engleski

Teaching novice writers generic and disciplinary-specific academic writing conventions – approaches to a syllabus design

The “publish or perish” pressure young researchers are facing at the very onset of their careers is a good incentive to approach academic writing in English as a necessary skill in any academic career. However, the lack of a structured training prior to their entering academic institutions is a very frequent occurrence in Croatian. The paper discusses teaching academic writing to novice writers in English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia, which offers diverse study programs spanning social sciences and humanities. More specifically, it aims to show the challenges and solutions in designing and implementing a syllabus aimed to cover all initial requirements of young researchers when writing research articles in English. The syllabus design followed the genre- based and the corpus-informed approach to academic writing. The former focused on teaching some generic features of academic English (e.g. academic vocabulary, hedging devices, citation formats) and the rhetorical structure of a research article (moves structure across the IMRAD, the phraseology of moves, etc.), followed by examining their use in writing in their specific disciplines. The discipline-specific writing conventions were analyzed by employing the corpus-informed approach to academic writing ; i.e. by having participants compile the personal corpora of research articles (Charles, 2014) in their respective disciplines and analyze the features of academic writing style previously discussed at the generic level. Thus, our twofold methodological approach was expected to familiarize novice writers with some fundamental characteristics of academic written discourse in English and raise their awareness of how these are employed in their disciplines. The teaching methodology presented here may be beneficial to academic writing instructors in designing a uniform training course, especially when tackling the diversity of students' disciplinary writing conventions.

academic writing, novice writers, personal corpus, syllabus design, training

nije evidentirano