ASSESSMENT OF A GENRE-BASED APPROACH TO SCIENTIFIC WRITING THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF STUDENT-PRODUCED ABSTRACTS

Abstract

A course aimed at writing Scientific Research Articles (SRA) in English was offered to Spanish-speaking researchers at a public university in Argentina. It deployed activities described by the Reading to Learn Pedagogy (R2L) (MARTIN; ROSE, 2012). This article assesses the effectiveness of this pedagogy by analyzing students’ productions. We compared students’ abstracts of SRA written before and after the implementation of R2L’s practices, considering the presence or absence of rhetorical sections and the use of evaluative language under the light of the System of Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005). Texts written after the course include a larger number of sections compared to the ones written before, and they also exhibit a larger amount of Attitude and Graduation elements. The higher complexity of the texts written after the course suggests that the teaching of scientific genres to English as a Foreign Language students through an R2L-informed approach is effective.