Teaching Academic Writing in Higher Education

Academic writing is one of the most complex tasks students encounter in university. Both domestic and international students struggle with academic writing; however, international students also face language barriers and are unfamiliar with western academic writing genres. Since many instructors don’t know how to instruct academic writing as a process, the fields of Rhetorical Genre studies (RGS), and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) provide theoretical frameworks that can be applied pedagogically in order to teach academic writing effectively in any university classroom. This paper also contains a pedagogical method for applying these concepts into a writing classroom designed for ESL graduate students. It is a method that can be used in any writing program to teach both international and domestic students.