Academic writing texts for EAP

[sbourque]

I'm teaching English for Academic Purposes to college freshmen whose first language is not English. There's a wide range, from kids who have been here in the U.S. for several years and graduated from local high schools, to newly-arrived learners from Asian and African countries. One of the classes is Writing and Grammar; we have a decent grammar text but the writing text seems designed for native speakers, as the examples are from essays on the U.S. Constitution, local issues such as pollution problems in the Everglades, and so on. The organization of this text is adequate, but I think most of my students would do better with a more structured approach to (for example) writing a five-paragraph objective essay with X number of references. Any suggestions?

When I taught in China I used a VERY structured text with lots of examples and language that was easily understood. I think that this let the students focus on the structures: topic sentence, logical connectors, reference devices, and so on.