Raising collective awareness of rhetorical strategies

Scientists who are non-native speakers (NNSs) may receive inadequate training in the skills required to write scientific English, and may even be unaware of the various language and procedural issues involved in gaining acceptance from their own research community. Pedagogic materials exist for teaching these skills but, to date, there has been little interactive online assistance available. In addition, their own institutions may not even formally recognize this need by providing writing courses for doctoral students and practising researchers. This article describes how a new online writing tool can be used to raise awareness with regard to the writing of research article (RA) introductions in a multidisciplinary perspective. The tool is based on a corpus of NNS drafts and revised versions that have been processed pedagogically to highlight rhetorical and linguistic features. In this chapter, a series of communicative activities is described which progressively draws the learners’ attention to some of the rhetorical, organisational and linguistic features common to RA introductions that they may use when writing their own texts. Keywords: research writing; online tool; genre analysis; expert writing; typical errors