Ann M. Johns
San Diego State University

For a very long time, there has been active interest in academic literacy among applied linguists, rhetoricians, and—not incidentally—campus administrators, for at least two reasons: because literacy is still seen as central to success in secondary and post-secondary education; and because academic literacy issues are complex, controversial, and daunting. I have been in the literacy business, as a teacher, researcher, and administrator, for almost as long as Bob (see Johns, 2002),1 and controversies surrounding academic literacy have been raging throughout my professional life. The debate has been especially heated among those of us who teach undergraduates in North America, where most colleges and universities require students to complete a number of "breadth," or general education, courses before they begin to specialize. However, many of the same issues are now being raised in European universities, as well (see Björk et al., 2003), where students are often better prepared to immediately begin their major studies.
In contexts in which academic writing is taught to undergraduates, there are at least four questions that have arisen, and they are answerable in a number of ways:

• Question 1: In what theoretical and pedagogical frameworks should academic writing classes be taught? In this regard, Bob and I have lived through the heydays of the Structuralism (and Current-Traditional Approaches), during which time Bob wrote his famous * “Doodles” article (Kaplan, 1966), as well as through Expressivism, and Cognitive Approaches (and the Process Movement). Now, Social Constructionists challenge earlier views.
• Question 2: What should be the content of academic reading and writing classes? Should our classes be devoted to literature, as English departments often require? Should we attempt to concentrate upon topics that interest students? Should we focus upon the disciplines of rhetoric/composition, teaching ethos, pathos, logos, and other issues related to argumentation? Should course content interact with general education or students’ majors in some meaningful way, or should we teach stand-alone courses?
• Question 3: What are we educating students for? For initiation into the practices of the academy or into professional life? For resistance and critique of the hegemonic practices of our institutions (Benesch, 2001)? For research into literacy values and practices (Johns, 1997)? Or for their own motivation and enjoyment?
• Question 4: What is the place of contrastive rhetoric in our scheme of things? For example, can we use its current insights to understand L2 student discourse organization? Text style and pragmatic features? Errors?
It would be impossible for me to cite even a small portion of the publications devoted to these questions and the arguments that stem from them; but for many of us in the profession, mentored by Bob and others, the issues that these questions raise have provided a lifetime of research, theory, and heated debate at conferences.
After working with two generations of teachers and several generations of students, I am convinced that all practitioners should acknowledge openly, and justify to their students and institutions, their answers to these questions, and I am trying to do just that. After considerable ambivalence and trial and error (see Johns, 2002), some colleagues and I are attempting to codify what seems to work for us, and for our students, in a number of academic contexts. As a result, I am writing a freshman textbook in an attempt to apply current theory and research, as well as insights from years of pedagogical practice.

Some history

However, before discussing the present, we need to review some history, meanwhile noting that the more we delve into the nature of academic literacies, the more complex the issues become. It would be a relief to return to the good old days when we were reading Bob’s “Doodles” article as gospel, when we in North America were using one of the few writing textbooks for ESL/EFL on the market, Robert Bander’s American English rhetoric (1971). Then, we thought we knew the answers to teaching EAP writing, and they were these:
• Good writing is about structure. At the text level, students need to learn the discourse patterns (or “modes”) of the target language. If students can prepare an effective comparison/contrast, cause/effect, exemplification (etc.) essay, then they can write. Thus, there is a generalized writing ability, realized through the discourse patterns.
• At the sentence level, structure (grammar) is also the key. Being a good writer means self-correction and production of almost perfect papers. Students learn how to correct by drilling grammar patterns and completing fill-in-the-blank exercises.
Those were the days! And, because teaching in a classroom based upon this structural, drill-based approach is relatively easy, many unschooled writing teachers still follow this model. At our local CATESOL Conferences, for example, presentations on teaching writing using the structural templates (the comparison/contrast essay, the cause/effect essay) are common.
