Making Sense of Research: University Students’ Difficulties in Writing Academic Summaries

Ivanova, Irina Nikolova

doi:10.46687/silc.2020.v08i01.002

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Thus, for example, in working with source texts and summarizing them for the purposes of their research, Bulgarian students experience difficulties related to understanding the gist and details in the source articles, differentiating between the voice of the author and the research they refer to in their texts, identifying the author's stance and the interrelation of ideas in the literature review sections of summarized articles. In writing their papers they tend to rely exclusively on their own opinion, expressed without caution in passing judgments, and do not usually use hedging devices (Ivanova, 2020).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

University students and instructors’ perceptions of challenges in academic writing

Gerova,

Ivanova

2023

Lyuboslovie

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Academic writing in courses taught in English is one of the areas which pose challenges for university students. Due to a lack of consistent practices in teaching writing in secondary education, school graduates encounter serious difficulties in their transition to academic discourse and writing in English required for some disciplines. The article discusses students’ attitudes and perceived challenges in writing, and reveals discrepancies between students and instructors’ perspectives. The discussion is mapped against the widely researched area of challenges in academic writing, and is based on analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, obtained from a small-scale survey with BA and MA students of English studies in a Bulgarian university, and focus-group interviews with their instructors. The findings of this interdisciplinary study provide insights into students’ challenges in academic writing. It also helps to raise students’ awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas for instructors’ intervention and remedial work.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

University students and instructors’ perceptions of challenges in academic writing

Gerova,

Ivanova

2023

Lyuboslovie

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“…Within the scope of reporting, problems related to developing a thesis statement, making connections between sentences, writing coherent paragraphs, organizing ideas, and the text, elaborating the argument, having problems with word choice and sentence structure, citing sources and reorganizing citations have been pointed out in existing publications ( Pablo and Lasaten, 2018 ; Ivanova, 2020 ; Lin and Morrison, 2021 ; Aldabbus and Almansouri, 2022 ). Within this framework, teaching academic writing includes purposes such as creating the text based on scientific foundations and various evidences; being able to deal with the results obtained as a result of one’s own work together with the results of other studies; gaining the ability to conduct research around established standards; being able to see from different perspectives; being able to present a text that is consistent in terms of arguments and content; and being linguistically proficient.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of pre-service teachers’ argumentation-based academic writing process

et al. 2022

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The purpose of this research is to examine the participating students’ argumentation-based academic writing processes and the contributions of these processes to the students’ academic writing skills. The participants of the study, which was conducted through mixed method research design, were a group of 53 pre-service Turkish Teachers who are in their first year of Turkish education program at a state university in Turkey during the 2020–2021 academic year. In this research, the data were obtained through student products, rubrics, reflective participant diaries, and a semi-structured interview form. SPSS 23 was used in the analysis of the quantitative data, and NVivo 12 programs were used in the analysis of qualitative data. When the results of the analyses are considered in general, it can be deduced that academic writing practices based on argumentation contributed to the development of students in the dimensions of “subject and content,” “organization,” “language use,” “citation,” and “writing process.” In the data obtained from the reflective diaries and interviews, although some difficulties were pointed out, the statements of the students regarding their development came to the fore. In addition, it was pointed out that argumentation contributes not only to students’ academic writing skills, but also their development of thinking, objectivity, research motivation, and critical thinking.

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Scaffolding Summary Writing through the ‘Reading to Learn’ Pedagogy

Li,

Wijeyewardene,

Stackhouse

2024

RELC Journal

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Summary writing is a core competency for students pursuing university studies, but the demands of the reading-to-writing process can be fraught for those students new to the university context, particularly international students for whom English is an additional language. This paper reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of using the Reading to Learn (R2L) pedagogy for students’ summary writing in an online environment. International English as an additional language students enrolled in four separate iterations of an advanced academic literacy unit offered by an Australian university, and were taught academic reading and summary writing online using the R2L pedagogy. Pre- and post-tests were administered in the first and last weeks of the unit each trimester. In the weeks between the tests, tutorials (2 h×9 weeks) consisted of structured and scaffolded teacher–student interactions, which guided the students through reading and summarising and moved from a high level of teacher input to greater student independence in the reading-to-writing process. Results found significant improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend and summarise key ideas from a source text and to write grammatically sound and complex sentences. However, the instruction did not show any impact on cohesion, vocabulary or punctuation. Despite the limitations of the study, the results confirm previous results as to the value of R2L, which provides a scaffolded approach to reading and writing.

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Making Sense of Research: University Students’ Difficulties in Writing Academic Summaries

Cited by 5 publications

References 22 publications

University students and instructors’ perceptions of challenges in academic writing

University students and instructors’ perceptions of challenges in academic writing

Analysis of pre-service teachers’ argumentation-based academic writing process

Scaffolding Summary Writing through the ‘Reading to Learn’ Pedagogy

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