Seeing eye to eye? The academic writing needs of graduate and undergraduate students from students’ and instructors’ perspectives

This article reports on findings from a research project designed to assess undergraduate and graduate students’ language-learning needs in the context of a new academic language support center at a Canadian university. A total of 432 students of English as an additional language and 93 instructors responded to the questionnaires, which asked them to provide importance ratings of academic language skills, to assess their own or their students’ skill status, and to respond to open-ended questions. This article reports on data collected from the writing section of the study.The findings indicated that there is much overlap in the skill items identified as ‘very important’ between graduate and undergraduate students and instructors. Students’ self-assessments and instructors’ assessments of their students differed dramatically, however. In addition to important pedagogical implications, this study suggests a need to be cautious when interpreting needs assessment results because what instructors or students consider as an important skill to possess may not be what students need to develop.