But during the 60s and 70s, learner-centered approaches, driven by the political ideologies of the time (and, of course, by Chomskian linguistics) encouraged teachers to turn away from the structuralist paradigm. First, there were the Expressivists, those folks in the tie-dyed shirts who told us that nothing should interfere with our students’ creativity or with their conversations with the muse. We were to encourage students to “journal”, writing fluently without direct correction or focus on form. Not surprisingly, this was the period during which many writing teachers argued that they didn’t need to teach grammar explicitly. Presumably, ESL/EFL students could learn about structure at the sentence and paragraph levels through osmosis.
Another, more sophisticated, learner-centered approach soon followed. In fact, it was, and continues to be, much more than an approach. It is a movement, devoted to assisting learners to understand, and reflect upon, their own writing (and reading) processes. In this approach, it is the mind that is central to the development of language. Writing researchers, through oral protocols, studied how students’ minds worked as they attempted to complete their written texts. Because this movement was, and is, so powerful, many teachers felt (and feel) free to pay little heed to the worlds in which texts are produced and the audiences who will read them. What really matters are students’ metacognitive development and their text processing. In classes, students select their own motivating topics and write essays, using ”the writing process.” Text structure and other product elements become non-issues in instruction, since these are to arise from the students’ own revisions (see Zamel, 1983).
This was heady stuff! It led to an explosion of research and to professionalism in the teaching of writing that benefited us all. It also introduced us to invention, drafting and revising texts from the top down, and student reflection, all excellent ideas that should continue to be central to our work. However, for several reasons, teachers who carefully assessed the needs of ESL/EFL and bilingual students in their classrooms became dissatisfied. Why? The first reason is that in many textbooks and curricular materials “the writing process” rapidly became formalized. Every time the students wrote, they brainstormed the topic. Identifying vocabulary; they drafted and peer reviewed, then they edited. Many of my American-educated college students can recite the formula for The Writing Process, as if there were only one instead of many. Some students had difficulty drafting texts in this way. Often, they were fully as frustrated as those who were told to write comparison-contrast essays using templates during the Current-traditional (Structuralist) period. In addition, our ESL/EFL students, many of whom would never again write the English class essay, needed to try other types of texts—from a number of genres and for a variety of audiences. Leki & Carson (1997), who investigated the disparities between second/foreign language writing classes and academic assignments, found support for this latter group of students’ views. How can students be certain that their writing will evolve into a satisfactory form and style for audiences when the language and sanctioned genres of these audiences are foreign to them? Australia’s Jim Martin (1985: 61) has argued that pure process approaches are de-motivating and frustrating for our diverse students, for they “promote a situation in which only the brightest, middle-class monolingual students will benefit.”
The three approaches discussed so far, Current-Traditional (Structuralist), Expressivist, and Process, continue to thrive in many classrooms throughout the world because our textbooks, our hurried lives, and our insecurities promote them. Of course, there have been modifications over time, since publishers are interested in selling textbooks. Now, for example, the Current-traditional, template-driven textbooks mention the writing process, and writing process books make concessions to text structure and audience. Nonetheless, much actually remains the same. This adherence to past practices is raised periodically at conferences. At the 2001 TESOL Conference, Ken Hyland pointed out that the Journal of Second Language Writing seldom dealt with post-process issues. One of the editors, Ilona Leki, said, “We have to publish what we get.”2 Serving on a writing panel at the 2003 TESOL Conference, I suggested that the English class essay written in different discourse modes (comparison/contrast, etc.) is not the only type of writing that should be assigned in our classrooms. Some members of the audience said, “Oh, really? What are the alternatives?” What are the alternatives, indeed.
Current discussion and research—and pedagogical implications
Now let us turn to what the alternatives might be. In this section, I will discuss some of the current, complicating factors introduced by theory and research: analyzing texts as socially-constructed through study of discourse moves, stance and voice; the related issues stemming from writing in context, and multiliteracies. I have chosen these three, broad categories, because the recent work has been so rich—and because we need to consider each of these topics while developing our modern pedagogies.
Text Analysis and Social Construction
Influenced by Systemic Functional Linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics, and corpus linguistics, many current researchers are treating texts as socially-constructed, living documents with which writers, readers, discourse communities, and other texts interact. Though there is much to discuss in terms of current approaches to text analysis, I will touch upon three areas that are particularly valuable for academic writing teachers: “moves” analysis, author’s stance, and voice--all of which relate to the context in which a text is produced.
