engleski

Redefining academic writing policy in a business school: what do teachers say?

Over the past decade, the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), University of Zagreb, has introduced elements of academic writing in English within a number of ESP courses. These are predominantly delivered to students new to university in large, mixed‐ability groups where efforts to teach academic writing basics do not always produce the desired results. Moreover, academic writing in Croatian is not taught either, and students generally demonstrate little interest for this vital skill. As a result, despite considerable English language proficiency, students’ writing often remains fragmented and incoherent, which may affect their performance in discipline courses. On the other hand, Croatian higher education institutions have recently been engaged in the process of internationalization and accreditation, which called attention to the quality of academic writing. We have therefore attempted a policy makeover at the institutional level and embedded our attempts in our school’s broader efforts to satisfy accreditation requirements. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with the FEB management and teachers in FEB’s English‐taught programme to establish how they assess students’ writing and its place in discipline courses. Next, we constructed a questionnaire targeting teaching staff. We expect that our research will show the need for teaching the basics of academic writing in small groups, after which writing instruction should be embedded into subject teaching (team teaching). Hopefully, our initiative may be beneficial for academic institutions which do not have a strong tradition of teaching academic writing.

academic writing, ESP, policy, business education

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