- Email: [email protected]
Introducing English for academic purposes, Maggie Charles, Diane Pecorari
System xxx (2016) 1e3
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
System journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/system
Book review Introducing English for academic purposes, Maggie Charles, Diane Pecorari. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK and New York. (2016). 205 pp.Academic writing step by step, Christopher N. Candlin, Peter Crompton, Basil Hatim. Equinox, Sheffield, UK. (2016). 207 pp.
The shock, the sense of betrayal and the scales falling from my eyes e it was like being told as a child that there was no Father Christmas all over again. Such was the effect of the anti-textbook view, as set out on pages 78 and 79 of Introducing English for Academic Purposes by Charles and Pecorari, when we are informed that any success of a textbook may be a reflection of feats of marketing wizardry rather than any pedagogical merit. All too often the content is not research based e it has not emerged from corpus analysis e but the knowledge comes across as ‘officially sanctioned’ and this predisposes the human mind to uncritical acceptance. I found myself muttering, ‘Oh yes. Oh yes,’ while nodding my head vigorously in some sort of Damascene moment. And I guess that it will be very much like this for most teachers with more than a passing interest in EAP, who will find themselves seeing the world rather differently again and again on page after page of this truly excellent introduction to the field. For such a readership, the movement from theory to practical application and implication will be very welcome and the level is perfectly pitched with regards to assumed and new knowledge. The economy and beguiling simplicity with which the knotty and multi-layered fabric of frameworks, perspectives and approaches are staked out so very clearly is evidence of two forensic minds completely on top of their game. Unfortunately, I cannot endorse with anything like the same zeal a second piece of Spring reading, namely Academic Writing Step by Step by Candlin, Crompton and Hatim. Maybe I am being a little unfair as, after all, both the bar and my guard about textbooks had been raised somewhat high but, despite a few impressive features, I was largely underwhelmed. To this one, I will return later. The twelve chapters of Charles and Pecorari's tour de force follow a similar pattern to one another with initial brief context segueing into a statement of key objectives that bear the form, ‘By the end of the chapter, you will have learned …’ The text is divided into sections and interspersed with several boxed out exercises e the first is always for awareness raising purposes and later come more challenging tasks designed to help those with a degree of commitment to engage more deeply with the subject matter (for example, students on courses) while the very last is reflective in nature and aims to consolidate learning. Towards the end of chapters, there is a ‘Profiles of Practice’ section which generally relates the focus to a number of fictitious teachers' differing settings though they all have an entirely convincing ring of authenticity about them. The very final ‘Further Reading and Resources’ section consists of an annotated bibliography of around half a dozen sources, and they are ones that you really feel you might like to explore. I wondered at first whether repeating the same sort of journey in every chapter might make the experience a little staid, but this is not the case at all; it actually facilitates learning because the reader, who always has some idea of what to expect next, is better equipped to process the material. Section I, entitled ‘The field of EAP’, consists of three chapters on the scope of EAP, as well as the global and institutional contexts. In my view, the service the authors provide here in helping EAP teachers understand how their individual circumstances fit into the broader scheme of things is an invaluable one. All too often in HE, teachers of EAP can suffer identity problems because they fail to understand that their role is different from that of subject academics. If they are going to be accepted and respected within the wider academic community, they must learn to be comfortable within their own skin. In order to combat the ‘Cinderella status’ (p. 38), it is necessary to take the maxim ‘know thyself’ to heart and understand that more diverse competencies are called for, that the job is far from straightforward and to perform it well requires a high level of skill. The sections ‘Who are the EAP teachers?’ and ‘The status of EAP’ are particularly instructive in this regard. For any teacher at the start of their career, I would strongly recommend Chapter 2, a thought-popping consideration of English as a lingua franca and English-medium instruction (EMI). In the so-called expanding circle countries, where English really is a foreign language, universities are currently undergoing the painful process of switching over to English, and it does not take rocket science to work out that there will be career opportunities aplenty for at least a couple of decades sorting out the teething problems arising from dyed-in-the-wool academics being required to lecture, administer and assess in a new language. Kachru's (1985) metaphor of concentric circles for depicting the countries of the world grouped according to their relation to the English language has come in for a lot of flak in recent years, and I felt that the authors could have expanded a little more on the criticism. For instance, we are told that the model is a simplification because the ‘the relationships among http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.04.010
2
Book review / System xxx (2016) 1e3
