A Study on academic text writing education for foreign students

Abstract

Writing is considered to be more difficult as it is an area that requires ability to draw new conclusions based on analysis rather than analytical ability. Compared to speaking in the same expression category, writing is the most complex area as it assesses ability to utilize written language, sophisticated grammatical ability. Speaking is understood and evaluated holistically, considering spontaneousness and focusing on the content. On the other hand, since the result of writing lasts longer, structural and expressional details can be assessed. Moreover, academic texts are specialized and have authoritative and formal written style, different from colloquial language. Therefore, for foreign students who learned Korean as second language, academic text is difficult to master. Consequently, making students understand the qualities important in Korean writing and making them to understand and use typical characteristics of academic text and vocabulary, grammatical, stylistic characteristics of academic text is important in teaching academic text composition to foreign students. It is highly likely the students have been trained in their native language to select content and generate topic and the ability would not show drastic difference between target and native language. Thus Korean composition education should focus on “structuring” level– expanding sentence to paragraph and structuring text cohesively—and “expression” level —constructing sentences. As this research has been conducted to develop pedagogy of academic text writing for foreign students, it focuses more on the general understanding of subject of writing and typology of academic text and provides limited direction for education. Detailed method could be established after based on fundamental understanding provided by this research.