Moves analysis
One of the several lasting contributions made by John Swales to the teaching of writing (and reading) has been his moves analysis, an approach to analyzing the functions of various sections of text. Based on a view that paragraphs or larger chunks of texts serve writer’s purposes within a genre, this approach has been remarkably useful, especially for writers in sophisticated genres, such as scientific research articles. After studying a number of research articles in the sciences, Swales (1990) proposed this analysis of their introductions:
• Move 1: In the first few sentences of the introduction, the writer “establishes the research field” by introducing the topic and discussing its importance.
• Move 2: In the second group of sentences, often a new paragraph, the writer summarizes some of the most relevant previous research, perhaps to demonstrate that the project discussed in the research article reflects an on-going discussion in the discipline.
• Move 3: In the next move, the writer often presents the “gap” in the previous research, that area that has not been studied but is the subject of the article being introduced.
• Move 4: Finally, the writer presents the topic of the research to be reported, often in the form of a purpose statement and/or one or several research questions.
Of course, there are a number of variations in these moves depending upon the discipline, the writer, the context, and the audience; for, like all elements of expository texts, moves are affected by the context and thus are socially-constructed. Despite contextual variation, these four functional moves are so common that they are being taught to researchers throughout the world.
Moves analysis research and teaching has been extended to other sections of research articles (the results and conclusion) and to expository genres of all types. For example, there is an instructor on my campus who uses functional “charting of paragraphs” to assist students in understanding authors’ methods for developing an argument3 with a particular audience. This functional charting approach helps the readers to identify the relationships between a text’s structure, the community, and the writer’s purposes. Thus, the social construction of the text, the interrelationship between readers, writers, and context, becomes more transparent to our students in these moves analyses.
Author’s stance and social construction
Bruffee (1986) tells us that
… social construction assumes that the matrix of thought is not the individual
but comes from some community of knowledgeable peers and the vernacular knowledge of that community. That is, social construction understands knowledge and the authority of knowledge as community generated, community maintained,
symbolic artifacts. (777)
What is the place of the text writer, then? Are writers merely “shoved around by physical reality?” (Rorty, 1982, quoted in Brufee, 1986: 776). Not at all. Skilled writers select language that evaluates their topic and the work of others and thus reveals the writer’s stance. Of course, conventions of a discipline may require that this evaluation be couched in certain phrases, particularly if the author is speaking to her/his peers or reviewers. Hedging of conclusions is common in scientific research articles, for example (see Hyland, 1994, 1998). Considerable recent research has been devoted to author’s stance, i.e., the language writers use to indicate their views about topics and others’ texts.
What are some of the acceptable stance options for writers, given the social construction of genres? How do writers use their knowledge of genre and community to project a stance, an evaluation of a topic, issue or another’s work? Thompson & Hunston (2000: 6ff) classify stance into three categories, according to writer’s purpose:
1. “To express the…writer’s opinion (of something mentioned) and in doing so to reflect the value system of the person and his/her community.” Though there are a variety of approaches to expressing an opinion within a community, Thompson and Hunston have identified some linguistic terms whose primary function is evaluation. Here are some examples from an academic corpus:
• Adjectives: obvious, important, untrue, remarkable
• Adverbs: unfortunately, plainly, interestingly, possibly
• Nouns: success, failure, triumph, likelihood
• Verbs used to quote another person: comment, note, argue, posit
2. To construct and maintain relations between the writer and reader. Under this heading, Thompson and Hunston discuss three possibilities:
• manipulation (when opinions are presented as given in the discourse),
• hedging (expressing the author’s certainty/uncertainty, to modify knowledge claims, for example) , and
• politeness (see, e.g., Brown and Levinson, 1987).
3. To organize the discourse. Metatextual features are often included to lead the reader through the text (e.g., “first, second, third”…and “Now I will discuss”.) Thompson & Hunston note that evaluation is often integrated into these discourse signals. For example, the author might say, “This is the first part and this is why it is so interesting…” (10).
