Teaching Academic Writing Through Awareness Raising: Students´ Views

Abstract

This thesis explores the views of Icelandic university students on how good their academic English writing skills are and to what extent they believe their writing skills have improved as a result of completing an academic writing course especially aimed at users of English as a lingua franca. Previous studies show that most university students claim that their English is adequate for university study, more than a third struggle which indicates a lack of training in Academic English. A writing program was established specifically aimed at those who use English as a lingua franca. The program includes intensive writing courses including a general academic writing course for all students in the BA program in English. One of the goals of that course is for students to become aware of the nature of academic discourse so that it may help them in reading academic texts as well. The goal of this study is to examine whether these goals were met and whether the students felt that their academic writing skills improved as a result of the general course. Pre and post surveys were sent to all students registered in the course. Nine of the 36 survey questions were analyzed for this study. The findings indicate that students believed that their writing skills had improved, with a slight improvement in reading comprehension as well.