languages it attempts to capture are in fact highly contingent, …’ (p. 21). Before moving briskly onwards, this could have done with a little unpacking. The three chapters in Section II, ‘Planning for EAP’, are strongly recommended for any budding materials writer. They are tightly packed with both theoretical underpinnings and procedural tips that have clearly emerged from a fund of practical experience. Getting one's head round corpus-based, genre-based and social-context based approaches takes some doing, in good part because there is further sub-division with the reader drilling down within genre-based approaches into move analysis, systemic functional linguistics and rhetorical approaches; however, definitions and explanations suffer from no wasted word and the reader is left with conceptual frameworks for comprehending this difficult area that stick. I was a little less sure about the advice on choosing between them as the authors appear to be sitting on the fence somewhat when they suggest that no approach is better than any other e it all just depends on the type of information being sought. We read on page 56, ‘If you need to find out about the overall structure of a certain type of text, a genre analysis will provide the necessary information.’ However, this would appear to beg the question whether the overall structure is more or less useful than the kinds of information that the other approaches furnish. I was pleased to see that the principle of constructive alignment is given its due as it is so helpful for course developers to have at the back of their minds the need for a fairly fine-tuned calibration between course content, assessment and objectives e the elusive prize being coherence and rigour. Section III, ‘Teaching and assessing EAP’, encompasses the remaining six chapters and they all overflow with substantive points. Chapter 7 starts with a look at variables affecting the nature of academic discourse and I guess most readers will appreciate the care and attention given to defining two of them: register and genre. Useful to keep in mind is the heuristic that ‘… genre can be thought of as combining register with purpose’ (p. 95). An interesting practical implication drawn out of the analysis that makes good sense is that while it is fully appropriate to teach undergraduate students how to read a research article, there is a lot less justification for teaching them how to write such an expert genre, considering that its primary purpose is for presenting new knowledge to fellow experts rather than merely displaying it. The chapter ends with key features such as cohesion, nominalisation, stance and intertextuality all of which should fire up with curiosity any EAP teacher worth their salt. In Chapter 8, ‘Academic Vocabulary’, the authors make the very useful distinction between general, academic and technical terminology and then tackle multi-word units and an academic phrase list, before ending with a focus on teaching and learning vocabulary. As they put it, ‘…a more relevant question than whether a learner knows a word is often how well the learner knows the word’ (p. 115), and in steering the reader towards this more sophisticated grasp they offer a comprehensive and revealing list of additional features. I also liked the fact that their deliberations make plain and frequent reference to the EAP context. However, I am not sure I agree that it is only possible to teach academic terminology within an ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes) setting (p. 116) e a competent teacher should be able to make some allowance for the diverse needs of the students especially with respect to disciplinary variation within an EGAP (English for General Academic Purposes) class. Furthermore, in my view, more expansive consideration could have been given to the recording of new vocabulary. It is suggested that there is no best way and students should just use the method that they find works for them, that is, it is all a question of personal learning style. I would be interested to know the evidence for this as my own impression is that technology, for example, Quizlet.com, offers significant learning advantages over the traditional paper notebook that quickly gets filled and then if the student is not careful, a lot of time is wasted testing the ability to translate a limited set of items into the student's first language. Chapters 9 and 10 look at written expert genres (e.g., research articles) and written learner genres (e.g., essays) respectively. The latter's classification of approaches to teaching and learning academic writing is especially fascinating. I felt that I would benefit from revisiting Chapter 11, ‘Spoken genres’, as preparation for an academic speaking or listening class. In the past, I have typically resorted to information gap practice exercises and instinctively avoided micro-skills and attempting to pass on textbook wisdom, which all too often has appeared to be either dressed-up common sense or to be too woolly and abstract. However, Charles and Pecorari succeed in making the theory accessible and relevant. They consider top-down and bottom-up processing; common structures and functions to be found in lectures as well as the factors affecting listening comprehension. Were you aware that the speed of speech varies with lexical and propositional density? Did you know that intonation patterns divide lectures into segments with a high pitch typically occurring at the start? We then move on to notetaking and presentation skills followed by the very different sort of skillset required for performing well in ‘multi-person spoken genres’ such as seminars. The advice on turn-taking is wonderful and here is a thought to prime your students with before they launch into a seminar practice activity: its success is a responsibility shared by all members as the outcome is a coconstruction of meaning that arises from the interaction of all contributors. Chapter 12, ‘Assessment and feedback in EAP’, is the final chapter. It lives up to the high standards of the rest of the book, digging a little deeper than you may have found elsewhere so effective testing is not just valid and reliable but also constructively aligned as well as predictable. The chapter ends with a brief look at plagiarism. Why is it that every text I read on this subject appears to use the adjective ‘vexing’? My second book for review, Academic Writing Step by Step, is a completely different kettle of fish because it obviously has a far narrower scope and it is a textbook and therefore primarily for consumption by students rather than teachers. There is, in fact, some discrepancy over the target reader, as the back cover suggests the readership might include foreign language students while, according to the preface, the intended readership is foreign language students. All chapters are firmly rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and I have to admit that I liked the explicit attention devoted to the move from given to new information that underpins so much more academic discourse than most of us probably credit.
