Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching (JLLT)

Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 9 (2018) Issue 1
pp. 67-82

Chances and Challenges:

Teaching Academic Writing to University Students

in Hong Kong

Anna Wing-bo Tso (Hong Kong) & Winnie Siu-yee Ho (Hong Kong)

Abstract

The mastery of academic writing has long been viewed as “the hallmark of success for any student at university” (Jones 1999: 37). However, research indicates that university writing courses offered by language centres or English departments often fall short of the writing demands expected in various academic disciplines (Grabe 2001). Recent studies on academic English writing and learners’ literacies, including Flowerdew & Miller (2008), Grabe (2001), Hyland (2003) and Prior (2006), have criticized generic writing courses for turning a blind eye to socio-cultural contexts and individual learners’ needs and motivation. The development of academic literacy, now an increasingly popular area of study, comes under the spotlight. In this paper, we will examine the main difficulties Hong Kong university students face when taking a freshman English academic writing course for first-year students. We will also discuss the key challenges English teachers encounter in the academic writing class.

Key words: Academic writing, new literacy studies, English as a second language

1   The Hardship of ESL Academic Writing Training

The notion of academic studies emphasizes the needs of effective presentation and interpretation of ideas. It is commonly believed that students’ better performance on academic writing can contribute to the overall success in higher education. From this perspective, offering a series of English academic writing training is mandatory across all universities in Hong Kong.

However, the academic literacies approach, which is closely related to the New Literacy Studies, sees literacies as a social practice in institutional settings, especially schools. The fact is that language instructors and students can have different interpretations on the requirement on “epistemology, authority and contestation over knowledge” (Lea & Street 1998: 160). Performing well in English language examinations does not guarantee an A grade in academic writing modules. Academic writing skills are not exactly the same as academic literacies.

On this, there is a need to mention Bhatia’s (2004) three levels of discursive competence:

Textual competence refers to the ability for professionals to both master language (i.e. sounds, words, grammar, word meanings, discourse) and to use textual, contextual and pragmatic knowledge to construct and interpret texts. Generic competence is the ability for professionals to respond to recurrent and new communicative situations by producing, interpreting and using generic conventions in the disciplines to achieve professional goals. The last competence, social competence […] refers to the ability for professionals to use language more widely to participate effectively in a wide variety of social and institutional contexts to give expression to their social identity (Cheng 2010: 67).

At the tertiary level, it is expected that most students will already have reached a certain level of textual competence. In a writing course especially tailor-made for university students, the learning outcomes are supposed to be geared mostly towards training up students’ generic competence. Academic skills rather than linguistic accuracy are the main focus, including but not limited to:

• Using hedging
• Avoiding emotive language
• Avoiding contradictions
• Eliminating wordiness
• Employing a consistent point of view
• Writing clearly and objectively
• Improving text organization
• Ensuring linearity with no digressions and/or inconsistency

(Tso, Ho & Chung 2016: 3-7)

It is noteworthy that English language proficiency alone is not sufficient for professional academic writing. Without discipline-specific academic writing training, it is highly unlikely that students can master the genres typical to the study field. For example, an effective English academic writing course for law school students should be a legal context-based course that empowers students with knowledge of the language game in the legal field, assisting them in legal reasoning and the understanding of domain-specific literature, such as legal doctrines, court decisions (cases), legislation and regulations.

This can be best exemplified by Sword’s (2012: 21) comparison table of the widely different academic expectations in various disciplines, which shows the average number of authors, page numbers, and citations or footnotes in articles from ten academic disciplines (n = 500; 50 articles per discipline):

                       Table 1: Sword’s (2012: 21) comparison table of academic expectations

                                     in various disciplines

2   New Literacy Studies

The New Literacy Studies (NLS) mark the transition of viewing literacies from a skill-based decontextualized approach to a highly contextual one (Street 1984, Gee 1990). It is generally believed that literacy no longer refers to one’s ability to read and write texts (Ivanič et al. 2009). As Gee (2010) elaborates:

