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Enhancing ESL students academic writing skills through the term-paper


Citation

Rafik Galea, Shameem and Arumugam, Nalini and De Mello, Geraldine (2012) Enhancing ESL students academic writing skills through the term-paper. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 20 (4). pp. 1229-1248. ISSN 0128-7702; ESSN: 2231-8534

Abstract

Tertiary ESL students find writing the academic term-paper a complex process as they grapple with issues about academic writing conventions and ethics. This paper examines tertiary students’ thoughts and perceptions in co-constructing knowledge about academic writing and how multi-drafting and feedback strategies enhance their academic literacy skills through term-paper writing. In particular, we examine the use of the term-paper as a pedagogical instrument incorporating the process approach to writing for developing academic writing skills among tertiary level students in Malaysia including the importance of multi-drafting, where students reflect on the writing of the multi-drafts and evaluate their learning while working in groups. The respondents are 38 Diploma in Business Management students from a Malaysian university enrolled in an academic writing course. Focus group interviews, group observations and respondents reflective journal entries provided the qualitative data. Our findings show that group multi-drafting and feedback processes enhanced students understanding of writing as a recursive process and sharpened their academic writing literacy knowledge in the areas of referencing, planning, idea generation, editing and revising. We conclude that the multi-draft term-paper approach as a pedagogical tool seems to be a feasible solution to heightening the academic writing skills and confidence of tertiary students.


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Additional Metadata

Item Type: Article
Divisions: Faculty of Modern Language and Communication
Publisher: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press
Keywords: Term-paper; Multi-drafting; Feedback; Reflection; Recursive process
Depositing User: Azhar Abdul Rahman
Date Deposited: 27 Oct 2015 03:31
Last Modified: 27 Oct 2015 03:31
URI: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/40868
Statistic Details: View Download Statistic

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