TEACHING ACADEMIC ESL WRITING: PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES IN VOCABULARY AND
GRAMMAR. Eli Hinkel. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xii + 360.
$79.95 cloth, $37.50 paper.
In this text, Hinkel argues that second language (L2) writing
instruction has long favored teaching the writing process and discourse
and rhetorical features of text while neglecting the essential language
skills that L2 writers need to succeed in mainstream university
classes. She attempts to redress this perceived shortcoming by
identifying and describing the formal syntactic and lexical
characteristics of academic text and advocating the explicit teaching
of these key structures and lexical chunks.