The NLS opposed a traditional psychological approach to literacy. Such an approach viewed literacy as a “cognitive phenomenon” and defined it in terms of mental states and mental processing. The “ability to read” and “the ability to write” were treated as things people did inside their heads. The NLS instead saw literacy as something people did inside society. It argued that literacy was not primarily a mental phenomenon, but rather a sociocultural one. Literacy was a social and cultural achievement - it was about ways of participating in social and cultural groups - not just a mental achievement. Thus, literacy needed to be understood and studied in its full range of contexts - not just cognitive but social, cultural, historical, and institutional, as well. (Gee 2010: 10) 

In other words, authentic experiences of being a member of the social and cultural group are of utmost significance. The social practice paradigm is also welcomed by scholars like Lankshear (1999). In terms of the institutional nature, schools or universities are bound by customs, rules, traditions and regulations of various disciplines. Simply offering generic skill-based freshman English courses is not sufficient.

3 Literacy Practices

Literacy practices can be in various formats, namely schooled literacies, i.e. reading and writing in schools (Street 1995), local literacies, i.e, reading and writing in the community (Barton & Hamilton 2012), prison literacies, i.e. maintaining a personal identity in prison (Wilson 2001), bureaucratic literacies that may be reflected in tax forms (Fawns & Ivanic 2001), workplace literacies that could be reading and writing in the taxi industry (Breier & Sait 1996), advertising literacies that are shown on signs in townships (Papen 2002), visual literacies, i.e. a combination of a physical or performative act and a digital information text (Bowen 2010), and economic literacies, i.e. reading and writing in markets (Maddox 2001).

Literacy seen as a social practice (Street 1995, Barton 2001), the notion of academic literacies means that students use literacy in schools or other learning contexts to achieve academic purposes. Nonobservable literacy practices in the academic setting consist of observable literacy events related to texts, which are recurrent and regular (Ivanič et al. 2009). For example, doing in-text citation exercises for academic writing modules. Literacy practices involve the socially situated beliefs, values and purposes that shape one’s (i.e. students, in this research setting) behaviours related to reading and writing (Barton 2001, 2012).

As such, what is at issue for ESL academic writing training is the following question:

What should be done in an academic writing course, so that learning and teaching can go beyond reading and writing, textual and generic competence, attaining effective academic literacy development?                                                                                          

4 Purpose of the Study

With the aim of helping local Hong Kong English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners improve their academic writing, this paper uses a freshman English academic writing course from a university in Hong Kong as an example and looks into how English academic writing courses are conducted in the university setting. Through a university students’ questionnaire survey, written assignments, and external examiner’s comments, the study will shed light on students’ perceptions, actual experiences and difficulties in learning academic writing. We will then discuss the multiple constraints encountered by the teachers of the academic writing course.

4.1 A Case Study at a University in Hong Kong

As a five-credit, one-term course for all full-time face-to-face students coming from various degree programmes (including Chinese, Language and Translation, Social Studies, Psychology, Advertising and Media Design, Creative Writing and Film Arts), the freshman English academic writing course (ENGLA101F) aims to provide learners with a practical approach to mastering English academic writing effectively. Within the duration of 13 weeks, the instructor has to teach the following areas to over 250 students:

Topics

Course introduction Academic writing style & conventions Analyze and interpret assigned essay topics

Patterns of essay development Introduction to essay development Argument

Citing sources in academic writing Quoting Paraphrasing and summarizing

Reading comprehension skills Recognizing definitions, examples, headings, subheadings, emphasis words and other signal words Recognizing main ideas in paragraphs Making inferences

Getting and selecting information for academic writing Research paper structure Critical reading & data analysis Understanding graphs and tables

Introductions in academic writing Types of academic texts Narrowing down essay topics Writing introductions

Body paragraphs in academic writing Writing body paragraphs with topic sentences Analyzing reasons (causes) Comparing and contrasting

Concluding paragraphs in academic writing Writing concluding statements Writing conclusions

Evaluating and revising an essay Proofreading guidelines Detecting and correcting errors in grammar Chinese-influenced expression vs. English native speaker expression

Table 2: Topics included in the academic writing course of a university in Hong Kong

Due to limited resources and manpower, the university is not able to offer discipline-specific academic and professional writing courses for students of different majors. Instead of incorporating discipline-specific genre-based pedagogies, the freshman English course has to remain general and suitable for all.

