Developing Engineering Students’ Writing Skills through a Process-Genre Writing Approach: A Literature Review

This literature review aims to describe a series of studies that highlight the challenges engineering students face when learning English as a foreign language, especially in terms of written communication. Moreover, this paper advocates for the implementation of the Process-Genre Writing Approach (PGWA) as an effective methodology to address these challenges and foster improvement in students’ writing skills. The studies described in this work suggest that the main issues include students’ lack of motivation, poor language proficiency, deficient literacy skills, and teachers’ commitment to teaching writing. Literature suggests the PGWA as a pertinent and useful approach to developing engineering students’ technical writing skills. The implementation of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is presented as an effective way to integrate the PGWA to develop not only students’ technical writing skills but also their ability to adapt to different writing contexts and genres within the field.