SURVEY OF ACADEMIC WRITING TASKS REQUIRED OF GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE FOREIGN STUDENTS

Brent Bridgeman · Sybil B. Carlson

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EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Second Language Learning and Teaching Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT A survey of the academic writing skills needed by beginning undergraduate and graduate students was conducted. Faculty, in 190 academic departments at thirty‐four U.S. and Canadian universities with high foreign student enrollments completed the questionnaire. At the graduate level, six academic disciplines with relatively high numbers of nonnative students were surveyed: business management (MBA), civil engineering, electrical engineering, psychology, chemistry, and computer science. Undergraduate English departments were chosen to document the skills needed by undergraduate students. The major findings are summarized below. Although writing skill was rated as important to success in graduate training, it was consistently rated as even more important to success after graduation. Even disciplines with relatively light writing requirements (e.g., electrical engineering) reported that some writing is required of first‐year students. The writing skills perceived as most important varied across departments. Faculty members reported that, in their evaluations of student writing, they rely more on discourse‐level characteristics than on word‐ or sentence‐level characteristics. Discourse‐level writing skills of natives and nonnatives were perceived as fairly similar, but significant differences between natives and nonnatives were reported for sentence‐ and word‐level skills and for overall writing. Among the ten writing sample topic types provided, preferred topic types differed across departments. Although some important common elements among the different departments were reported, the survey data distinctly indicate that different disciplines do not uniformly agree on the writing task demands and on a single preferred mode of discourse for evaluating entering undergraduate and graduate students.

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References

1980THEORETICAL BASES OF COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES TO SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND TESTING 1951Educational Measurement.1980Communicative Syllabus Design 1970Teaching the Universe of Discourse 1966The measurement of writing ability 1981Necessary English: A Faculty Survey 1982Teaching ESL Students to Read and Write Experimental-Research Papers 1980A Survey of Academic Needs for Advanced ESL

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1990The TOEFL Test of Written English: Causes for Concern 1984THE ASSESSMENT OF WRITING ABILITY: A REVIEW OF RESEARCH 1985RELATIONSHIP OF ADMISSION TEST SCORES TO WRITING PERFORMANCE OF NATIVE AND NONNATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH 1991Interpreting an English Competency Examination 2000Interactional Conflicts among Audience, Purpose, and Content Knowledge in the Acquisition of Academic Literacy in an EAP Course 2018Researching the comparability of paper-based and computer-based delivery in a high-stakes writing test

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