CRITICAL READING 13

A CRITICAL READING OF DEVELOPING ACADEMIC WRITING

IN A BUSINESS-ORIENTED UNIVERSITY

J.A. Foley

Graduate School of English, Assumption University, Thailand

Published by Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics

Vol. 2 No. 2, January 2013, pp. 168-186

Nowadays, every field of science deals with English. English as an international need to be required by the student to acquire higher knowledge. As a result, teaching English become a important term in transferring knowledge. Thus, the teacher have to develop the student to have preference in learning English.

In the higher level of education ,English has been taught in specific field such as academic writing. Academic writing is a subject focus on the academic form of writing such as genre text, essay, scientific article, and so on. In the process of writing, it provides many steps and the student should pass the steps simultaneously.

There are many researches about academic writing for instance: the research conducted by Foley (2013). The research investigated the development of language choices in the Academic writing of students at an English-medium university in Thailand. The purpose of this study was to see what effect the implementation of a genre– based approach to writing might have on the development of “academic” writing of university undergraduates. The focus was on the nominal group in Topical and Marked Topical themes position.

The result of his study showed that the students have limited knowledge of genres. They also have narrow lexical and grammatical choices. Furthermore, after implementing the approach of genre based in teaching learning, there are some improvements. They have written a draft text of report.

Based on the finding above, we can learn that writing subject needs to be taught by appropriate teaching strategy. The teacher should develop strategy that make the students understand easier about what they learn. The teacher also can guide the student to write continuously until they can write individually.