Book review / System xxx (2016) 1e3
3
In Unit A, ‘The Popularized Research Article’, we are introduced to the genre that we stay with for seven of the total ten chapters. I think they are mistaken in selecting this genre. The texts that students pull to pieces in exercises designed to reveal the underlying skeletal structure for students to then practise in their own writing are drawn from newspapers (e.g., the Guardian and the Sunday Times) as well as magazines (e.g., the Economist and Newsweek), but this is the world of journalism rather than the academy. Encouraging students, for instance, to attract the lay reader by writing entertaining and vivid lead summaries is actually doing them a disservice because this is not the nature of the type of writing with which they should be coming to terms. I had a chuckle on page 167 as I felt my suspicions were confirmed by the ‘Journalistic Brief’ section. ‘Try to put yourself in the position of a journalist …,’ we are instructed. It also has to be mentioned that there is far too scant guidance given, some of which is plain wrong. In the ‘Words in Context’ exercise on page 2, the reader is advised that feeling ‘as sick as a parrot’ means feeling ‘very disappointed’ e this is not the case even in situ. Then there is the ‘Grammar in Context’ exercise on page 7, where students are taught the difference in meaning between the modal verbs ‘may’, ‘can’ and ‘could’ for expressing future possibility. This is an area that students have difficulties with and it has an added importance in EAP because they are so commonly deployed in the discussion of research findings. However, the explanation that ‘may’ means ‘We don't know for sure but it is possible the statement is true,’ while ‘could’ means ‘The statement may not happen e or come true e in the future, but it is possible,’ misses the mark completely in helping students distinguish the real-world reference of ‘may’ from the theoretical realm suggested by ‘could’. A final example, though there are several others, is to be found on page 67, where we are informed that in summaries, there is only a need for a single attribution to the author of the original text because all subsequent elements will be ‘automatically understood by the reader as coming from the source.’ I disagree e repeatedly reminding the reader of the original author is an effective means of distancing the summary writer from the content. Although I was able to pick holes in some of the text analysis exercises, overall I thought they were excellent for consciousness raising about the deeper structure and I liked the novel and accessible layout. I also liked the building block approach whereby more complex types of texts such as the persuasive synthesis in Unit F incorporate patterns that have been learnt in earlier units. Unit G entitled ‘Logos, Ethos, Pathos, and Logical Fallacies’ offers the reader a very helpful toolset for comprehending persuasive strategies and the exercises on logical fallacies are indeed very enlightening. However, I cannot resist pointing out a post hoc ergo propter hoc blunder in Paragraph [7] (see page 96 of Unit F). After the event does not mean because of the event so the fact that people tended to be in a poorer mood later in the day after they had been daydreaming does not mean that we can leap to the conclusion that daydreaming caused unhappiness. The book appears to improve as it progresses and I found Unit H ‘Documentation of Sources’ to be very thorough and instructive. However, a little more information about ‘doi’ could have been provided than just what it stands for (‘Digital Object Identifier’) and that it should be included in any list of references. Why do they not explain what it is? The final two units ‘What goes on inside the Writer's Head’ and ‘What goes on inside the Beginner Writer's Head’ offer analysis of an expert exemplar report and a student attempt at one respectively. The latter may indeed offer advantages; all it takes is some faith in Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’. Every unit ends with final assignments that practise the construction of a certain type of text and they are generally well constructed and with some decent mileage in them. References Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realm: the English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk, & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the World: Teaching and learning the language and literatures. (pp. 11e30). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Peter Saunders Language Centre, University of Oxford, 12 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HT, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] Available online xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
System journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/system
Book review Introducing English for academic purposes, Maggie Charles, Diane Pecorari. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK and New York. (2016). 205 pp.Academic writing step by step, Christopher N. Candlin, Peter Crompton, Basil Hatim. Equinox, Sheffield, UK. (2016). 207 pp.
