Writing at the graduate level: What tasks do professors actually require?

Cooper, Amy; Bikowski, Dawn

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2007.09.008

Cited by 56 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…He has further explained that the reported research in this field can be divided into four categories. The first category research studies investigated the faculty perspective regarding the academic writing (e.g., Zhu, 2004;Casanave and Hubbard, 1992;Bridgeman and Carlson, 1984;Eblen, 1983), the second category investigated the students (Chou, 2011;Alsamdani, 2010;Grami, 2010;Yiu, 2009;Anderson, Day and McLaughlin, 2008;Myles and Cheng, 2003), the third one analyzed the students writing specimens (Ezza, 2010;Tahaineh, 2010;Cooper and Bikowski, 2007;Zhu, 2004;Braine, 1989;Horowitz,1986) and the last category attempted to investigate the perceptions of the students versus the academic advisors (Bacha and Bahous, 2008;Anderson et al, 2008;Myles and Cheng, 2003;Dong, 1998;Belcher, 1994). It has also been reported that much of the research in the past two decades has primarily focused on either product, process or both" (Yiu, 2009, p. 9).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saudi English-Major Undergraduates' Academic Writing Problems: A Taif University Perspective

Al-Khairy¹

2013

ELT

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This study attempted to investigate Saudi English-major undergraduates studying at Taif University to identify a) the types of academic writing Saudi English-major undergraduates carry out at English departments, b) Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems, c) the reasons behind Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems and d) the solutions to overcome Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems. To collect data for this purpose, senior faculty members were interviewed and a 32-item structured Likert-scale questionnaire was developed that was administered to 75 English-major students (sophomores, juniors & seniors) studying at foreign languages department, Taif University. Data generated through the questionnaire were subjected to descriptive analyses and mean and standard deviation were recorded using SPSS. The findings of this study reveal that Saudi English-major undergraduates are very weak in writing skills and commit lots of errors in their academic writings and are usually engaged in sentence-level or at the maximum at paragraph-level academic writing and they do not consider it important at this level to write different kinds of essays. It has been strongly recommended that the language courses should be increased to strengthen all the language skills in general and writing in particular, motivate the students to use English with the teachers as well as with each, introduce modern and novel teaching techniques, equip the classrooms with necessary audio-visual aids, diagnose students' writing problems in the beginning of their studies at university, tailor the course contents according to their needs, introduce group/pair work, peer correction, use dictionaries frequently etc.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saudi English-Major Undergraduates' Academic Writing Problems: A Taif University Perspective

Al-Khairy¹

2013

ELT

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“…Indeed, participants' world-views largely lacked an understanding that effective academic writing in either their L1 or their L+ has a principally rhetorical objective. This puts them fundamentally at odds with not only their instructors but evaluators and the global research community as a whole, in whose own world-views such understandings occupy a central place (Casanave & Hubbard, 1992;Cooper & Bikowski, 2007;Kaufhold, 2015;Leki, 1994;Viáfara González, 2008;Yildirim & Ilin, 2009). In other words, the problems that the participants had with regards to the writing tasks assigned by their instructors resulted principally from a clash of culturesthough given that the participants are implicitly seeking access and admission to the "alien culture" of academia, success in this endeavor implies that they must learn its ways.…”

Section: Participant Beliefs and Practices About Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beliefs and Practices Concerning Academic Writing among Postgraduate Language-Teacher Trainees

Anderson

Medina

2019

Íkala

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This paper reports on the initial stages of a larger study on plurilingual rhetorical communicative competences. Experiential evidence indicated a mismatch between the academic writing competences desired from and those displayed by the participants—adult bilingual (L1 Spanish, L+ English) English-language teacher trainees in a postgraduate program at Colombian university. We examined participants’ beliefs and practices concerning academic writing to identify the sources of their challenges and develop the evidential basis for identifying appropriate remedial strategies. This was a mixed methods study, in which we analyzed data from semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and student artifacts through the grounded theory approach and descriptive statistics. The results suggest that participants’ challenges with rhetorical aspects of academic writing stem from a lack of training. However, participants were relatively successful with aspects of writing in which they had been trained: discrete language skills and purely descriptive prose. We conclude their academic writing difficulties are fundamentally non-linguistic and hypothesize they would face similar academic writing challenges even if writing in their L1. There is an urgent need to address these challenges, not only because rhetorical competences are increasingly important in a knowledge-driven society but also because teachers need to be able to train their own students in such competences.

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“…The program was created by the authors to address not only graduate students’ professional development needs, but also their need for high‐level English skills specifically for their research and future academic or nonacademic careers. Based on literature reviews (e.g., Cooper & Bikowski, ) and preliminary surveys in the program design stage, some specific English needs were identified and targeted in our program, including writing CVs, writing statements of purpose, crafting teaching statements or research statements, job searches, job options, language motivation, interview skills, producing syllabi and course materials, English pronunciation, and lecture and presentation skills for conference presentations and teaching. While some components of conventional PFF/PD programs such as teaching issues and job searches were incorporated, other aspects such as mentor relationships and faculty life were excluded (DeNeef, ).…”

Section: The Eap Professional Development Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

An EAP Professional Development Program for Graduate Students in an English‐Medium Instruction Context

Lee

2018

TESOL Quarterly

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Writing at the graduate level: What tasks do professors actually require?

Cited by 56 publications

References 12 publications

Saudi English-Major Undergraduates' Academic Writing Problems: A Taif University Perspective

Saudi English-Major Undergraduates' Academic Writing Problems: A Taif University Perspective

Beliefs and Practices Concerning Academic Writing among Postgraduate Language-Teacher Trainees

An EAP Professional Development Program for Graduate Students in an English‐Medium Instruction Context

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