Thus, though writers may be constrained by their roles vis-à-vis text and audience, genre, and context, they still have considerable latitude (see, for example, the corpus studies in the Thompson and Hunston volume, e.g., Channell, 2000 and Conrad and Biber, 2000). Particularly interesting for academic writing is the language of a writer’s “attribution” (Hunston & Thompson: 178), i.e., when a statement is attributed to someone other than the writer, since so much of academic argumentation is supported by citation. The verbs are particularly useful in attribution. Here are some examples I might use: "Kaplan comments, remarks, notes, argues, insists that…"--what a difference those choices make! Or how about the difference between Kaplan has shown and Kaplan makes the claim that… Which does the writer evaluate as true?
It can be seen from this discussion of stance that despite the acknowledged constraints of context and genre within social constructionism, writers can make their stances, their evaluations, very clear to the readers of their texts. Certainly, helping students to become aware of the evaluative language in stance assists them in understanding what an author is attempting to achieve.

Voice and social construction
Unfortunately,4 “voice” has often been identified as “personal” and individual, a province of the Expressivists and their muses. Many North American English teachers admire and reward students with a personal “voice,” those who can express their emotions and who project themselves as unique individuals within texts. However, for a number of reasons, including the fact that some of our ESL/EFL students to not subscribe to the ideology of individualism, both accepting and using personal voice in texts is difficult for them. (see Matsuda, 2001). After discussing a number of approaches to “voice” in a special Journal of Second Language Writing issue, Atkinson (2001) has this to say about the topic, particularly as it relates to the second/foreign language student:
As far as I am concerned, voice…is if anything at least co-owned. Like language
“coming to voice”…involves not such much learning to express one’s “own” ideas
for one’s “own” purposes, as learning how to be a person-in-society, basically
the only way people can be. It therefore involves a constant negotiation and
tension between what one may “want to do” or say and a social system or
technology that allows, or as often as not does not allow, one to say it.” (p. 121)
Therefore, we need to ask how a writer’s voice in a text is constrained, or should be, by “society,” by the context in which a text is being written, and especially, the writer’s role in this context. Famous writers from any profession or academic discipline may be relatively free from the constraints of disciplinary/community voice (see e.g., Stephen J. Gould’s, The flamingo’s smile, 1985, or much of his later work.) However, novice writers need to follow the community rules initially, as many of us discovered as we attempted to publish our first professional papers.
What can be said about voice in a social constructivist approach, then? Ivanic & Camps (2001) put it this way:
All writing contains “voice”…which locates their users culturally and historically. Writers may, through the linguistic and other resources they choose to draw on in their writing, ventriloquate an environmentally aware voice, a progressive-educator voice, a sexist voice, a positivist voice, a self-assured voice, a progressive-educator voice, a committed-to-plain English voice, or a combination of an infinite number of such voices (3).
So “voice,” which cannot be successfully separated from “stance,” ----or from the writer’s role, the genre, and the context---is integral to any academic writer’s text. If students are to become initiates into academic and professional communities, they need to consider what voices the individuals in that community take on and to work within these voices. In a charming piece in which he lays out his view of academic writing, Peter Elbow (1991) tells readers that academic texts “should maintain a ‘rubber-gloved’ quality of voice…They should show a kind of reluctance to touch one’s meanings with one’s naked fingers.” (p. 145) Although not all academic texts have “a rubber-gloved quality,” this suggestion of distance, of apparent objectivity and critical analysis, gives teachers and students a metaphor for beginning to study voice in academic texts. This comment releases them to discover a voice that portrays, first of all, the “person-in-society” about whom Atkinson speaks.
