Writing for academic purposes is a tricky issue, especially for researchers who are eager to be recognized by larger academic discourse communites through their publications. Indeed, writing for prestigious databases and especially in English has been the basic concern of researchers with EFL background. However, in the last thirty years, the leading figures in ESP and EAP realms have developed pedagogical writing models and emphasized the critical role of genre analysis as road map in academic writing for researchers, with the very term of John Swales, who are looking for creating research space in local and international academic platforms. Thus, driven from these inspiring models in the literature, which are basicly prolific outcomes of genre based writing pedagogy, I, as a researcher, eager to cover all these pragmatic tools in a way that reseachers and, especially, novice researchers would easily catch the essence of writing for academic discourses in terms of positioning themselves in these discourses by synthesizing relevant parts of my master thesis and dissertation. Thus, as a motivational, inspring and reader friendly guide, Genre Analysis Based Pedagogy: Writing for Academic Discourses firstly explains genre as a term within paradigms and the critical position of genre analysis based writing pedagogy and genre analysis as methodology. Followingly, the models specifically put by ESP and EAP experts and practitioners are provided briefly and clearly for researchers in such a way that will guide them in rhetorically and lexico-grammatically structuring of their academic texts, or academic genres, section by section and holistically in English. Thus, through this self-help book, researchers can organize their academic genres with a professional academic tone in English, which will ease, as Hyland pointed out, contextualizing their genres into wider academic contexts.

The papers of this volume fall into three groups, two of the three being written by myself. From my writings on education I have selected only those which may have some claim to permanent interest, and all but two have been tested by previous publication. Those of the first group deal with questions about which we teachers, eager about our immeasurable art beyond most professional persons, never cease to wonder and debate: What is teaching? How far may it influence character? Can it be practiced on persons too busy or too poor to come to our class-rooms? To subjects of what scope should it be applied? And how shall we content ourselves with its necessary limitations? Under these diverse headings a kind of philosophy of education is outlined. The last two papers, having been given as lectures and stenographically reported, I have left in their original colloquial form. A group of papers on Harvard follows, preceded by an explanatory note, and the volume closes with a few papers by Mrs. Palmer. She and I often talked of preparing together a book on education. Now, alone, I gather up these fragments.

George Herbert Palmer

1908

Although the month is March and not November, it is never unseasonable to count up the blessings for which it is well to be thankful. In fact, from the standpoint of education, the spring is perhaps the appropriate time to perform this very pleasant function. As if still further to emphasize the fact that education, like civilization, is an artificial thing, we have reversed the operations of Mother Nature: we sow our seed in the fall and cultivate our crops during the winter and reap our harvests in the spring. I may be pardoned, therefore, for making the theme of my discussion a brief review of the elements of growth and victory for which the educator of to-day may justly be grateful, with, perhaps, a few suggestions of what the next few years may reasonably be expected to bring forth.

And this course is all the more necessary because, I believe, the teaching profession is unduly prone to pessimism. One might think at first glance that the contrary would be true. We are surrounded on every side by youth. Youth is the material with which we constantly deal. Youth is buoyant, hopeful, exuberant; and yet, with this material constantly surrounding us, we frequently find the task wearisome and apparently hopeless. The reason is not far to seek. Youth is not only buoyant, it is unsophisticated, it is inexperienced, in many important particulars it is crude. Some of its tastes must necessarily, in our judgment, hark back to the primitive, to the barbaric. Ours is continually the task to civilize, to sophisticate, to refine this raw material. But, unfortunately for us, the effort that we put forth does not always bring results that we can see and weigh and measure. The hopefulness of our material is overshadowed not infrequently by its crudeness. We take each generation as it comes to us. We strive to lift it to the plane that civilized society has reached. We do our best and pass it on, mindful of the many inadequacies, perhaps of the many failures, in our work. We turn to the new generation that takes its place. We hope for better materials, but we find no improvement.