Writing at the Graduate Level

There have been extended publications on developing writing skills for undergraduate and graduate students (Odena & Burgess, 2015). Ondrusek (2012) made a review of the core elements in advanced writing. The list included organization, prewriting, a process seen as the rewriting of the document, and evaluation of students’ own writing. Thanh, Bin, Cong, and Binti (2016) add to the list drafting (in groups, pairs, or individually), editing, feedback, and redrafting. Dimmock (as cited in Dubicki, 2015) conducted two anthropological/ethnographic studies at a higher education to know if undergraduate students’ research practices had changed. The author concluded some weak areas in students’ research practices, among them poor writing skills. Dubicki (2015) recommended scaffolding assignments to support students for whom difficulties may arise. Odena and Burgess (2015) reported that students’ voices are an aspect that has been underexplored, especially in graduate research education.

Students’ Perspectives

A descriptive study was conducted with a group of 64 master’s degree candidates. The master’s program was for English teachers in a country in which English was not the dominant language. Candidates were taking the last course before program completion. One of the assignments was to write a letter in which they commit to participate in academic events. Because students were about to start the graduation process, the researcher decided to explore their perspectives toward writing and its process at this level.

Students were given a survey after the assignment. The survey included 19 yes/no items related to the writing process as defined by Ondrusek (2012) and Thanh et al. (2016). The steps included in the survey were outlining, brainstorming, revising, proofreading, and editing. Three items asked about the clarity of the instructions. There was an open question at the end that asked about instructions and recommendations to the teacher.

Results indicated that only 45% of respondents made an outline, indicating that outlining is not a regular practice at this level, at least with this sample. Sixty-one percent stated that they wrote as words came to their minds. Nonetheless, 81% indicated that they had brainstormed ideas before writing. Regarding feedback, 73% did not ask anyone to read their document before turning it in. When they were asked about revising their work, they took this step as rereading to correct punctuation and spelling. Therefore, 92% indicated they read the letter before uploading it to the platform, 83% checked for punctuation and 91% corrected misspelt words.

Even though 43% indicated that they know the format of a letter, 91% looked for examples to develop the letter; moreover, 83% said they read several examples before they began writing. It seems the open question confused students because they did not know what the teacher expected. In this regard, 66% reported that they asked peers for explanations of the assignment, but they did not ask them for feedback once they completed the letter.

Questions regarding instructions were also included in the survey to learn what students understood from the instructions provided by the teacher. Sixty-three percent marked that they read the instructions and started working on the assignment, but 81% of those same participants had to reread the instructions before writing. Moreover, 88% confirmed they wanted to know what the teacher really meant and expected. In the open question, 17% of the participants indicated that they expected detailed or specific instructions. Fifty-two percent recommended the teacher to provide an example or a rubric as a guideline.

It seemed from the teacher’s perspective that writing a letter was an easy assignment for graduate students. However, half of the class recommended the teacher to provide an example of the expected outcome. Another finding involves instructions; results indicated that students needed to reread the instructions; that they had to look for examples independently; and, that they wanted more details about the letter. Thus, implications of this study for teachers are to scaffold the writing process, to provide detailed instructions, and good examples of expected work. Lastly, the writing process, as defined by Ondrusek (2012) and Thanh et al. (2016), was not observed by the graduate students in this study, in an assignment such as writing a letter. This should be a barometer to understand why students experience great difficulty when they have to write more extensive and elaborated assignments like their thesis.

References

Dubicki, E. (2015). Writing a research paper: Students explain their process. Reference Services Review, 43(4), 673–688. Doi: 10.1108/RSR-07-2015-0036.

Odena, O., & Burgess, H. (2015). How doctoral students and graduates describe facilitating experiences and strategies for their thesis writing learning process: A qualitative approach. Studies in Higher Education. Doi:10.1080/03075079.2015.1063598

Ondrusek, A. L. (2012). What the research reveals about graduate students’ writing skills: A literature review. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 53(3),176–188.

Thanh, K., Bin, S., Cong, T., & Binti, N. (2016). Developing research paper writing programs for EFL/ESL undergraduate students using process genre approach. Canadian Center of Science and Education, 6(2), 19–29.

María Rossana Ramírez-Avila is currently the chair-elect of the Higher Education Interest Section. She is also coordinating the graduation process of the Master Program in Pedagogy of National and Foreign Languages at Universidad Casa Grande in Ecuador. She was a consultant for primary and high schools for about 8 years. She also supervised eight teachers at an English language school.