Writing in Context
Moves, stance, and voice are concepts that are difficult to understand or explain (especially to students), but real problems arise when we attempt to discuss “context” in print or in our classes. Effective texts are written for specific contexts, for specific situations in which the writer is attempting to get something done. This is what has been argued in social construction and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) for a number of years
But what is context? What are the central elements of the situation to which academic writers must pay attention? One researcher who has attempted to dissect the elements of the academic situation is Samraj (2001), who completed extensive ethnographic and analytic studies of two graduate majors in an attempt to discover contextual influences on students’ texts. What she found is a multi-layered set of interlocking influences, which she portrayed in this visual:

Through the visual, Samraj shows that there are various interacting influences upon the student’s text, e. g., the institutional examinations and requirements, the disciplinary genres, the proclivities of the faculty member teaching the course, the task itself, and the student’s own interests and stance. We might also want to add: the influences of “the state,” the texts the student has been reading, what the student’s roommate told him about the course…and the list goes on. Despite the sophistication and depth of the Samraj model, it still might be a bit too static to portray real tasks in real contexts. Prior (1998), in his study of the life of an assignment in a graduate class, has found that assigned tasks evolve as the instructor changes her mind, the students ask for clarification or begin to negotiate the task, time gets short and paper length is modified…and this list goes on, too. Thus, the influences on any written text are both synchronic (occurring at a particular moment, such as when the instructor introduces the task) and diachronic (changing over time). at least until the paper is turned in and graded.

Multiliteracies
Writing teachers tend to rely on words. We like them, and we assume that our students do.4 However, the demands of academic literacy, particularly outside the humanities, are becoming increasingly multi-modal. Writer’s responsibilities often include producing visual representations of their arguments and other non-linear text such as charts and graphs. Thus, we now turn to the issue of multi-literacies.
Multiliteracies. In response to the technological revolution that has occurred in the past thirty years or so, the New London Group (Kress, Fairclough, Cope, Kalantzis, and Cazden, among others) met in 1994 to ask this question: “What constitutes appropriate literacy teaching in the context of ever more critical factors of local diversity and global connectedness?” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000: 3). In their thought-provoking volume, this group lays out the argument that as teachers, we should recognize that the “human mind is embodied, situated, and social” (30) and that an understanding of language should be “action-oriented and generative,” emphasizing “the productive and innovative potential of language as meaning-making.” The authors note that many of our students are, or will be, reading or writing in what they call “multimodal” texts that integrate language with one or more of the following: audio design (music, sound effects, etc.), spatial design (geographic and architectonic renderings), gestural design (proxemics, kinesthetics) and visual design (colors, perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding). The group makes three major points about the implications for teachers, the first two of which should not be new to the readers of this chapter:
1. The first, and perhaps most important, is that we seriously view literacy as socially constructed, as taking place within social contexts. This implies that the role of writer, audience (and discourse communities—see Swales, 1990) and the situation are central to the writer’s invention and process as well as to the text produced.
2. It also means that writers are constrained in any public literacy act not only by their own purposes but by the context in which they are attempting to accomplish their ends.
3. And it means that student literacies should consist of working with several designs, only one of which is language.
Before I turn to the pedagogies suggested by the New London Group, it is important to mention the visual modality, long ignored in many of our North American writing classes, most which are often taught by humanities-trained faculty with little interest in the visual in text. Visual images include for our academic students any non-linear text: charts, graphs, or other non-linguistic representations of language found in books, in lectures, or on the WEB. Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), among many others, have noted that the importance of visual images to literacies, particularly in sciences and technology—and in the professional world—is major. I have found that business and economics professors believe that one of the most basic language practices that students can learn is first to create, and then to discuss, visual information central to their disciplines (Johns, 1998). In everyday life the “semiotic landscape is becoming more and more populated with complex social and cultural discourse practices, “ and language is becoming “decentered in terms of meaning making” (Iedema, 2003: 33). As our students read textbooks, complete research on line, attend concerts, and read magazines and newspapers, they must be increasingly aware, and critical of, the visual texts in their lives.
Pedagogy
What pedagogies do the New London Group suggest? They draw from a number of important theorists to propose a pedagogical approach for the new multiliterate era, an approach that draws from, and extends upon, much of what we know. Arguing that all possible designs should be recognized by teachers, they suggest discussion, critique, and practice. Here are their recommendations for classrooms, followed by my specific comments in parentheses about how these points relate to the teaching of academic writing. Students should have
• Practice, in which students play “multiple and different roles.” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000, p. 234.) [Thus, in academic writing, students take the role of student, expert, peer, critic… These roles can be taken in writing groups as they peer critique each other’s texts, but they can also be diversified as students become experts and report on a researched topic or critics as they review a book or article. Students need to understand when these roles can, and should, be taken and what taking a role implies in terms of stance, voice, genre, and other issues.]
