Enhancing undergraduates' academic writing skills with strategy training and revision feedback: in private and state universities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Writing is one of the essential skills that should be practiced to communicate ideas, concepts and innovations in a broad academic environment. Being undergraduates at universities, students need to attend writing in scientific and technical reports, literature reviews and long essays where they encounter difficulties like structuring paragraphs, vocabulary and grammar. Thus, the study focused on enhancing the text quality of the academic writing of the undergraduates using writing training strategies: text structure application and summarizing or writing succinctly, along with providing feedback for revising through try-again feedback. Therefore, the research aims to find whether the text structure application and summarizing benefited in producing cohesion and coherence of the text in academic writing. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate whether try-again feedback improved the students' accuracy and critical analysis in the academic writing context. Fifty undergraduates from two state and private universities participated in the study. The students were divided into five groups and each group was given a pre-task. Then, the same task as a post-task was given after the practice and training related to writing for three weeks. Each group was given an English instructor to assess the paragraphs using the rubric and ratings. Limitations of the study were the sample size was small and the results could not be generalised due to the factors like experience, language proficiency and the practice of both the participant and the evaluator. The analyses of the data revealed that academic writing skills were positively affected by summarizing and text structure application in improving cohesion, coherence, grammar and vocabulary. Furthermore, try-again feedback had a direct impact on improving critical analysis and accuracy, thus enhancing the text quality which can be applied in universities.