The goal of this volume is to provide an in-depth analysis of academic writing in an English as a foreign language context with a view toward improving English language teaching methodologies. This book consists of two parts. Part 1, the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis, examines genre studies (i.e., macro view of texts) and studies of formulaic language (i.e., micro view of texts) in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Previous work is suitably analyzed, except for the discussion of discourse community, which ignores the somewhat conflicted scholarly history of this concept. Despite this minor weakness, in chapter 4, Hüttner merges perspectives from genre analysis and formulaic language into what is described as coconventionalism within the framework of a new genre analysis approach—the extended genre analysis. This new approach aims to address potential limitations of genre analyses by systematically identifying formulaic language sequences “used overall and typically in specific genres (genre specific formulaic sequences)” (p. 101) and by examining sequences within these genres that “are functional in specific moves (genre-functional formulaic sequences)” (p. 101). Also significant is that the extended genre analysis approach does not consider prototypicality as a criterion for a text to be included in an analysis. Hüttner argues and then sets out to demonstrate that a better understanding of a genre can emerge that identifies (a) the status of particular moves (i.e., defined and bounded communicative acts intended to achieve a communicative objective) as obligatory, optional, or perhaps inappropriate and (b) the language specific to the genre. This, in turn, can point to model texts and new teaching methodologies for learners to “become familiar with [...] generic structures” and “accepted and required formulaic patterns within these texts” (p. 112).

Part 2 discusses the extended genre analysis of two genre constituents (i.e., the introduction and the conclusion) of 56 course assignments written by students (mostly first year students with an upper intermediate level of English proficiency who were considered novice academic writers) in the department of English at the University of Vienna. In addition to the extended genre analysis of their course assignments, interviews were conducted with five students chosen for their potential to become good academic writers, and 85 questionnaires were analyzed to understand student background, use of aids while writing, and communicative objectives. The reason for the difference between the number of questionnaires and the number of papers does not seem to be explained. Moreover, these questionnaires do not feature very strongly in the study. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the move structure of the introductions and conclusions, respectively, and highlight features of successful texts. These two chapters also compare the students’ output to equivalent sections of published research articles and to a small corpus of 10 English native-speaker student papers. This comparison adds little to the study—other than to say, of course, that published papers are not good models for classroom or pedagogical genres and that similarities exist between the English native speakers’ and English learners’ texts—and thus, could have received less attention in the overall discussion. Chapter 8 summarizes interviews with the students, who discussed their perspectives on academic writing, genre awareness, and understanding of the genre constituents. Chapter 9 concludes with a brief discussion of the implications—specifically, that extended genre analysis reveals important connections between the discursive and textual levels of a text and identifies genre-specific formulaic sequences of language. Moreover, the models that emerge from this analysis can help students understand a genre and become better writers.

Extended genre analysis is a useful tool for identifying moves and the strategies that realize them. However, readers who expect a broader application of the findings may be somewhat disappointed. The corpora are rather small—approximately 14,900 introduction words and 11,000 conclusion words—and the empirical results should be viewed as tentative. These limitations notwithstanding, this study offers some interesting findings and is a useful tool for understanding written texts from the genre (i.e., macro) and the formulaic (i.e., micro) perspectives. This dual perspective can help writers whose first language is not English but who must produce texts in English. Additionally, this work is one of the few that examines undergraduate texts and is thus a welcome contribution to the understanding of novice academic writing that could support the creation of better academic writing teaching materials and approaches.