Developing Academic Writing Competence through Teaching Academic Paragraph Writing

Abstract

Abstract: Aim. The aim of the article is to provide a theoretical rationale and a methodological description of the process of developing students’ academic writing competence at the initial stage of university education through systematic instruction in writing an academic paragraph within a foreign language course. The study seeks to clarify the didactic status of the academic paragraph as a basic unit of academic writing and to determine its role in the formation of microstructures of coherent written discourse. Methods. The methodological framework is based on the communicative-activity and competence-based approaches to foreign language teaching and on contemporary concepts of academic writing. The study is based on a set of theoretical and empirical methods, including the analysis and synthesis of scholarly literature on academic writing competence, the systematisation of didactic approaches to teaching academic writing, pedagogical observation, the analysis of a corpus of 120 student paragraphs in German, as well as descriptive and comparative analysis aimed at identifying typical difficulties in academic paragraph construction. Results. The concept of the academic paragraph is clarified as an autonomous structural unit of academic discourse, and its core components are identified, namely the topic sentence with a controlling idea, a system of supporting sentences, and a concluding generalisation. On the basis of the analysis of students’ written texts, typical difficulties of initial academic writing are systematised, including the absence of a controlling idea, violations of thematic unity, difficulties in formulating a concluding generalisation, a limited repertoire of cohesive devices, and the predominance of an informal descriptive style. The study outlines the main directions for designing a system of exercises and assessment criteria that allow for step-by-step monitoring of the development of academic writing competence. Conclusions. The study shows that systematic instruction in writing an academic paragraph creates methodological conditions for the targeted development of microstructures of written discourse at the initial stage of university education. The academic paragraph is treated as an autonomous didactic unit through which the basic cognitive and communicative processes of academic writing are regulated.