lOMoARcPSD|18803032

lOMoARcPSD|18803032

Senior High School

English for Academic

and Professional Purposes
Quarter 1 – Module 1:
Differentiating Language Used in Academic
Texts from Various Disciplines
 Language Used in Academic Text from Various Disciplines

Writing is one of the Four Macro Skills that a student should possess. It is one of
the media of communication in order for us to pass information to people. One of
these writings that a student should know is Academic Writing. In this module you as a
student will learn Academic Writing and the language that should be used in writing
academic text.
Let us define key terms you will meet in this discussion.
Academic Writing - is a kind of writing that can be used in academia or school.
1. Subject – pertains to the topic of the text.
2. Tone – pertains to the attitude of the writer about the text. It can be distinguished
through the words used by the author.
3. Purpose – is information that an author wants to imply to the reader.
4. Language – are the words used by the author in writing an academic text.
Academic writing requires formal language.
5. Audience –pertains to the reader in writing.
6. Point of View – refers to how the writer tells the information in the reading text.
An academic text is always in the third person point of view.
7. Style – refers to how the author arranges his or her writing.
8. Knowledge – is the amount of information that an author knows about his or her
topic. The reader is the one who can distinguish how much knowledge an author
has in the topic he or she is writing.
9. Explicit – means that the information should be precise and clear.

Academic Writing
Academic Writing is a kind of writing that can be used in academia or school. It
has a process that starts with posing a question, conceptualizing a problem, evaluating
an opinion and ends in answering a question posed, clarifying a problem or arguing for
a stand. The specific purposes of academic writing are to inform, to persuade and to
argue that address specific audience or the teacher. To inform means supplementing
a lot of information about the topic. To persuade means having the credibility to make
your audience or readers believe in you. To argue means making your readers or
audience respond on the information you are telling them.
 Academic writing also requires formal language or word that does not contain
colloquial or jargon words. It usually uses layman’s term or the term that is easy to
understand. It avoids the use of hifalutin words or words that have deep meaning.
Academic writing is all about thinking:

� It follows certain rules and standards.

� Language to be used in writing academic text should be formal.

� Audience should be first taken into consideration.

All the information included in this kind of text should be backed up by valid
evidences.

Four Features of Language

1. Formality reflects your dignified stance in writing as a member of an academic

community. This means that in your writing, you should avoid colloquial words and
expressions.
The language use requires precision to make it a legitimate piece of writing.

Formality can be achieved through the following ways:

• Choosing expanded modal forms over contracted forms, such as using cannot
instead of can’t, do not instead of don’t.
• Choosing one verb form over two-word verbs, such as damage instead of mess up.
• Choosing expanded terms over their abbreviated equivalents, such as as soon as
possible instead of ASAP.
• Avoiding colloquial/idiomatic expressions, such as kind of like, as a matter of fact,
sort of.

Other examples of one verb over two-word verbs:

• Calculate - James added up the number of attendees in his party.

• Purchase (someone’s assets) - The large company bought out the smaller ones.
• Cancel - The teacher was to call off the noisy students immediately.
• Continue - The meeting will carry on even without your presence.
• Discover - The purpose of this meeting is to find out what would be your idea about
our new project.
2. Objectivity means that the focus of the information is on the topic rather on the writer
itself. Written language should not be personal but rather in general objective.

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 It can be achieved by:
a. Avoiding the use of personal pronouns such as you, I, my, and we.
Poor example: You need to follow instructions.
Improved version: The researchers need to follow instructions.

b. Avoiding rhetorical questions because academic writing should not assume that the
readers know the answer in the statement and the author should express the
information strongly and clearly.
Poor example: How can these problems be solved?
Improved version: Certain procedures must be discovered to solve problems.

c. Avoiding emotive language that shows biases. Giving an overly favorable opinion of
someone can eliminate objectivity.
Poor example: The police investigators were shocked to see the outcome of the
tests.
Improved version: The police investigators did not expect the results.

3. Explicitness in academic writing demands the use of signposts that allow readers to
trace the relationships in the parts of the study. If you intend to show a change in your line
of argument, make it clear by using however.

Example:
It is apparent that the school institutions hope to provide quality education to the
learners. However, having this COVID-19 pandemic requires a lot of effort to reach
out students.

