Makrina ZAFIRI
University of Thessaly
Evmorphia PANOURGIA
Technical Institute of Kavala
ABSTRACT
Student’s responses are usually negative when invited to write, in the L2, anything from a paragraph to an academic paper in tertiary education. This is due to many different factors including the fact that students attending an ESP/EAP language course are usually of different language levels. The most difficult part of an ESP/EAP language teacher is to persuade students of the need to write in the foreign language and more specifically to write using the terminology of their discipline.
Providing students with a broad range of opportunities to write, thus facilitating their ability to discover the socially appropriate language structures necessary in their science, will aid students in their quest for more knowledge. One first step which should be taken by the ESP/EAP language teacher is to enable students to distinguish the different academic writing styles such as tentative, formal, informal and objective, etc. This presupposes, on the side of the students, a sound knowledge of grammar, syntax, spelling, etc, of the foreign language, and if students do not have this kind of knowledge then it is the teacher’s duty to make sure that she/he will start her teaching process with these basic language structures and that she/he will then move on to paragraph and summary writing, to processing, to interpreting and to synthesizing their material. This paper broaches the subject of writing and more specifically of academic writing in tertiary education, and probes into matters such as, for example, the techniques and approaches employed in the teaching of academic writing. It also looks at the techniques which are employed by ESP/EAP teachers to encourage their students to build their confidence in writing.
Key words: academic writing, building student’s confidence in writing