Enhancing Research Writing Skills among Graduate Students through Practical Expository Writing Instruction (Published)
Knowledge of academic writing is crucial to success in postgraduate education; however, a great number of graduate students have problems with this skill, which is the reason why it is necessary to explore ways to facilitate the acquisition of the ability to write high-quality academic works. The present paper is dedicated to studying the impact of a certain kind of teaching, called “Practical Expository Writing Instruction,” on graduate students’ ability to produce scholarly papers. It uses Genre Theory and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development to analyze the impact of instructional support on certain indicators of writing proficiency. For this purpose, the paper employed a quasi-experimental design involving a group of graduate students who were followed up during a semester. Specific criteria of research quality included structure and integrity. Analysis of quantitative data obtained during the study demonstrated a significant improvement in students’ ability to write an introduction, a hook statement, and a clear thesis, keeping paragraph coherence and smooth textual transitions. Also, a significant increase in the number of qualitative criteria indicating students’ ability to synthesize sources was revealed, specifically the capacity to write a literature review and use citations appropriately. From the analysis of the results presented, one can see that explicit and practical expository writing instruction acts as a very effective cognitive intermediary between the novice researcher and research writing skills. The importance of the shift from remedial to structural writing approaches is evident in this case. In general, this work can be considered as a prototype of a pedagogical approach which can be used by universities to help students with their writing skills.
Keywords: Academic Writing, Graduate Students, Scaffolding, academic integrity, expository writing, genre theory, rhetorical structure
Investigating Major Academic Writing Problems Encountered by Yemeni MA Students of English in Writing Examinations’ Answers at the Faculty of Education/ Saber – Lahij University (Published)
The present study aimed at investigating the problems of Yemeni Master students of English in writing examinations’ answers at the faculty of education/Saber -Lahij University. The population of the study was (20) master students in the department of English during the period 2019 to 2021 who were chosen as the sample of this study. The data was obtained from analyzing the students’ written answers for the examination questions in relation to the course of semantics. The students’ difficulties in writing were viewed in relation to analyzing their exams’ answers according to the academic writing conventions. The results of the analysis showed that there were variations between the students in their writing performance as well as their scores due to the problems and difficulties they face in writing answers for the examination’s questions. The results showed that there were problems in both sentence as well as paragraph levels in terms of vocabulary, sentence structure, using conjunctions and punctuation marks and the organization of paragraphs. Such problems were related to both linguistic and cognitive types. The linguistics’ problems were clear in relation to language use and vocabulary, and the cognitive problems were related to organization and mechanics. The results also showed that the master students of English face problems in achieving cohesion and coherence in terms of creating linkage and relationships between the constituents of a sentence, between sentences in a paragraph and within paragraphs.
Keywords: Academic Writing, coherence, unity