The following phrases may be useful in making ideas explicit:

1. This is due to the…
A number of MERALCO consumers trooped to the City Hall to claim a P500 cash
incentive. This is due to the Supreme Court ruling that overcharges must be returned to
the end users whose electric consumption for the April-May period was below 100kw/hr.
2. This resulted in…
With the Supreme Court ordering MERALCO to return overcharges to the end users,
government offices have been tapped to operate as claim centers. This resulted in a number
of MERALCO consumers trooping to the City Hall to claim the P500 cash incentive.
• When two ideas seem the same, express each one clearly.
 The study showed that eighty percent of the 200 participants involved in the study were
dissatisfied with the operations of MERALCO. Similarly, the data revealed that majority of
the participants were not aware of the charges imposed on them by MERALCO.
• If you intend to give extra information in your sentence, make it clear by writing
“In addition...”
MERALCO has been operating as a business conglomerate involving foreign
stakeholders and independent power producer or IPP. In addition, MERALCO owns major
IPPs operating in the region.
• If you are giving examples, do so explicitly by writing “For example…”
The MERALCO issue has led to disputes between opposition and administration
senators. For example, those who have been labeled as against the president considered
the issue as the administration/s way of avoiding the NBN-ZTE scandal.

4. Caution in academic writing requires care since knowledge is built on proven theories
and concepts. Caution is needed to avoid sweeping generalizations.

Government officials are corrupt.

The statement is not completely true and the rhetorical impact of the statement may
be misleading. The statement can be improved through the use of devices such as modal
verbs, adverbs, or verbs.

Improved versions:
Some government officials may be corrupt.
Corruption is commonly linked to some key government officials.

Types of Writing Styles

There are four main types of writing: expository, descriptive, persuasive and narrative.
Each of these writing styles is used for a specific purpose. A single text may include more
than one writing styles.

Expository
This means that the author is trying to
explain a concept, imparting information to the
audience. It is not subjective but rather focuses
on facts that are supported by evidence.

Examples of Expository Writing:

• textbooks
• articles
• recipes

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 • news stories (not editorials or op-eds)
• business, technical or scientific writing

Descriptive Writing
Descriptive style means painting a picture of a person, place, or thing through words.
It is often found in fiction, though it can make an appearance to non-fiction as well Memoirs,
first-hand accounts, and events or travel guides are examples of descriptive writing. The
author might employ metaphor or other literary devices in order to describe the author’s
impressions using their five senses.

Persuasive Writing
It is the main style of writing you will use in academic papers. When an author writes in a
persuasive style, he/she is trying to convince the audience of a position or belief. Persuasive
writing contains the author’s opinions and biases, as well as justifications or reasons given
by the author as evidence of the correctness of their position. Any “argumentative” essay
you write in school should be in the persuasive style of writing. The examples of persuasive
writing include cover letters, op-eds and editorial newspaper articles, reviews of items,
letters of complaint, advertisements, and letters of recommendation.

Narrative Writing
Narrative writing is used in almost every longer piece of writing, whether fiction or
non-fiction. When an author writes in a narrative style, he/she is not just trying to convey
information, rather tries to construct and communicate a story, complete with characters,
conflict and settings. The examples of narrative writing include oral histories,
novels/novellas, poetry (specifically, epic sagas or poems), short stories, and anecdotes.

What Is Reading?
An Excerpt from Reading for Understanding
By: Christine Cziko, Cynthia Greenleaf, Lori Hurwitz, and Ruth Schoenbach

It is probably self-evident that the conceptions educators hold about the nature of
reading shape their approaches to helping students improve their reading abilities. Some
current approaches to supporting adolescent reading improvement address students' word-
level reading problems as a precondition for working on other levels of reading improvement.
Our reading apprenticeship approach is different because our understanding of the nature of
reading is different. Here is a brief outline of
what we have learned from existing research and our own observation.
Reading is not just a basic skill.
Many people think of reading as a skill that is taught once
and for all in the first few years of school. In this view of
reading the credit (or blame) for students' reading ability goes
to primary grade teachers, and upper elementary and
secondary school teachers at each grade level need teach
only new vocabulary and concepts relevant to new content.
Seen this way, reading is a simple process: readers decode
(figure out how to pronounce) each word in a text and then
automatically comprehend the meaning of the words, as they do with their everyday spoken
language. This is not our understanding of reading.

Reading is a complex process.

Think for a moment about the last thing you read. A student essay? A school bulletin? A
newspaper analysis of rising conflict in another part of the world? A report on water quality in
your community? A novel? If you could recapture your mental processing, you would notice
that you read with reference to a particular world of knowledge and experience related to the
text. The text evoked voices, memories, knowledge, and experiences from other times and
places—some long dormant, some more immediate. If you were reading complex text about
complex ideas or an unfamiliar type of text, you were working to understand it, your reading
most likely characterized by many false starts and much backtracking. You were probably
trying to relate it to your existing knowledge and understanding. You might have stumbled
over unfamiliar words and found yourself trying to interpret them from the context. And you
might have found yourself having an internal conversation with the author, silently agreeing
or disagreeing with what you read.

