Genre approaches to teaching have long been applied to improve students’ skills, and their effect has usually been assessed by looking into students’ productions. In this work, we examine students’ perceptions of the implementation of a genre-based writing course that incorporated tasks developed by the Reading to Learn Pedagogy (R2LP) (Rose & Martin, 2008) for the teaching of Scientific Research Articles (SRA) in an EFL context. A scientific writing course in English was offered for 8 weeks on a weekly basis to researchers and Ph.D. students in Argentina. They were asked to answer surveys after every class and once the course finished. Surveys were analysed considering ATTITUDE of the System of Appraisal (Martin & White, 2005), polarity and the entities evaluated. Joint writing and Detailed reading were entities frequently evaluated positively, mainly in terms of usefulness. Negatively appraised entities include contents and exercises, which were perceived as “difficult”. Our evidence suggests that the teaching of SRA writing to researchers through the R2LP in an EFL context is effective. More precisely, teacher-guided activities which were jointly carried out with students were found to be the most useful, making them suitable for a highly specialised audience like the one that participated in this study.

A course aimed at writing Scientific Research Articles (SRA) in English was offered to Spanish-speaking researchers at a public university in Argentina. It deployed activities described by the Reading to Learn Pedagogy (R2L) ROSE, 2012). This article assesses the effectiveness of this pedagogy by analyzing students' productions. We compared students' abstracts of SRA written before and after the implementation of R2L's practices, considering the presence or absence of rhetorical sections and the use of evaluative language under the light of the System of Appraisal (MARTIN;WHITE, 2005). Texts written after the course include a larger number of sections compared to the ones written before, and they also exhibit a larger amount of Attitude and Graduation elements. The higher complexity of the texts written after the course suggests that the teaching of scientific genres to English as a Foreign Language students through an R2L-informed approach is effective.

A pesar de la popular distinción entre hablantes nativos y no nativos de inglés, la participación en la academia y la ciencia de escritores cuya lengua materna no es el inglés es cada vez mayor, por lo cual resulta relevante proponer diferenciaciones en términos de experticia escrituraria. En este trabajo analizamos las definiciones disponibles en la literatura sobre escritores expertos y principiantes sobre la escritura académica y científica, y contrastamos una de ellas con las autorrepresentaciones que construyen los escritores de ciencia en sus relatos. Para ello, entrevistamos a 18 investigadores de una universidad pública argentina. Los datos recogidos se analizaron según categorías emergentes de significados experienciales relacionados con la experticia reportada. Determinamos que una de las definiciones empleada con mayor frecuencia por lingüistas en los estudios del inglés para propósitos específicos (IPE) y académicos (IPA) es aquella que caracteriza a los escritores según el género que producen; así, los expertos escriben artículos de investigación y los principiantes escriben tesis doctorales. Al ser contrastada con las autorrepresentaciones, observamos que esta definición no coincide con las de investigadores/escritores en disciplinas como química, bioquímica, física, matemática y geología, por cuanto las categorías se vinculan con las actividades que desarrollan al interior de los grupos de investigación y con los requisitos institucionales con respecto a la publicación de artículos de investigación para la graduación. Finalmente, resaltamos la necesidad de complementar las definiciones de la literatura con elementos que deriven de una caracterización situada que tenga en cuenta las percepciones de los propios investigadores.