microsoft Publisher started to become better know in the late 1990s.

I edited – and designed – the IATEFL ESP SIG Newsletter/Journal for several year using MS Publisher and Page Plus, but I soon moved on to InDesign, which I used for several years, as it is what the IATEFL office and the printers required.. Issue 55 was the last issue that I produced. After I stopped being involved with the ESP SIG publication, I did not renew my InDesign licence and went back to Page Plus and Publisher. meanwhile Serif was replacing Page Plus as Affinity Publisher It wasn’t very good in the early days, especially the way it dealt with tables,  so I mainly made used of MS Publisher. However, as Publisher will be retired soon, I am developing my ability with Affinity Publisher again.

Main Screen

Affinity Publisher is similar to other desktop publishing applications. When you start Affinity Publisher, the main window appears as shown below. The studio panels, the toolbar, the context toolbar, and the tools are as shown.

Studio panels
Most of Affinity’s features can be accessed from the panels that appear on the left and right sides of the screen.
Toolbar
The Toolbar provides quick access to several commonly-used features.
Context toolbar
Below the main toolbar is a second toolbar named the Context Toolbar, commonly
referred to as the Context Bar.
Tools
The Tools panel is different from the panels shown in the Left and Right Studios because it is shown on its own outside of the studios panels.

Create Document

  1. Create a New Document: File ⇒ New ⇒ make choices for page size, margins, layout  ⇒ Create
  2. To Create Text:  Frame Text tool ⇒  Draw a text box ⇒ Type the text or import  a Word document (File ⇒ Place).
  3. To Change Font:  In Text box, Ctrl A to select all text or click and drag ⇒ change font, colour, justify etc from Contextual Toolbar
  4. Can also use Artistic Text Tool – For headers etc.
  5. To Add Pages:  Window Menu ⇒ Check Pages (Page Panel Opens) ⇒ Click on “+” (Add Pages)
  6. Insert Images:  Place Tool (or File⇒ Place),  ⇒ Choose Image ⇒ Draw box to place picture.
  7. To wrap text around image: choose “Show Text Wrapping Settings” on Toolbar.
  8. Layers:  Layer Menu ⇒ Add Layer

Examples

IATEFL ESP SIG Journal Issue 52, Front Cover

IATEFL ESP SIG Journal Issue 52, Page 1

Extracting Comments from Documents

The main reason I write the blog is to sort out my thoughts. Writing is a good way to clarify your mind.

I also use the blog to help me remember things that I do not do very often.

Like many teachers, I use Microsoft Word’s track changes facility to comment on student work.

This is also useful for marking dissertations. The problem, though, is that comments are dispersed throughout the whole 15,000 word dissertation and I would like them all together. It is possible to see all the comments as a list, but I do not think you can export them.

After some searching I discovered Kutools from ExtendOffice. Kutools for Word adds two menus to the MS Word Toolbar – Kutools and Kutools Plus. With Kutools Plus, in the File group, you can chose More and then Export Comments. Choose the whole document and  you obtain all the comments together. Very useful.

Make sure that Track Changes is off, though.

This file can easily be edited.

Many students, though, hand in their work as an Adobe pdf document. It is easy to add comments and to see a list, but it is not easy to export them as one list.

You can use  PDF Extractor from SysTools  to extract the comments and save them as an MS Word document.

The problem now is that all the comments are in individual text frames. Kutools, though can remove them.

Remove Group -> Remove All Frames
Remove Group -> Breaks -> Remove All Page Breaks

This file can easily be edited.

Turnitin Similarity Report

I have been supervising dissertation students recently at several institutions.

One thing that has been mentioned several times is the interpretation of the Turnitin Similarity Report. One student showed me her Turnitin report in which she had received a similarity score of 32%. She was worried as she had been told that anything above 20% was problematic. I looked at her work and found that most of the 32% similarity was made up of typical EAP phrases. Examples are “questions have been raised over the ,,,”, “… have received very little consideration” and “this evidence leads us to reject the hypothesis that…” These are kinds of phrases that EAP students are expected to learn and use and are covered in books such as Jeanne Godfrey’s The student phrase book (Godfrey, 2013) and John Morley’s online Academic Phrasebank.

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Dissertation Management

I have been supervising MA student doing dissertations for many years now at several institutions and this is the time of year when we usually get started.

As soon as I am given the list of students who I will be supervising, I usually email each student and give them some information about me. I ask them to reply with some information about themselves. Some reply quickly, some reply slowly and some do not reply at all until I have sent several reminders.

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Reporting Findings from Interviews

I have been supervising students doing research at both undergraduate and graduate levels recently and many of the students have been doing qualitative studies, involving interviews. In doing so, I have found that many of them find it difficult to report their findings and provide evidence. I am not surprised as there does not seem to be much information available. As Robert Yin (2011, p. 234) has made clear:

At a minimum, a common kind of narrative data would take the form of quotations and paraphrased passages, representing your study participants’ descriptions their own lives, actions, and views. In qualitative research, even these briefer descriptions serve as an important form of data. Not surprisingly, the choices about how to present these narrative data are more than a matter of literary style. Methodological issues also are relevant. Yet, this type of narrative — whether brief or lengthy — has not received much attention in existing guides for doing qualitative research.

I have looked through the publications in the references list below. Most of them are excellent, but none of them provide the useful information that my students need.

There are some useful suggestions, but none of them – apart from Yin – are detailed enough:

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Cognitive Overload

I have recently received a large amount of work from my students of international business that is very messy, very badly organised – pages in the wrong order, tables not fitting on the page, even pages upside down and at 90 degrees. I have been wondering why. Most of the students I am thinking of were second or third language speakers of English and there seemed to be an inverse correlation between English language competence and quality of presentation of work, but I do not think it is direct. It has reminded me of several other experiences I have had and I wonder if there is a connection.

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ESP and Common Sense

I remember a number of years ago, after a morning of evaluating student oral presentations with a colleague and wondering why they sometimes said strange things, I mentioned that it seemed to me that people lost their common sense when they were speaking a language they were not very confident in. My colleague – who was a good linguist and had never experiences such issues – disagreed.

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