Facilitating the Development of Advanced L2 Academic Writing

Composing written texts is a cognitively demanding process, even in a writer’s L1. Producing academic texts and adhering to genre conventions and reader expectations in an L2 is additionally challenging, even for those who are highly proficient in English. To explore setbacks and ways to facilitate advanced L2 academic writing proficiencies, nine L2-English students pursuing higher education degrees in English-centered programs participated in this pilot study. They completed surveys, interviews, and produced drafts of academic texts for analysis. Participants have L1 backgrounds in Cantonese, Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean and Japanese, and are pursuing undergraduate or graduate-level degrees in various programs. They are expected to produce critical essays, research papers, and theses in order to graduate. Findings from their feedback and analysis of their compositions are evaluated to determine 12 main areas of difficulty, which will serve as the foundation for future studies comparing the effectiveness of different writing methodologies.