Raising students’ awareness about academic writing features in writing an academic paper.

Abstract

The present research is conducted to point out that teaching academic writing should focus on the salient features that make this type of writing different from the other kinds of writings. It also attempts to investigate to what extent second year students at the University of Constantine 1 aware of academic writing features, as well as if they use these features mainly objectivity, formality, and cautious writing in their academic written productions. In the light of this, the hypothesis is that if second year students receive explicit instructions about academic writing conventions, they would be aware of academic writing features and their writing quality would improve in writing academic papers. To test this hypothesis, two research tools are used; teachers’ and students’ questionnaires and an experiment (pre-test, post-test) which were taken by a random sample of students. The results of the present study show that students lack knowledge about academic writing conventions; as the questionnaires have revealed. On the other hand, the results of the experiment revealed that the experimental group showed an improvement in using academic writing features after the treatment compared to the control group which does not receive any explicit instructions.