4.2 Students’ Perceptions and Experiences: Data Analysis

In December 2015, a mass student survey was conducted at the end of the writing class to check students’ perceptions and experiences of learning academic writing in the freshman English academic writing course, using a questionnaire with 27 close-ended questions and one open-ended question ("Any comment?"). From the 216 questionnaires (response rate: 88.0%) gathered from the class, up to 77.6% of the students reported that they found the writing class content relevant and useful. Interestingly, as can be seen in the student feedback, some students seemed to be happy with the linguistic accuracy training in the course. On the other hand, 5 out of 66 written feedback questionnaires collected from 216 students reflected that the grammatical drilling was boring and redundant. In Table 3 below, student opinions in the above-mentioned open-ended question, are displayed:

Feedback	Opinions Given
1	“I like the grammar review.”
2	“We have learnt grammar in secondary school already.”
3	“Many things in the course we have learnt before. Can the course have some new things to teach?”
4	“The university English writing skill must not only focus on the grammar and general essay issues.”

Table 3: Diverse Student Feedback on Grammar in the English Academic Writing Course

While the writing course was criticized for including grammar accuracy drilling, which was not considered equivalent to good academic writing skills, it was found that not many students managed to attain a high level of English proficiency. Multiple grammatical mistakes such as fragments and fused sentences can often be spotted in students’ written assignments. Below are some typical ones¹:

(1) However this situation is not unseen on neither personal level nor social level. Such as the differences between the characteristics of Chinese culture and modern society but also Hong Kong should define as either international city or Chinese city.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (added detail: starting a clause with such as turns the clause into a fragment) + run-on (fused sentence, using but also to join another idea ungrammatically to the sentence)

(2) Beauvoir thinks that woman does not born natural and it is a process which is the sum up of education and conditioning and is affected by culture, subculture, social norms and religion when a female grows up.

→ Major problem: run-on (fused sentence: joining multiple processes/reasons with and, which and when)

(3) And the result of the social process change young females to girls, and to woman,

the early feminist will apply the term gender to describe it.

→ Major problem: run-on (comma splices – the early feminist…This is another idea, so a new sentence should be used)

(4) In conclusion, the text shares the idea of collective identities at personal, social,

cultural level, also the view of education.

→ Major problem: run-on (comma splices – also they view…, also not being used as a conjunction, and the idea is joined ungrammatically)

(5) For example, social workers help many people every day, most of them are not

particularly handsome, even though they may look fat, their hearts are full of love, so

they are the most beautiful people in the world.

→ Major problem: run-on (comma splices – multiple ideas joined wrongly by commas)

(6) While conflicts of identities will therefore occurred in different level of understanding

because of the opposite opinions and different points of view toward the identities.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (while dependent clause)

(7) It becomes a common useful word after develop rapidly though 20 years. Although,

there is nobody care about this word at first.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (although is the beginning of a dependent clause. The comma should be deleted and an independent clause should be placed after although.)

(8) According to Luise, after the book “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” appeared in

1949 which the author is Simone de Beauvoir and then translated to be “One is not

born, but rather becomes a woman” in 1953 by E.M. Parshley.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (after has turned the clause into a dependent clause. The dependent clause needs to be followed by a comma and an independent clause that starts with a subject.)

(9) To become a real woman. The developing environment and the reply of expectation

in the society of turns a girl into woman.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (A -to infinitive cannot be a sentence on its own.)

(10) Almost everyone has more than one identities. For example, family member or even

nationality.

