TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS: CHALLENGES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Abstract

Academic writing involved multifarious tasks ranging from writing assignments, case studies, technical reports, laboratory reports, examination questions through writing articles in journals to final year thesis. It is vital for engineering students to excel in academic writing. Nevertheless, academicians are sometimes frustrated that the performance of students in academic writing. There are complaints from employers about the poor writing skills among engineering graduates. Generally, there are three aspects that students who study engineering face difficulties when writing academic articles in i.e. content, structure and language. As such in order to enhance the quality of academic writing among students, these aspects must be taken into consideration. This paper presents a preliminary investigation on the challenges faced by engineering students at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in producing high quality academic writing and proposed recommendations as well as strategies in order to remedy the problem