A concordance- and genre-informed approach to ESP essay writing

This paper advocates a concordance- and genre-based approach to academic essay writing for non-native students. It describes a project which aimed at teaching law undergraduates to write formal legal essays. As a first step, the students identified some structural characteristics of legal essays. Next, they used concordances to explore possible correlations between the generic structures and particular lexical items. Finally, as part of their work on the concordances they were asked to write mini-essays incorporating the generic features identified in Step 1, and some of the lexical items studied in Step 2