The puzzle of academic discourse. Students' essays from a genre-based perspective. Applying genre theory to the analysis of students' written product in first-year Humanities essays in L2

III Colloquium on Semi-Immersion in CataloniaIII Encuentro sobre Semi-Inmersión en CataluñaThe internationalisation of present day university demands from students the ability to understand and produce academic discourse in English. However, students find themselves entrapped by problems regarding not only their foreign language skills, but also their ignorance of the culturally-coined conventions of their knowledge communities, its domain-specific procedures and its substantive concepts. A Bakhtinian conceptualisation of academic discourse as a set of sub-genres built by the community of users allows university instructors to focus on the features that define such genres as a short term goal, regardless of the other long-term issues mentioned above: In an academic context, generic expertise is both the essential instrument and the object of learning. Our communication presents a model of analysis for the teaching and assessment of academic writing in English as a foreign language. The model we present adapts Halliday's three components of communication -i.e. the ideational, the textual and the interpersonal components -to the specific features of academic discourse, in order to scaffold students through the most frequently encountered obstacles during their acquisition of field-specific genres. The implementation of this model of analysis is then exemplified by some illustrating extracts from the literary essays written by a group of non-native first-year students of Humanities enrolled in an immersion English Language and Literature course