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