• Overt instruction during which students develop “a conscious awareness and control over what is being learned” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000, p. 243), through working collaboratively with an expert, and building upon what the learner knows. [This, of course, is a Vygotskian principle, implying scaffolded writing instruction. In “The Process Approach,” teachers generally scaffold by taking students through “the writing process.” In a more socially-oriented view, scaffolding begins with the rhetorical situation which includes the genre, community and context, and specific audience. The process then relies heavily upon the genre identified as appropriate to the situation (see, e.g., Bawarshi, 2003).]
• Critical framing, during which time “students stand back from what they are studying and view it critically in relation to its social context” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000, p. 246.) [Reflection is not new, of course. It is an integral part of portfolio development and assessment in many writing classes, and often central to “the Process Approach.” What changes here is what is reflected upon. Students can respond in their reflections to questions such as these: “Who is in power through this text?” “Who is being dominated?” “How can we read this text to answer the first two questions?” “How can you, the writer, begin to take power over the text and the situation?”
• Transformed practice, in which students try out what they’ve learned in different contexts. If one of our pedagogical goals is a degree of mastery in practice, then immersion in a community of learners engaged in authentic versions of such practice is necessary (31).
How can we assist students to understand the social and ideological nature of discourses, particularly within a “democratic and participatory society”? For the past fifteen years, I have been teaching a group of first-year postsecondary bilingual and ESL students (from immigrant families) in a learning communities program, Freshman Success, designed by the university to increase student retention. Freshman Success students are enrolled in my writing class, a "breadth" requirement or major class (e.g., anthropology, biology), a university orientation class and a study group. One important element of our classes is community-based service learning, a component that brings my students in direct contact with diverse secondary school students—and brings these students to us on our university campus. There are many benefits to this program (see Johns, 2001a); however, the most relevant here are two: my students’ mentoring and advising of the secondary students, and my students’ research paper. In their mentoring work, the university students help to convince first generation, diverse secondary students to consider the possibility of attending university, to view college entrance as an accessible goal. While mentoring, my students begin to work on their research paper, whose sources are interviews with the secondary students. Anthropology is particularly well-suited for our learning community. Using the concepts (adaptation, assimilation…) of this course and a relatively standard genre in the social sciences (the IMRD research paper),5 modified for this class, the students have drafted and redrafted their research papers, graded, when completed, by both myself and the anthropology instructor. Authentic practice was in play: their interviews, their integration of sources into the final text –within the context of anthropology, and of the secondary school—made practice real and, of course, remarkably motivating for all concerned.
Applications
What can we do with what has been presented here? How can classroom practitioners make use of the current research and theory that complicates our pedagogical lives? In response, I will repeat the questions that appear in the introduction of this paper and supply some answers:
• In what theoretical and pedagogical frameworks should academic writing classes be taught? Though it is becoming increasingly clear that the concept of genre and the social construction of texts6 should be central to our teaching, we cannot ignore the two approaches that have played important historical roles in our field: Structuralism/Current-traditional Approach and Process Approaches. Both of these approaches still have something to offer. Below, I make some comments about how these approaches can be adapted to current pedagogies:
o Structuralism/ Current-Traditional approaches focused on the importance of text structures (comparison-contrast, cause-effect, etc.), called “discourse modes” in rhetoric. As time went on, it became very difficult to find an authentic text that employed one of these text structures exclusively. (They only occur in writing classes, apparently.) Therefore, it has been suggested that discourse modes, which appear across genres, be considered as writer strategies, methods by which the writer achieves his/her purposes in the text (see, e.g., Bhatia, 2001). A well-crafted academic textbook that embodies this view is Kiniry & Rose (1993), Critical Strategies for Academic Thinking & Writing. These writers argue that the strategy (e.g., cause/effect) chosen at any point in text may vary, depending upon writer’s intent, evidence, and other social factors, including the writer’s academic discipline.
