Academic Writing Development in English: An Action Research Project

Abstract

Academic Writing is considered as the most important yet most difficult task for learners at secondary and higher education levels in Pakistan.Academic writing is the most difficult of all the four skills of a language (Garcia & Isabel, 2018). Nevertheless, it is considered as one of the prerequisite skills, the enrolled learners at college and undergraduate level need for various educational purposes including passing the exams (Dar & Khan, 2015). One way to study this issue is to first identify the problems of the learners in their academic writing and then seek a pedagogical intervention.The currentstudy followed this approach. It identified the difficulties of intermediate students of pre-engineering in academic writing at Government Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah Higher Secondary
School and then in the next phase it developed their academic writing skills by employing instructional teaching and practices through a content-based approach. An essay was used as a tool that assessed in a 5-point Analytical Rubric adopted by Angel and Garcia (2019). The scale included discourse, organization, syntax, convention, and vocabulary as the parameters/categories. Each category was marked for five marks individually and thus making a collective score of twenty-five marks for an essay. The methodology, employed in the research, was an action research that selected thirty participants as purposive sampling. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics atpre-actional phase and post-actional phase to know the extent of improvement. The findings revealed that the participants were found weak in essay writing under academic writing at pre-actional phase level and later improved their competence and performances after the intervention of teachingpractices through a content-based approach. The scores of the essays increased at each category of the assessment gradually. Thus, the findings pave way forward for conducting more action research plans on developing academic writing skills in English and it also encourages further detailed research in this area.