As experienced readers read, they begin to generate a mental representation, or gist, of the
text, which serves as an evolving framework for understanding subsequent parts of the text.
As they read further, they test this evolving meaning and monitor their understanding, paying
attention to inconsistencies that arise as they interact with the text. If they notice they are
losing the meaning as they read, they draw on a variety of strategies to readjust their
understandings. They come to texts with purposes that guide their reading, taking a stance
toward the text and responding to the ideas that take shape in the conversation between the
text and the self (Ruddel and Unrau 1994).

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 While reading a newspaper analysis of global
hostilities, for example, you may silently argue with its
presentation of "facts," question the assertions of the
writer, and find yourself revisiting heated debates with
friends over U.S. foreign policy. You may picture
events televised during earlier wars. Lost in your
recollections, you may find that even though your
eyes have scanned several paragraphs, you
have taken nothing in, so you reread these passages, this time focusing on analysis.

Reading is problem solving.

Reading is not a straightforward process of lifting the words off the page. It is a complex
process of problem solving in which the reader works to make sense of a text not just from
the words and sentences on the page but also from the ideas, memories, and knowledge
evoked by those words and sentences. Although at first glance reading may seem to be
passive, solitary, and simple, it is in truth active, populated by a rich mix of voices and views
—those of the author, of the reader, and of others the reader has heard, read about, and
otherwise encountered throughout life.

Fluent reading is not the same as decoding.

Skillful reading does require readers to carry out certain tasks in a fairly automatic manner.
Decoding skills—quick word recognition and ready knowledge of relevant vocabulary, for
example—are essential to successful reading. However, they are by no means sufficient,
especially when texts are complex or otherwise challenging.

Yet many discussions about struggling readers confuse decoding with fluency. Fluency
derives from the reader's ability not just to decode or identify individual words but also to
quickly process larger language units. In our inquiries into reading—our own and that of our
students—we have seen that fluency, like other dimensions of reading, varies according to
the text at hand.

When readers are unfamiliar with the particular language

structures and features of a text, their language-processing
ability breaks down. This means, for example, that teachers
cannot assume that students who fluently read narrative or
literary texts will be equally fluent with expository texts or
primary source documents.

Fluency begins to develop when students have frequent opportunities to read texts that are
easy for them. Multiple rereadings of more difficult texts help broaden a reader's fluency
(Pikulski 1998). Perhaps most important for adolescent readers, fluency grows as they have
opportunities, support, and encouragement to read a wide range of text types about a wide
range of topics.

Reading is situationally bounded.

A person who understands one type of text is not necessarily proficient at reading all types.
An experienced reader of dessert cookbooks can understand what is meant by "turn out on
a wire rack to finish cooling" but may be completely unable to make sense of a legal brief. A
political science undergraduate can understand that the phrase "on the other hand I will
argue" leads into the author's main point and that the main point will be in contrast to the
earlier discussion. But that same undergraduate may feel lost when trying to read the poetry
recommended by a friend. A good reader of a motorcycle repair manual can make sense of
directions that might stump an English literature professor but may be unable to
comprehend her son's chemistry text. And a chemistry teacher may feel completely insecure
when trying to understand some of the original source history materials on a colleague's
course reading list.
In other words, reading is influenced by situational factors, among them the experiences
readers have had with particular kinds of texts and reading for particular purposes. And just
as so-called good or proficient readers do not necessarily read all texts with equal ease or
success, a so-called poor or struggling reader will not necessarily have a hard time with all
texts. That said, researchers do know some things about those readers who are more
consistently effective across a broad range of texts and text types.

Proficient readers share some key characteristics.

Different reading researchers emphasize different characteristics of good or proficient
reader. However, despite contention in many other areas of reading research, when it
comes to proficient readers, widespread agreement has emerged in the form of a set of key
habits of proficient readers. This consensus could be summarized as follows (Baumann and
Duffy 1997):

Good readers are . . .

➢ Mentally engaged,

➢ Motivated to read and to learn,

➢ Socially active around reading tasks,

➢ Strategic in monitoring the interactive

processes that assist comprehension:

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➢ Setting goals that shape their reading processes,

➢ Monitoring their emerging understanding of a text, and

➢ Coordinating a variety of comprehension strategies to control the reading process.

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Department of Education, Schools Division of Bulacan

Curriculum Implementation Division
Learning Resource Management and Development System (LRMDS)
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Email Address:[email protected]

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