Sometimes students coming from different countries, are not so familiar with the writing style, the correct way of writing Standard American English, and score less on the Writing, although they need to have better grades in Professional degree courses, high school or college, and due to writing the scores are bad, the grade is bad, how can we help this student who is in grad school, college or high school.
This is a very important issue nowadays, in a time when students move around throughout the world. As Erika Lunding has put it, language learning is a life-long process. But let me make another remark: beyond learning English words, spelling, phonetics and morpho-syntax (i.e. traditional grammar issues), students/researchers need to improve their abilities in specific text genres (I mean, PhD Dissertation, Master Thesis, journal article, etc.). And this means that one has to learn (and learn fast) how to write different types of texts, in terms of their typical sentence-structure but also of their content selection and organisation.
For instance, in academic texts written in romance languages (as Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Italian), sentences tend to be longer and syntactically more complex than in those same texts written in English. In English, you noemally write simpler sentences, including only one specific idea per sentence. In Portuguese and in French, students/researchers tend to include three ou four relevant ideas in each sentence, which makes it more difficult to apprehend all of them at once. If you are a Portuguese or a French student in the USA or in the UK, then you need to culturally adapt yourself to what is required in universities of these countries.
To sum up, improving in completing your research papers should rely not only on learning good "American/British standard English", but also on develloping your genre skills (i.e. selecting and organising your ideas in each different text type you write).
Dear Zulekha,
We have such a problem among the various students of Iran. But fortunately most of them can overcome their problems by reading lots of research papers related to their particular topic. This method help these researchers to write accurately and with confident.
English is just another language. It is easy to learn. I would like to suggest that one should try to learn the original English language first. Once that is done, variations such as the American English language can be digested easily.
The problem is not with the English or American English per se, it is the format and certain format that is designated for writing research papers is different, certain style of writing: writing for blogs, or internet is different, science writing is different, story writing is different. As I monitor the Writing classes for fourth grade(Testing is for State-wide in Florida for fourth graders), they teach a different style of writing for Narrative, Expository, and Persuasive Writing, letters, cover letters, resume, C.V's and then even screenplay, drama, essay, (high school). My suggestions is as follows:
When students coming from non-English speaking countries are selected for graduate studies, first the best way to accommodate all in the same level of Standard American English is to find the "right" and "on level" writing courses for them and they must be familiar with APA style before they take graduate work. I have never seen any universities that offer to take a course in APA style and how to cite references. We take time to teach the children time tables in Math since the third grade because we know they can never be successful without knowing their time-tables, so why leave the graduates to fend for the right rule for APA style, when we are taking classes online, you go back-and -forth searching for the right way to cite.
Give them a course in APA writing for all grad schools students, and have them get an "A" in it to be able to start the classes of Research writing or whatever the case may be. We all have APA manual sixth edition, how many of us really went through the whole book?
We just go and "refer" to the pages the instructor asks us to refer and then that book is of no use unless there is a reference of a page number. Its like a pocket dictionary for us.
My suggestion:
Make it mandatory for APA courses
Make it mandatory for Writing foundation classes in the beginning
Make the classes linked to the coursework that is expected (for example, I am in Education and policy changes so I should read lots of research papers before beginning the semester and read and analyze before the class begins.
Same applies for law school, pharmacy and so on, keep students informed and not just accept them and leave them as one of the bogs of student reviews dot com said, "swim or sink" situation.
Z.Shaikh
The problem of difficult writing in English appears to all students who are not familiar with writing in English. All you have to do, is to try to advance the part of writing and speaking in English.
And me also I had to exceed my limits in terms of speaking English because it is not my first language.
Either way if a student does not want to learn, then surely he will not learn. Everything is linked eventually to his ability of motivation and initiation.
Have a look at REF-N-WRITE scientific paper writing tool. This tool allows you to import text from previous papers relevant to the subject area in MS word. While you are writing your paper, you can just search for similar statements from other authors and inherit their vocabulary and language to improve your paper. It also comes with a library of academic phrases that you can readily use to polish your paper. Here is the link for the site.
http://www.ref-n-write.com
They have some nice tutorials here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf7qyyKtbyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6hlXzqO3r4
One of the strategies is to read every available article in the particular field of study. Also, we should not expect that kind of students is able to finish what he or she has to do from the first try, so usually the first draft done by introducing the ideas, then improve the quality of the text step by step until he or she has arrived to the best possible quality. This can be supported via a good proofreading done by one his or her group members.
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