This paper discusses the difficulties of a graduate student in the area of Energy in writing the introduction of a research paper in English. Two versions of the text (one after the instruction and another after the conference with the instructor) were compared with Swales' (2004) and Samraj' (2002) models of introductions taught in the English academic writing course offered. The student revealed the following problems: narration as the rhetorical mode of organization of the text, the absence of Move 2 of the introduction, inappropriate choice of vocabulary. The combination of these factors prevented the article from having the cultural value of the academic article genre: self-promotion. The data raise questions about the limits of empirical description of genres and their teaching based on this kind of description.
research article; introduction; energy; genre-based writing instruction
