Обучение академическому письму: проблемы и решения

Научные ведомости Белгородского государственного университета. Серия: Гуманитарные науки. 2018. Т. 37. № 1. С. 114–123.

Petrova E.

The paper analyzes students’ written assignments and looks at the challenges that the students faced when preparing those assignments. The objective of carrying out this analysis is to optimize the teaching process to develop academic writing skills. Contextual analysis was used to achieve the objective. Moreover, the paper includes the literature review on the topic. It helped to identify the main challenges that professors and students face in Academic Writing (teaching Academic Writing separately without integrating other skills and only to achieve the teaching goals; students’ and professors’ differing interpretations of the significance of various assessment criteria; one-way feedback, usually with criticisms only) and to determine the solutions to those challenges. The analysis of the students’ written assignments revealed that the students are aware of the criteria applied to the language of this sort of papers but they have poor skills to arrange their ideas logically (the connection between the topic sentence and arguments or between the arguments and minor supporting details is implied but not explained clearly). That is the reason why the author offers a set of measures that can help students to develop this skill: teaching academic writing together with critical  reading; setting a forum for students where they can discuss the topics, arising challenges and possible solutions; detailed instruction and feedback sessions, etc. The paper also offers a set of exercises that may help students to improve the quality of their written assignments.

Keywords: академическое письмо, аргументация, academic writing, discussion, обсуждение, argument, counterargument, statement, утверждение, reasoning, topic sentence, аргумент, written assignment, вводное предложение, контраргумент, письменное задание