Introduction students to academic writing practice: text focus and structure

to form universal competencies of students of non-humanitarian specialties means to develop their abilities to perceive and analyze information and write logically and reasonably structured texts. However, this task is complicated because of functional illiteracy among some Russian schoolchildren and students, which is noted by many researchers. The author’s experience in teach-ing undergraduates and graduate students to write an academic essay and abstracts to a scientific article allowed her to form the students’ ability to formulate the main thesis (focus) of the text and to structure the text in accordance with the standards of academic discourse. The use of a bilingual approach in the learning process enabled students to simultaneously learn a foreign language and improve their knowledge of native language while comparing linguistic phenomena in the native and studied languages. When teaching essay writing, the author focused on encouraging students to formulate the main idea (focus, thesis) of the essay and to plan (structure) the text. Teaching under-graduates and graduate students to write abstracts in Russian and English included familiarizing with the structure and logic of abstracts in Russian and English and their comparison; writing an abstract in Russian and editing it before translation; translation of the abstract into English using machine translation systems and post-translation editing of the target text.