→ Major problem: sentence fragment (added detail)

Such grammatical mistakes reveal that most ENGLA101F students have weak English foundations. They need more linguistic accuracy training, because they have not even attained textual competence, not to mention generic and social competence, which come later in the academic literacy development. This problem is reflected in an external examiner’s report as well:

                       Figure 1: An external examiner’s comment on Students’ grammar

                                      in the end-of-course report

Besides students’ weak English grammar, the external examiner notices that students may not know how to convey their viewpoints nor develop their own arguments in full. Rather, they paraphrase and summarize ideas put forward by others:

                           Figure 2: An external examiner’s comment on students’ inability

                                          to put essay plans into practice in the end-of-course report

It is also found that while those at the top of the scale have clear understanding of the assignment goals, students, whether at the lower end or the higher end of the scale, are not particularly good at writing in a consistent tone:

                    Figure 3: An external examiner’s comment on students’ understanding

                                   of the assignment goals

        Figure 4: An external examiner’s comment on inconsistencies in the writing tone

More significantly, regarding students’ academic writing skills, another external examiner (a professor working for the Department of English at another university in Hong Kong) made the following comments in the end-of-course report:

                    Figure 5: Another external examiner’s comment on students’ referencing skills

                                    in the end-of-course report

In his professional advice, the external examiner further affirms that students in the English academic writing course were not totally aware of the academic writing principles, styles and conventions. More time and effort may need to be spent on teaching university writing skills and referencing skills, namely topics 1 and 3 of the course outline as shown in Table 2 of the article.

Student evaluation results are revealing, too. 10 out of 66 written feedback gathered from the open-ended question of the questionnaires collected from 216 students revealed that students were aware of the lack of manpower. They preferred to have a smaller class size. In Table 4 below, student opinions in the above-mentioned open-ended question, are displayed:

Feedback	Opinions Given
1	“Small class is better.”
2	“Lack of manpower. e.g. only one teacher teaching 200 people.”
3	“I think this course is lack of manpower.”
4	“Small class is more preferable.”

Table 4: Student feedback on their preference for small-class learning

Students also wanted more interaction between the teacher and the class, though the unmovable seats in the lecture theatre and the huge class size would not allow much room for in-class interaction. This students’ request was reflected in 5 out of 66 written feedback in the questionnaire’s open-ended question mentioned above: 

Feedback	Opinions Given
1	“More interactive between students.”
2	“Need to be more interactive.”
3	“It can change to a more interesting learning way.”
4	“More interact sessions.”

Table 5: Student feedback on their preference for in-class interaction

Contrary to what teachers expected, students actually wanted to have more writing tests and assignments in the course. This view was revealed through 5 out of 66 written feedback towards the open-ended question ‘Any comments’ set in the questionnaire:

Feedback	Opinions Given
1	“More tests.”
2	“Provide more exercise for us to practise.”
3	“To increase assignments in this course.”
4	“The tutorial class should have more exercises.”

Table 6: Student feedback on their request for more writing tasks

Last but not least, in the end-of-course student feedback questionnaire, 12 out of 66 students who wrote feedback in the open-ended question of the questionnaire pointed out that the writing course is not discipline-specific enough:

Feedback	Opinions Given
1	“The course is too general. Every different major requires a different writing style.”
2	“More related to my major.”
3	“The course content needs to be more specific.”
4	“Can be more [sic!] fit into the specific subject.”

Table 7: Student feedback on insufficiency in the English academic writing course

It is a good sign that many students noticed the downsides and insufficiency of the English academic writing course. This may imply that students were aware that a good academic writing course should provide sufficient opportunities to develop their socio-cultural sensitivity, as well as reading and writing strategies for various written genres in their own field of study.

5 Constraints for the ESL Academic Writing Course

It is, however, no easy task to train up students’ textual competence, generic competence and social competence within a short course that lasts only for one term. Below are several major challenges for teachers when conducting academic writing training courses.

