ELF, ACA:DEMIC WRITING, AND THE SEMANTICIZATION OF THOUGHT
ELF, ACA:DEMIC WRITING, AND THE SEMANTICIZATION OF THOUGHT

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes the view that varieties of writing represent agreed ways of mediating content that are recognized by discourse communities such as the academy who constitute their expectable readerships. These mediations make use of language-specific default affordances that are not only syntactic but also pragmatic and represent thinking for speaking categories (Slobin 1996) which, I argue, have greater explanatory power than the more abstract concept of virtual English (Seidlhofer 2011). In this context, I make a few preliminary comments on what appear to be the pragmatic affordances identifi able in parallel English texts generated by two native Chinese and a native English student writer faced with the same academic task, and make some consequent observations about teaching academic writing.

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