Facilitating and Assessing Academic Writing to Graduate Students in a Pilot English for Academic Purposes Course: An Activity Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

This paper reports on a pilot course responding to facilitating academic writing for an academic writing program implemented at a provincial key university in China. Taken from an activity theoretical perspective, it discusses the practical experience collected during a pilot process of designing, implementing, and assessing a genre-based approach to facilitating graduate students’ academic writing and assessing their academic writing competence. It argues that it is essential to take varied student interests into account in the structuring, delivery, and assessment to ensure academic success and that EAP programs are fruitful places for nurturing academic writing.

Challenges in Designing an Online Academic Writing Tutorial for International Efl/Esl Speaking Graduate Students

“…Offering such tutorials for partial or full credit as an elective would yield more consistent enrollments. Our future research will also involve a detailed analysis of texts produced by the participants following parameters identified in earlier studies (e.g., Kyle & Crossley, 2015;Wang, & Qin, 2022).…”

“…Multiple versions of online courses for academic writing have been proposed (e.g., Shirvani & Porkar, 2022). Relatively few available studies of online writing by graduate students have been conducted and they mostly addressed structured Academic Writing courses (e.g., Wang & Qin, 2022). The novelty of our study is its focus on an extracurricular e-learning of Academic English writing by IGSs.…”

Developing and Evaluating an Online Professional Development Model on Academic Writing Conventions and Norms in English

“…Yuan et al (2022) have highlighted affective and social aspects of academic publication in L2 and offered some practical implications toward the demanding nature of scholarly writing. Further evidence of effective outcomes of explicit instruction has been displayed by various researchers (e.g., Jeyaraj et al, 2022; Mckenna & Kyser 2021; Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari, 2017; Wang et al, 2021). These implications seem to serve the methodology of the current study in terms of the practical feature of the model and the obtained themes (e.g., accuracy, formality, paraphrasing, and cohesion) for the tutorial.…”