An aspect of holistic modeling in academic writing: Propositional clusters as a heuristic for thematic control

Abstract

It is a major challenge for teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to devise meaningful exercises and techniques which can function as research tools for EAP practitioners and as heuristic procedures for L2 writers. If exercises are to be authentic in helping students accomplish their real concerns, they need to be holistic in their modeling of the academic writing process. That is, they need to integrate attention to textual, cognitive, and social aspects of the texts students are required to produce in order to enter into the academic/discourse community. As a contribution to this effort, this study presents one potentially valuable procedure, Propositional Clusters (PCs), which aims to help L2 writers handle one crucial aspect of text organization, namely thematic control. The use of PCs is demonstrated with reference to Japanese graduate students drafting their first research papers in English.