Research findings reveal that students encounter a lot of difficulties in putting down their thoughts and ideas on paper as they are habituated to memorizing essays, report and composition, which they think important for the examinations, rather than thinking anything with a critical approach.
Alaul Alam: Academic writing is a scholarly contribution which is a gateway for innovations in different branches of knowledge. Knowledge is being created and recreated in different forms and shapes through research. In the academic arena, apart from subject knowledge language plays a crucial role as one needs to have standard knowledge of the language in which one wants to conduct research.
Actually, there is no specific rule that all scholarly contributions would be written in some dominating languages in the world. But it is evident that most research scholars around the world choose English to write their research papers thinking that research contribution should be shared globally.
In most developing countries it is tough to enter the global phenomena without access to English language. But academic writing difficulties are one of the prime causes that deny many access to scholarly contribution.
However, academic writing difficulties do not always mean the inadequacy of grammatical knowledge, rather in most cases, these may refer to the inadequate knowledge over the systematic organization of scholarly contribution.
Usually, academic writing refers to a special set of skills that can be achieved through a rigorous process. It is very formal, objective and concise in comparison to other styles of writing; the forms of writing like research projects, term papers, conference papers, essays, abstracts and reports, etc. are considered academic works in various disciplines.
The educational setting in Bangladesh systemizes language education following four skills i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing and certainly, writing gets the most priority as students are assessed through written examinations in all academic levels and in case of writing, developing functional and structural approaches are considered.
But regrettably, the introduction to academic writing at school and college level is still unaddressed. Even at tertiary level of education students are asked to develop report or thesis paper without giving them a considerable understanding about academic writing.
Students are found at times to prepare assignments, research proposals, reports and many more ignoring the proper guidelines of writing academic papers because getting stick to academic writing is not only crucial for students but also teachers and academicians from different disciplines resulting in failure of a systematic well-organized writing for academic purposes.
However, for students, teachers, researchers or other professionals, developing academic writing skills in English is necessary for producing essays, reports, presentations, research papers, reviews, articles and so on.
Research findings reveal that students encounter a lot of difficulties in putting down their thoughts and ideas on paper as they are habituated to memorizing essays, report and composition, which they think important for the examinations, rather than thinking anything with a critical approach. Besides, they do not know how to incorporate quotations into sentences, rather they pick up information from articles, books, and websites without acknowledging and even paraphrasing them whenever they are asked to prepare assignment.
In fact, they have developed the tendency of copying and pasting just entering the online researches seeming similar with the topic. Different studies state that due to not having practical knowledge of developing academic writing, they indulge themselves in plagiarism and sometimes time- constrains make them bound to do it. Studies also show that teachers do not provide individual feedback on their (students) assignment and writing any research paper and the only thing teachers do is to give the instructions to submit assignment in a deadline.
Another obstacle is that it is very difficult for students to use diction in the proper way and to develop the plot of writing following the proper coherence by using the transition words that make the writing understandable to the readers. Whether it comes to a thesis, essay or article – each of them has a certain structure. Typically, they all are based on three main components: introduction, main body and conclusion.
It is frequently noticed in their writing that they have failed to cope up the developing of writing plots or paragraphs based on the emphasis on the thesis statement and are found to be scattered leaving away the topic statement mingling with the supporting others to justify the thesis statement giving their logic and argument.
Error in grammar and punctuation are one of the main reasons that obstruct students in writing academic paper. Besides, too many errors make it difficult for an instructor to assess the content. In the present time, students are taught communicative English in which the emphasis is given more on developing fluency, rather than accuracy that is also responsible for grammatical inaccuracies of students.
Researchers have identified different common grammatical and punctuation errors including confuse prepositions and conjunctions, miss auxiliary verb and the problem of using punctuation in the writing that in many cases occur in their conscious mind as theoretical knowledge they have on different grammatical issues cannot make them refrain from committing such mistakes.
Here Krashen’s input and monitor model can be a lens to review a set of challenges regarding developing academic writing in English. He claimed that influencing factors such as teachers’ low proficiency and reluctance, method of teaching, inappropriate and inadequate academic writing courses and potential factors such as paraphrasing and in text citation, coherence and cohesion, grammatical and punctuation problem , word choices and referencing and citation contribute to academic writing difficulties among students.
However, as academic writing works as a driving force to succeed in academic life, there is no other alternative to developing this skill going beyond the challenges stated in this article. Undoubtedly, fostering quality education and education research will be a far cry unless we can teach students the paradigm of academic writing.
The writer teaches at Prime University. Email: malaulalam@gmail.com
