ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of second-language writing, showing how English as a Second Language (ESL) students deploy the meaning-making resources of English in their science lab reports in ways that differ from the choices made by a native speaker of English, with different results in terms of the overall shape and voice of the texts that they produce. Analyzing the texts of native speakers helps us identify the grammatical resources that enable writers to create a text of a particular type. With this knowledge, we can look at second-language writers’ texts to see where the students may need to develop lexico-grammatical and discourse-structuring resources that are functional for a particular task.