The shock, the sense of betrayal and the scales falling from my eyes e it was like being told as a child that there was no Father Christmas all over again. Such was the effect of the anti-textbook view, as set out on pages 78 and 79 of Introducing English for Academic Purposes by Charles and Pecorari, when we are informed that any success of a textbook may be a reflection of feats of marketing wizardry rather than any pedagogical merit. All too often the content is not research based e it has not emerged from corpus analysis e but the knowledge comes across as ‘officially sanctioned’ and this predisposes the human mind to uncritical acceptance. I found myself muttering, ‘Oh yes. Oh yes,’ while nodding my head vigorously in some sort of Damascene moment. And I guess that it will be very much like this for most teachers with more than a passing interest in EAP, who will find themselves seeing the world rather differently again and again on page after page of this truly excellent introduction to the field. For such a readership, the movement from theory to practical application and implication will be very welcome and the level is perfectly pitched with regards to assumed and new knowledge. The economy and beguiling simplicity with which the knotty and multi-layered fabric of frameworks, perspectives and approaches are staked out so very clearly is evidence of two forensic minds completely on top of their game. Unfortunately, I cannot endorse with anything like the same zeal a second piece of Spring reading, namely Academic Writing Step by Step by Candlin, Crompton and Hatim. Maybe I am being a little unfair as, after all, both the bar and my guard about textbooks had been raised somewhat high but, despite a few impressive features, I was largely underwhelmed. To this one, I will return later. The twelve chapters of Charles and Pecorari's tour de force follow a similar pattern to one another with initial brief context segueing into a statement of key objectives that bear the form, ‘By the end of the chapter, you will have learned …’ The text is divided into sections and interspersed with several boxed out exercises e the first is always for awareness raising purposes and later come more challenging tasks designed to help those with a degree of commitment to engage more deeply with the subject matter (for example, students on courses) while the very last is reflective in nature and aims to consolidate learning. Towards the end of chapters, there is a ‘Profiles of Practice’ section which generally relates the focus to a number of fictitious teachers' differing settings though they all have an entirely convincing ring of authenticity about them. The very final ‘Further Reading and Resources’ section consists of an annotated bibliography of around half a dozen sources, and they are ones that you really feel you might like to explore. I wondered at first whether repeating the same sort of journey in every chapter might make the experience a little staid, but this is not the case at all; it actually facilitates learning because the reader, who always has some idea of what to expect next, is better equipped to process the material. Section I, entitled ‘The field of EAP’, consists of three chapters on the scope of EAP, as well as the global and institutional contexts. In my view, the service the authors provide here in helping EAP teachers understand how their individual circumstances fit into the broader scheme of things is an invaluable one. All too often in HE, teachers of EAP can suffer identity problems because they fail to understand that their role is different from that of subject academics. If they are going to be accepted and respected within the wider academic community, they must learn to be comfortable within their own skin. In order to combat the ‘Cinderella status’ (p. 38), it is necessary to take the maxim ‘know thyself’ to heart and understand that more diverse competencies are called for, that the job is far from straightforward and to perform it well requires a high level of skill. The sections ‘Who are the EAP teachers?’ and ‘The status of EAP’ are particularly instructive in this regard. For any teacher at the start of their career, I would strongly recommend Chapter 2, a thought-popping consideration of English as a lingua franca and English-medium instruction (EMI). In the so-called expanding circle countries, where English really is a foreign language, universities are currently undergoing the painful process of switching over to English, and it does not take rocket science to work out that there will be career opportunities aplenty for at least a couple of decades sorting out the teething problems arising from dyed-in-the-wool academics being required to lecture, administer and assess in a new language. Kachru's (1985) metaphor of concentric circles for depicting the countries of the world grouped according to their relation to the English language has come in for a lot of flak in recent years, and I felt that the authors could have expanded a little more on the criticism. For instance, we are told that the model is a simplification because the ‘the relationships among http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.04.010
2
Book review / System xxx (2016) 1e3
languages it attempts to capture are in fact highly contingent, …’ (p. 21). Before moving briskly onwards, this could have done with a little unpacking. The three chapters in Section II, ‘Planning for EAP’, are strongly recommended for any budding materials writer. They are tightly packed with both theoretical underpinnings and procedural tips that have clearly emerged from a fund of practical experience. Getting one's head round corpus-based, genre-based and social-context based approaches takes some doing, in good part because there is further sub-division with the reader drilling down within genre-based approaches into move analysis, systemic functional linguistics and rhetorical approaches; however, definitions and explanations suffer from no wasted word and the reader is left with conceptual frameworks for comprehending this difficult area that stick. I was a little less sure about the advice on choosing between them as the authors appear to be sitting on the fence somewhat when they suggest that no approach is better than any other e it all just depends on the type of information being sought. We read on page 56, ‘If you need to find out about the overall structure of a certain type of text, a genre analysis will provide the necessary information.’ However, this would appear to beg the question whether the overall structure is more or less useful than the kinds of information that the other approaches furnish. I was pleased to see that the principle of constructive alignment is given its due as it is so helpful for course developers to have at the back of their minds the need for a fairly fine-tuned calibration between course content, assessment and objectives e the elusive prize being coherence and rigour. Section III, ‘Teaching and assessing EAP’, encompasses the remaining six chapters and they all overflow with substantive points. Chapter 7 starts with a look at variables affecting the nature of academic discourse and I guess most readers will appreciate the care and attention given to defining two of them: register and genre. Useful to keep in mind is the heuristic that ‘… genre can be thought of as combining register with purpose’ (p. 95). An interesting practical implication drawn out of the analysis that makes good sense is that while it is fully appropriate to teach undergraduate students how to read a research article, there is a lot less justification for teaching them how to write such an expert genre, considering that its primary purpose is for presenting new knowledge to fellow experts rather than merely displaying it. The chapter ends with key features such as cohesion, nominalisation, stance and intertextuality all of which should fire up with curiosity any EAP teacher worth their salt. In Chapter 8, ‘Academic Vocabulary’, the authors make the very useful distinction between general, academic and technical terminology and then tackle multi-word units and an academic phrase list, before ending with a focus on teaching and learning vocabulary. As they put it, ‘…a more relevant question than whether a learner knows a word is often how well the learner knows the word’ (p. 115), and in steering the reader towards this more sophisticated grasp they offer a comprehensive and revealing list of additional features. I also liked the fact that their deliberations make plain and frequent reference to the EAP context. However, I am not sure I agree that it is only possible to teach academic terminology within an ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes) setting (p. 116) e a competent teacher should be able to make some allowance for the diverse needs of the students especially with respect to disciplinary variation within an EGAP (English for General Academic Purposes) class. Furthermore, in my view, more expansive consideration could have been given to the recording of new vocabulary. It is suggested that there is no best way and students should just use the method that they find works for them, that is, it is all a question of personal learning style. I would be interested to know the evidence for this as my own impression is that technology, for example, Quizlet.com, offers significant learning advantages over the traditional paper notebook that quickly gets filled and then if the student is not careful, a lot of time is wasted testing the ability to translate a limited set of items into the student's first language. Chapters 9 and 10 look at written expert genres (e.g., research articles) and written learner genres (e.g., essays) respectively. The latter's classification of approaches to teaching and learning academic writing is especially fascinating. I felt that I would benefit from revisiting Chapter 11, ‘Spoken genres’, as preparation for an academic speaking or listening class. In the past, I have typically resorted to information gap practice exercises and instinctively avoided micro-skills and attempting to pass on textbook wisdom, which all too often has appeared to be either dressed-up common sense or to be too woolly and abstract. However, Charles and Pecorari succeed in making the theory accessible and relevant. They consider top-down and bottom-up processing; common structures and functions to be found in lectures as well as the factors affecting listening comprehension. Were you aware that the speed of speech varies with lexical and propositional density? Did you know that intonation patterns divide lectures into segments with a high pitch typically occurring at the start? We then move on to notetaking and presentation skills followed by the very different sort of skillset required for performing well in ‘multi-person spoken genres’ such as seminars. The advice on turn-taking is wonderful and here is a thought to prime your students with before they launch into a seminar practice activity: its success is a responsibility shared by all members as the outcome is a coconstruction of meaning that arises from the interaction of all contributors. Chapter 12, ‘Assessment and feedback in EAP’, is the final chapter. It lives up to the high standards of the rest of the book, digging a little deeper than you may have found elsewhere so effective testing is not just valid and reliable but also constructively aligned as well as predictable. The chapter ends with a brief look at plagiarism. Why is it that every text I read on this subject appears to use the adjective ‘vexing’? My second book for review, Academic Writing Step by Step, is a completely different kettle of fish because it obviously has a far narrower scope and it is a textbook and therefore primarily for consumption by students rather than teachers. There is, in fact, some discrepancy over the target reader, as the back cover suggests the readership might include foreign language students while, according to the preface, the intended readership is foreign language students. All chapters are firmly rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and I have to admit that I liked the explicit attention devoted to the move from given to new information that underpins so much more academic discourse than most of us probably credit.
