This study investigates syllabi for evidence of the principles of writing across the curriculum (WAC) in courses offered by the Faculty of Business (FOB) at a university operating in a non–English-speaking country. The research analyzed all syllabi of FOB courses offered in the spring 2010 semester for evidence of WAC looking for indications of writing activities. The analysis focused on both expressive/informal and product/formal writing and discovered through the syllabi the intention of the instructor to incorporate writing. The findings suggest that these courses require little or no writing and therefore principles of WAC are not evident.
With the globalization of higher education, English has become the lingua franca of universities operating in non-English-speaking countries seeking internationalization. The communication needs of students studying in such foreign-language contexts have not been fully explored. In this study, the authors interviewed a purposeful sample of professors teaching a variety of specialties in the School of Business in an environment in which English is a foreign language in order to ascertain their perceptions of students' ability to communicate in English, and these teachers' ability to focus on their students' writing skills. The findings reveal that although these teachers asserted the importance of communication skill, particularly in written English, they did not feel that nurturing that skill was part of their academic
The International Exchanges on the Study of Writing Series publishes booklength manuscripts that address worldwide perspectives on writing, writers, teaching with writing, and scholarly writing practices, specifically those that draw on scholarship across national and disciplinary borders to challenge parochial understandings of all of the above. The series aims to examine writing activities in 21st-century contexts, particularly how they are informed by globalization, national identity, social networking, and increased cross-cultural communication and awareness. As such, the series strives to investigate how both the local and the international inform writing research and the facilitation of writing development.The WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University Open Press, and University Press of Colorado are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editors are committed to the principle that knowl- vii § AcknowledgmentsThe editors would like to acknowledge and thank the many teachers and students from the Middle East-North Africa region whose perspectives and work are addressed in this volume.We sincerely thank Dr. Rula Diab and Dr. Michele Eodice for their reflections on the volume, as articulated in the foreword and afterword.We appreciate the guidance of the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing series editors-Terry Myers Zawacki, Magnus Gustafsson, and Joan Mullin-as well as our anonymous reviewers, for their support in bringing this work to fruition. Additionally, we are grateful to Ashleigh Petts at North Dakota State University for her help with proofreading the manuscript. And thanks to Mike Palmquist, for his promotion of research, exchange, and open-access scholarship through The WAC Clearinghouse.Finally, we are grateful to our own colleagues, friends, and families for their continued interest in and encouragement of our work.
On the heels of research in the 1970s by Briton and others at the University of London, where they discovered that classrooms were disturbingly teacher-centered, the article Why Johnny Cant Write? , appeared in Newsweek in 1975 and set the academic world on a path of reform. Briton is credited with labeling the subsequent pedagogical movement that promoted writing as a means to engage students in the process of knowledge formation as 'writing across the curriculum' (WAC). The literary crisis the Newsweek article generated resulted in WAC programs being implemented in more than 50% of institutions Of higher education in the US by the late 1980s (Kemper, 2013). The assumption that writing is not just a means of expressing what was learned but is, in fact, an integral part of the learning process is the central thesis of this essay. The essay explores how writing has played a major role in the learning process in tertiary programs in the Western world and how WAC is beginning to inform learning at the tertiary level internationally. The paper argues that if such extraordinary measures were taken in a native-speaker context to avert a perceived literacy crisis, then a context, such as the University Of Balamand, where English is a second or even third language, should also put equally extraordinary measures into practice for the benefit of students.
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