English for academic purposes: practical and theoretical approaches

This volume represents the final outgrowth of the confluence of two methodological strands: The study of academic writing in a Central European context on the one side and the dialogue that was enabled through the activities within the project framework of Saxon-Czech cooperation on the other. The volume has a tripartite, top-down structure that considers the problems and obvious shortcomings of the field at first from a theoretical, then from an applied perspective. Therefore we start out with considerations more at home in the methodology of science and epistemology, move toward applications with empirical studies and finally observe trends in putting this into practice in teaching. The major questions raised by the theory of academic writing revolve traditionally around stylistic features and text-linguistic considerations. Most authors in this volume, however, have also practiced academic writing. The picture emerging from this is therefore necessarily a heterogeneous one but one that undergoes sequential refinement in the course of the volume.