Book review / System xxx (2016) 1e3
3
In Unit A, ‘The Popularized Research Article’, we are introduced to the genre that we stay with for seven of the total ten chapters. I think they are mistaken in selecting this genre. The texts that students pull to pieces in exercises designed to reveal the underlying skeletal structure for students to then practise in their own writing are drawn from newspapers (e.g., the Guardian and the Sunday Times) as well as magazines (e.g., the Economist and Newsweek), but this is the world of journalism rather than the academy. Encouraging students, for instance, to attract the lay reader by writing entertaining and vivid lead summaries is actually doing them a disservice because this is not the nature of the type of writing with which they should be coming to terms. I had a chuckle on page 167 as I felt my suspicions were confirmed by the ‘Journalistic Brief’ section. ‘Try to put yourself in the position of a journalist …,’ we are instructed. It also has to be mentioned that there is far too scant guidance given, some of which is plain wrong. In the ‘Words in Context’ exercise on page 2, the reader is advised that feeling ‘as sick as a parrot’ means feeling ‘very disappointed’ e this is not the case even in situ. Then there is the ‘Grammar in Context’ exercise on page 7, where students are taught the difference in meaning between the modal verbs ‘may’, ‘can’ and ‘could’ for expressing future possibility. This is an area that students have difficulties with and it has an added importance in EAP because they are so commonly deployed in the discussion of research findings. However, the explanation that ‘may’ means ‘We don't know for sure but it is possible the statement is true,’ while ‘could’ means ‘The statement may not happen e or come true e in the future, but it is possible,’ misses the mark completely in helping students distinguish the real-world reference of ‘may’ from the theoretical realm suggested by ‘could’. A final example, though there are several others, is to be found on page 67, where we are informed that in summaries, there is only a need for a single attribution to the author of the original text because all subsequent elements will be ‘automatically understood by the reader as coming from the source.’ I disagree e repeatedly reminding the reader of the original author is an effective means of distancing the summary writer from the content. Although I was able to pick holes in some of the text analysis exercises, overall I thought they were excellent for consciousness raising about the deeper structure and I liked the novel and accessible layout. I also liked the building block approach whereby more complex types of texts such as the persuasive synthesis in Unit F incorporate patterns that have been learnt in earlier units. Unit G entitled ‘Logos, Ethos, Pathos, and Logical Fallacies’ offers the reader a very helpful toolset for comprehending persuasive strategies and the exercises on logical fallacies are indeed very enlightening. However, I cannot resist pointing out a post hoc ergo propter hoc blunder in Paragraph [7] (see page 96 of Unit F). After the event does not mean because of the event so the fact that people tended to be in a poorer mood later in the day after they had been daydreaming does not mean that we can leap to the conclusion that daydreaming caused unhappiness. The book appears to improve as it progresses and I found Unit H ‘Documentation of Sources’ to be very thorough and instructive. However, a little more information about ‘doi’ could have been provided than just what it stands for (‘Digital Object Identifier’) and that it should be included in any list of references. Why do they not explain what it is? The final two units ‘What goes on inside the Writer's Head’ and ‘What goes on inside the Beginner Writer's Head’ offer analysis of an expert exemplar report and a student attempt at one respectively. The latter may indeed offer advantages; all it takes is some faith in Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’. Every unit ends with final assignments that practise the construction of a certain type of text and they are generally well constructed and with some decent mileage in them. References Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realm: the English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk, & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the World: Teaching and learning the language and literatures. (pp. 11e30). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Peter Saunders Language Centre, University of Oxford, 12 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HT, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] Available online xxx