o The Process Movement has been invaluable to us as practitioners and researchers, revolutionizing classrooms across the world. What should social construction adapt from the contributions of this approach? Invention, drafting, revising, editing, peer reviewing, and reflecting—all process elements--should remain in our pedagogies. The difference, of course, is that the processes will now be framed and initiated by writer’s purpose and the community-sanctioned genre based upon an identified rhetorical situation. Students will be encouraged to develop an awareness and critique of audience and community, genre, visual elements, and contextual factors from the very beginning and to revise as that awareness becomes keener (see Bawarshi, 2003). Thus, student writing processes and their reflections upon their writing will mirror the elements of the situation in which they are producing their texts. One of the most articulate proponents of the genre/process intersection is Rick Coe. whose “An apology for form; or who took the form out of process?”(1987) and other contributions (e.g., 1994, 2001) make a great deal of sense.
What do we do, then, if text structures are to become strategies and writers’ processes are subsumed and situated within actual rhetorical situations? We begin a writing task with rhetorical analyses: of the situation, of the writer’s purposes, or of texts from a genre.7 Students need to understand from the very beginning that though a genre is “repeated social action” (Miller, 1984, p. 151) and the organizing principle of the classroom, no genre is static. Genres evolve and are adapted by writers as situations change. Elements of a genre may be repeated (e.g., the moves in research article introductions), but since there are few, if any, identical rhetorical situations, writers must always be open to revising their notions of a genre in order to produce appropriate texts. Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995) speak of the tension within a particular rhetorical situation between the centripetal forces that contribute to the prototypical elements of a genre and the centrifugal forces that require writers to revise their genre knowledge, and texts, for a specific rhetorical situation. Here’s an example: My students have been given the task of writing a memo in which they explain a genre they are studying. The centripetal forces are represented in memo format; however, the audience and content, the centrifugal forces, will vary considerably from any memo they have written in the past.
What about academic writing? Here are some of the questions that we can ask students as they study texts from genres (e.g., research articles, timed essay examination prompts, reviews) and begin the task of writing in the genre:
1. What does the assignment (or task) look like?
2. What do the writers know about the task from reading the assignment?
3. What do they have to find out?
One year, I taught a Freshman Success class that was linked with an introductory geography class. This is the prompt that the geography instructor gave to the students for a take-home examination:
Illegal international migration between Mexico and the United States has commanded a great deal of attention from policy makers in both countries. A sound policy needs to be grounded in an understanding of the magnitude of the flows as well as the forces that generate this form of migration. In your memo, you are to assume the role of a policy analyst who is responsible for providing this information and a discussion of the impacts of this migration on both countries. Additionally you are to suggest a plan for stemming the migration flow between the countries. Use your textbook, WEB and library sources for your discussion (APA style).
Together, the students and I developed a chart for what the writer knows, and doesn’t know, from reading the prompt. This chart was used for invention, but it continued to be central to the discussion about the prompt as the student writers drafted their response.
Invention Chart
Known Not known
a. Writer’s role: policy analyst
b. Audience: government officials
c. Genre: Memo
d. Sources: textbook, WEB, library
e. Referencing style: APA
f. Content: Information on impact, a plan
g. Length X Ask instructor. (Be careful! Instructors don’t like these questions!)
h. Course concepts to be integrated X Examine textbook and lecture for central concepts
i. Appropriate language for the role X Analyze good student texts or professional work with the same purposes.
j. Use of charts or illustrations X Analysis of good student or professional texts.
The students worked in groups to complete as many of the “known” slots as they could. Then, they planned their strategies for prompt research in order to discover the unknowns. These charts and discussions become central to the invention and revision steps of students’ writing processes, to decisions about what this text should look like (macro-structure), what it should sound like (language), how the discourse should be framed, and other factors. What kind of research did the students do? They began to understand this assignment by analyzing examples of good student papers written in response to a related prompt for the same class They also interviewed the faculty member making the assignment to complete their “unknown” slots.
