A genre-inspired and lexico-grammatical approach for helping postgraduate students craft research grant proposals

Abstract

Nowadays, there is increasing pressure on academic staff and their postgraduate students to publish in prestigious high-impact journals. It is therefore not surprising to find that academic writing programs are increasingly targeting English for Research Publication Processes (ERPP), in particular the research article (RA) genre. Grant proposal writing is another important high-stakes genre as getting a research article published is often dependent on being awarded a grant to undertake the research project in the first place. However, this “behind-the-scenes” genre has not received much attention in the ESP literature, either from a research or pedagogic perspective. This article describes the design and implementation of a research grant proposal writing module offered to postgraduate students of science and engineering. The materials are very much influenced by the research findings on grant proposal writing and adopt a Swalesian genre-based approach to the pedagogy. Tasks in which students match lexico-grammatical patterning to specific move structures are also outlined. At the same time, I also briefly raise two issues related to lexico-grammar, i.e. the question of novice writers' language re-use from corpus resources and the identification of ELF-type language in academic writing, important aspects which merit more attention and reflection for ESP courses targeted at scholarly writing.