ABSTRACT
Teaching Academic Writing is an introductory book on the teaching of academic writing in higher education. It is aimed at higher education lecturers and writing tutors who wish to help undergraduates improve their academic writing in both discipline-specific and writing/study skills contexts. The book raises issues about the teaching of academic writing and offers many practical suggestions about how academic writing can be taught. Some suggestions are meant for lecturers to implement as part of their subject teaching; other ideas will work better in collaboration with writing or language specialists who work alongside subject specialists to help students with their writing. The book will also be useful for people who work in contexts where writing support is offered as a separate provision, for example within study skills and EAP courses (English for academic purposes). Whilst the book is aimed principally at lecturers and tutors working with undergraduate students, it raises many issues which are relevant to those who teach postgraduate students, particularly those students who are returning to higher education after a break from academic study.1 The aims of the book are:
• to identify and demystify the conventions and practices associated with academic writing so that both subject specialists and writing support staff can better advise and help students to construct their written work
• to discuss ways that lecturers can address the needs of a variety of students, including those with little experience in academic writing and those whose primary language is not English
• to enable lecturers in a range of contexts to adopt and adapt various teaching strategies to the teaching of academic writing for different purposes
• to combine a practical orientation to teaching writing with a grounding in current theories of writing instruction.