I could go on with pedagogy, but then I would never complete my writing book based upon this approach—and the deadline nears. Instead, Let us move on to the other questions raised at the beginning of the chapter:
• What should be the content of academic reading and writing classes? As can be seen from the above, a writing course should be devoted to developing students’ research skills, encouraging them to view purposeful writing (and reading) as situated and genre-driven (see Johns, 1997, Chapter 6). If writers are to achieve their purposes, whether to be given a high score on a paper, argue a point, or to please their employer, students must investigate a number of situational and textual factors. It goes without saying, then, that the tasks the students research in our writing classrooms must be varied and as authentic as possible. Students need to be exposed to, and write in, a variety of genres for a variety of situations. The English class essay following some rigid textual scheme is no longer appropriate.
• What are we educating students for? Here, we can return to the goals of the New London group. If students are educated to be critical and observant citizens in democratic societies, then we can assist them in researching how writing can be effective in different situations, and how they can make their textual voices heard, and respected, within academic and political communities. This approach encourages them to be more critical and analytical readers, as well. By necessity, we are educating students to be multiliterate in their text processing and production.

• What is the place of contrastive rhetoric (CR) in the scheme of things? Effective texts demonstrate a writer’s purposes and an understanding of a rhetorical situation and the language and genre that are appropriate to them. In CR, there is a growing body of research juxtaposing the work of L1 English speakers with that of L2 English speakers, based upon some of the text features discussed above. The research indicates important differences among writers. For example, Maier (1992) studied politeness strategies of a variety of L2 learners as they wrote business letters for a particularly difficult situation (a missed job interview). She found that "Although non-native speakers were aware of various types of politeness strategies, their language used tended to be less formal and more direct than [that of native speakers]" (189).

Mauranen (1993) examined the metatext (text about text) in the English writing of Finnish and Anglo-American students and found that the English native-speaking students used significantly more metatext in their writing than did the Finns. She hypothesized that the reasons for these differences were based on “different notions of politeness”: "The poetic, implicit Finish rhetoric could be construed as being polite by its treatment of readers as intelligent beings, to whom nothing much needs to be explained. Saying too obvious things is, as we know, patronizing" (17).She found the Anglo-Americans to be much more explicit. Why? In order to avoid presenting themselves as superior to their readers, “or leaving the reader to struggle with following the writer’s thoughts” (17).
You can see from these two examples (out of many) that issues of voice and stance are very much a part of the research in contrastive rhetoric. As teachers, we need to be sensitive to the possibilities for different linguistic and social perceptions among speakers of different languages.
Conclusion
I am well aware that teachers of academic writing throughout the world, those people who do some of the most important work on our campuses, are unappreciated and undervalued (See Johns, 1997, Ch. 5, and Blythman et al., 2003). I am also quite aware that the large majority of our writing teachers are tutors, teaching associates or lecturers, individuals without prestige and often with little experience. However, if the teaching of academic writing is to gain status within our institutions, then we must keep current and aware of the shifting nature of text analysis and of the demands of multiliteracies.

Practitioners are beginning to get some concrete help in the post-process era (see Paltridge, 2001; Hyland, 2002; Johns, 2001b; and, Swales & Feak, 1994), but it is a hard sell, particularly to publishers who know that many teachers have little time to read about the relationship between theory and practice. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, it is so much easier to teach those text structures (“the discourse modes”) or to keep working through conventionally understood writing processes than to take on social construction. Perhaps Casanave (2002) has the right idea: We should encourage students to think of each writing task (and the research into rhetorical situations) as a game: there are rules, but they vary, depending upon the team, the situation on the field, and other factors.
Coda
This volume is a compilation of chapters written to celebrate Bob Kaplan’s 75th birthday. The profession needs to thank him, of course, for his many contributions to ESL and applied linguistics, for his continuing interest in, and applications for, contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis. However, for his students, there must be special thanks. Many, many of us are grateful for his patience with our dissertations (disguised by gruffness), and his fabulous letters of recommendation when we sought jobs. At a TESOL Conference held after Bob retired, he asked at his session, “Who are all of you people here at 5:30?” And we answered, “Your students.” Thanks and Happy Birthday, Bob.
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Notes