Negotiating "third spaces": EAP apprenticeship, academic writing, and Chinese students

• Main Author: Mirador, Josephine F.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Academic writing; Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/8609
• Institution: De La Salle University

The aims of this exploratory research on the academic writing apprenticeship of Chinese students are four-fold: (1) to determine what students thought were the purposes of academic writing, (2) to find out if students were adopting the preferred organisational patterns in writing argumentative essays, (3) to identify what their most common errors were when writing for academic purposes, and (4) to determine teacher perceptions of the academic writing program. The researcher surveyed 47 Chinese students, analysed the organisations of 31 sample essays, conducted an error analysis of 120 paragraphs, and interviewed 10 EAP writing teachers. Findings revealed that students generally associated academic writing with skills-based improvement rather than development of higher order skills as critically; students acculturated tot he preferred ways of organising essays; lexis posed the most serious issue for student writing; and teachers interviewed generally raised concerns about the effectiveness and direction of the writing program.