The Role of the Textbook Writing Research

This paper reviews the potential role of writing textbooks in increasing our understanding of academic writing. It argues that this role is underappreciated for several reasons. These include the dampening effects of existing discoursal and social-constructionist accounts of introductory college textbooks, a reluctance to look beyond the ostensible student audience, and a diffidence in recognizing textbook author motives other than the “commercial” or the “ideological.” The paper then discusses a recently completed textbook as a means of showing how a complex set of motives can result in some contribution to research and scholarship. The paper concludes by arguing that textbooks should not be automatically excluded from the set of research-process genres since they may consolidate and apply recent scholarship, incorporate new research findings, and generate interesting new topics worth further study. In effect, advanced textbooks are important hybrid genres. The Textbook as Genre In the first part of this paper, I would like to re-assess the textbook as a component of the system of genres (Bazerman 1992; Swales 1993b) which orchestrates our academic life and verbal behavior. This re-assessment falls into three parts: a brief review of studies of textbooks themselves; a reconsideration of the audience design of textbooks; and an exploration of the complex set of motives that may impel academics to embark on textbook writing. I will argue at least in the fields that I know something of, such as ESP, ESL, and composition that complexities in reader-author textbook relationships have been consistently under-appreciated, even if for understandable reasons. In consequence, the textbook is typically assigned a marginal and controversial place in the academic genre-system, particularly in terms of the improbability and implausibility of it contributing to our communal research enterprise. In the second half of the paper, I argue for a reconsideration of the textbook as a potential contributor to EAP writing research. Most of the illustrative material is drawn from a case-history of a recent EAP writing textbook which I have co-authored.