TASK 1
Why does academic writing need to be formal, objective, complex, concise and specific?
To find the answer to this question read the text below and click on each of the drop-down menus to fill in the gaps.
TASK 2
Below is the abstract of an interesting academic article about the academic writing of students whose second language is English.
Issues in assessing the academic writing of students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds: Preliminary findings from a study on lecturers’ beliefs and practices
Precisely how lecturers assess the written work of students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds is an important issue for Australian universities, as International and English as a Second Language (ESL) students make up a significant proportion of the student cohort, and students’ academic success depends largely on their ability to demonstrate academic competence through written assessment tasks. The literature on this topic points to concerns that ESL students are being assessed differently from Native-English speaking (NS) students and that lecturers’ cultural expectations influence the grading of written work by students from different cultural backgrounds.
The paper reports on the preliminary findings from a study investigating how lecturers assess students’ academic writing. The study aims to address the key questions:
What factors inform or influence lecturers’ assessment of students’ written work? How tolerant are lecturers towards various ESL writing errors (i.e. ESL writing that deviates from Standard Written English)? Do lecturers apply the same standards in assessing the written work of ESL and native English-speaking students?
Issues related to reliability, bias and equity are discussed in the paper and it is argued that continued research on assessment practices is essential to inform the development of appropriate departmental and institutional assessment policies.
Reprinted with the permission of Dr. Chi Baik, The University of Melbourne, Australia
The following words, phrases and sentences have been taken from the text above. Decide what particular academic language feature each example contains (often in bold) and write this feature (or features if there is more than one) in the box next to each example. If you need help, click on the hint button to see the answers you can choose from.
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