REVISITING TEACHING ENGLISH ACADEMIC WRITING IN THE EDUCATIONAL SPACE OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

The article deals with teaching English Academic Writing to students of higher education institutions. Nowadays, an important task of higher education in Ukraine is to improve the quality of specialists’ language training and their ability to apply the acquired knowledge in practical work, to equip them with academic writing and communication skills. English is commonly accepted as the language of international science and higher education requires an appropriate level of proficiency in the English language and, above all, in its scientific style. English academic writing proficiency will allow Ukrainian researchers to communicate their research results to the international community. Therefore, there is a need to develop the ability of students to express their thoughts in writing in accordance with the genre and stylistic features of academic English and the sociocultural features of the English-speaking society taking into account the gap between the Ukrainian language writing conventions and the Anglo-Saxon ones. Until recently, the main drawback of the concept of teaching academic writing in a foreign language in Ukraine was that it was realized mainly at the level of teaching grammar skills, which limited students ability to express their ideas and therefore negatively affected the quality of their writing skills in a foreign language. The linguistic students’ competence in English academic writing can be achieved by the integration of two main approaches to teaching academic writing: 1) a product-oriented approach where the product is a coherent text free from grammatical, lexical and stylistic errors, resulting from the analysis, imitation, and transformation of a sample text proposed by the teacher and 2) a process-oriented approach focused on the author of a piece of writing and the process of its creation, whose main characteristics are planning with due account for the communicative intention and the audience, and revision of its content, structure, and language until a piece of writing meets the author’s expectations. It is extremely important for students to develop academic literacy skills and academic integrity, which provides the foundation for every aspect and all levels of research and education.