5.1 Class Size

As mentioned above, since the teacher-student ratio is 1 : 250+ in the lecture, apparently, frequent interactions, close monitoring, and active involvement of students in the classroom are hardly possible, though a well-prepared instructor may be able to generate an effective buzz discussion from time to time. More importantly, detailed marking of students’ written essays and assessments is made almost impossible. Due to the time limit, tutors can only use impression marking. For example, in the autumn term of 2017 - 2018, 282 students took ENGLA101F, the freshman English academic writing course. Within the short duration of 13 weeks in the term, the four teachers in charge of ENGLA101F had to mark and standardize three two-hour written tests, twelve written assignments given after the tutorial sessions, not to mention the three-hour written examination:

Papers to be Marked	Workload
Test 1	x 282 students
Test 2	x 282 students
Test 3	x 282 students
12 post-tutorial written assignments	x 282 students
Final exam	x 282 students
Total number of written papers to be marked	4,512
Total number of written papers to be marked by each teacher:	4,512 / 4 = 1,128

Simply put, since each ENGLA101F teacher had to mark 1,128 written papers within thirteen weeks, the grammatical and vocabulary mistakes may not be corrected in detail and explained fully.

5.2 Physical Setting of the Class

Since there are not sufficient manpower and resources, the university in question can only afford to arrange two lectures and eight tutorial classes for over 250 students each academic year. That means for each lecture, there are over 125 students in the theatre. In-depth discussion with each student about their writing is out of the question. Likewise, for each tutorial session, over 35 learners will have to sit in rows and columns in a relatively small room. Student-centred learning and close interactions are also made close to impossible in tutorial classes.

5.3 Redundant Content for a Diverse Audience

As students from various disciplines under creative arts, humanities, social sciences, and science and technology are put into one class, discipline-specific genre-based pedagogies are out of the question. Only generic topics such as grammatical mechanics, punctuations, academic reading and writing skills can be included. Yet, paraphrasing, summarizing and referencing skills are by no means unique skills that only writing class teachers can teach. In other undergraduate courses such as modern drama, writing skills - including essay structure developments, paraphrasing and summarizing - are also taught as teachers explain the essay assignment requirements. The overlapping nature of the curriculum is undesirable.

5.4 Duration of the Course

The short duration of the course is a key matter of concern. Firstly, academic writing is not something that can be strengthened all of a sudden. The current university setting does not seem to have planned any follow-up academic literacy rapport beyond the first term.

Secondly, in order to make sure that the course can end within 13 weeks, learners have to attend two hours of lectures and two hours of tutorials, which can be too intensive for both teachers and students. Some students suggested that there be fewer hours of lectures and tutorials for the English academic writing course. To these students, 13 lectures of two hours each plus 24 hours of tutorials teaching generic skills may be pointless. After all, what students truly need is discipline-specific course content and guidance. For instance, social sciences students need to learn how to write scientific essays and data analysis reports, creative arts students need to learn how to write visual art analysis papers, whereas humanities students are expected to know how to write critical essays properly.

6 Conclusion

Due to limited resources at the university and the unfortunate misunderstanding between the three non-interchangeable concepts – English language proficiency, academic writing skills, and academic literacies –, up to the present day, academic writing courses have been designed and delivered in the traditional but outdated one-size-fits-all deficit mode in many tertiary institutions in Hong Kong, and the English academic writing course in this case study is just one among many. Through the student survey statistics, end-of-course student feedback, examiners’ evaluation reports, and academic written assignments collected from the case study at The University of Hong Kong, we can put forward that it is high time for universities to change their mindset, build a more advanced literacy setting, and most of all, develop a range of small-sized and more discipline-specific academic writing courses for ESL students of different majors.

Developing teaching contents for discipline-specific, genre-based academic writing courses is not an easy task (Tso & Chung 2016: 58), but one good way of redesigning the course curriculum is to use authentic, contextualized content-based teaching materials, in particular the use of corpus-based teaching toolkits, which can be easily created to improve students’ vocabulary and raise their awareness towards text types, concordance, collocation, and English vocabulary frequency in specific fields (Tso & Ho 2017).

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Authors:

Anna Wing-bo Tso

Associate Professor of English

Director of the Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities

School of Arts and Social Sciences

The Open University of Hong Kong

Email: atso@ouhk.edu.hk

Winnie Siu-yee Ho

Visiting Lecturer

Department of English

The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong

Email: winniesiuyeeho@gmail.com

1The mistakes occurring in students’ writing in (1) to (10) are quoted directly from the original form. They have not been corrected by the authors.