Foreign languages - Дипломная работа

Contents knowledge education undergraduate higher Introduction 1. Key Definitions 2. Determining Academic Writing Knowledge and Skills 2.1 Pre-Writing Stage 2.2 Writing stage 2.3 Post-writing 3. Possible Approaches to Using the Classification 3.1 Target Audience 3.2 Types of Academic Writing Courses Conclusion References Appendix Introduction Academic writing has been an actively discussed topic in the scholarly community for many decades. There has been a heated debate regarding various aspects of academic writing: the best ways to teach it, the skills that are necessary to produce high-quality writing, the people who should teach it, and the target audience of a course in academic writing. Universities all over the world have created a multitude of various courses that aim to improve their students writing skills. For Russia, the idea of teaching academic writing is relatively new. Although Russian students have always been asked to produce many academic texts, writing them was usually not explicitly taught. Instead, students would rely on advice from their research supervisors, trial and error, and tacit knowledge. Though it can be argued that this system of teaching academic writing is not effective, upon getting their bachelors degree most students have a basic understanding of how to write academic papers Russian; the same cannot be said about academic writing in English. Writing academic papers in English requires specific skills that are not covered in general English courses. The Anglo-American system of writing has its own principles and restrictions that most Russian graduate students and many Russian researchers are not aware of. Therefore, although academic research is becoming increasingly dependent on networking and international cooperation, many of our talented scholars are incapable of becoming part of the international research community. Papers by Russian scholars cannot reach wider audiences which affects both their individual research and Russias global academic competitiveness. This is especially true in humanities and social sciences where ideas and the way they are conveyed are often the most important part of a paper. Today, universities in Russia have begun to understand that there is a need to explicitly teach academic writing in English. Some colleges have already implemented specialized courses in the curriculum, some are currently developing such courses. It is true that colleges in America and The UK have multiple academic writing courses that Russian universities can use as frameworks to designing their own course. However, there are various issues that arise in copying academic writing courses from other countries. First, the courses are not adapted to international students, for whom English is not a first language. Perhaps even more importantly, academic writing instruction is currently in transition from the generic composition courses of old to more discipline-specific methods of writing instruction. Duplicating the current system could mean borrowing ineffective practices that will have to be changed again very soon. While students usually produce their most significant academic papers after they have received their bachelors degree, it is important to create a solid foundation of academic writing skills at the first level of tertiary education. Determining the core skills and knowledge needed to produce high-quality academic texts stands at the root of developing a modern course in academic writing. This work presents a classification of the skills and knowledge on the basis of which a program can be created. The methods used in this study consist of examining the literature on the subject and the courses that are already being used in the worlds top universities. The hypothesis of this work is that the current courses in academic writing do not pay enough attention to the core skills and knowledge required at the bachelor level. The aim of this paper is to: Create a classification of skills and knowledge that are to be taught during a course in academic writing at the bachelor level of education. In order to reach this aim, there are specific objectives: Analyze the existing literature on skills and knowledge needed in academic writing; Compare the theoretical classification to current real-life writing courses; On the basis of the objectives, the paper is divided into three major parts after the introduction. Part one focuses on reviewing the literature on the subject to create a classification of skills and knowledge that should be taught at the bachelor level of higher education. It also provides comments on which of these aspects of academic writing require more attention in class and how they can be taught. Part two examines the possible ways the classification can be implemented in the design of a course in academic writing. It examines how the classification can be adapted to the length of an academic writing course, describes target audience of an academic wr