While ESL materials are frequently graded with respect to grammatical and lexical difficulty, they are seldom graded with respect to rhetorical difficulty. In fact, ESL materials are often simplified rhetorically and do not contain much implicit information. We feel that more difficult materials should be used in order to give students additional practice in discerning implicit relationships in English. I think this quotation is important because it calls our attention as teachers to a problem that students have when reading scientific texts in academic courses. We need to understand the information presented in this article to provide students with practice exercises that help them feel comfortable identifying and comprehending explicit definitions as well as implicit definitions in context.
Teachers can prepare lessons to help students identify explicit and implicit definitions.
The students may be interested in keeping a notebook with these new concepts. Authentic materials such as undergraduate textbooks can be collected to provide practice in reading texts from different subject areas so that students can be exposed to different ways in which concepts are defined in the various fields of study. The purpose of this article is to examine research and practices in teaching writing to non-native speakers of the English language in academic courses at the undergraduate level. The author discusses two areas of research. The first area is research on genre, which focuses on presenting students with models of appropriate discourse structures for different academic tasks.