Language re-use as a strategy for research writing

This presentation argues that language re-use (Flowerdew and Li, 2007) can be a valid strategy in research writing and describes an experimental course which aimed to promote this practice. The presentation first reviews previous studies on language re-use in EAL academic writing, and it is argued that language re-use is a legitimate and teachable practice that may occur at discourse and linguistic levels. The second part of the presentation focuses on a practical application of the teaching of the language re-use strategy. It describes a course in which a series of teaching and learning activities focusing on the rhetorical moves and linguistic features found in expert corpora of research articles were focussed on for language re-use and discusses how useful the students found this practice to be in their own writing.