Survey of Academic Writing Tasks Required of Graduate and Undergraduate Foreign Students

ABSTRACT A survey of the academic writing skills needed by beginning undergraduate and graduate students was conducted. Faculty, in 190 academic departments at thirty‐four U.S. and Canadian universities with high foreign student enrollments completed the questionnaire. At the graduate level, six academic disciplines with relatively high numbers of nonnative students were surveyed: business management (MBA), civil engineering, electrical engineering, psychology, chemistry, and computer science. Undergraduate English departments were chosen to document the skills needed by undergraduate students. The major findings are summarized below. Although writing skill was rated as important to success in graduate training, it was consistently rated as even more important to success after graduation. Even disciplines with relatively light writing requirements (e.g., electrical engineering) reported that some writing is required of first‐year students. The writing skills perceived as most important varied across departments. Faculty members reported that, in their evaluations of student writing, they rely more on discourse‐level characteristics than on word‐ or sentence‐level characteristics. Discourse‐level writing skills of natives and nonnatives were perceived as fairly similar, but significant differences between natives and nonnatives were reported for sentence‐ and word‐level skills and for overall writing. Among the ten writing sample topic types provided, preferred topic types differed across departments. Although some important common elements among the different departments were reported, the survey data distinctly indicate that different disciplines do not uniformly agree on the writing task demands and on a single preferred mode of discourse for evaluating entering undergraduate and graduate students.