Academic writing for business students: a case for a content and language integrated approach

Research has shown that many students (Dutch L1/L2) do not meet academic language requirements upon entering Flemish higher education (Peters, Van Houtven, El Morabit, 2010). Many universities feel compelled to help their first-year students bridge the gap between secondary and tertiary education. This paper reports on a case study at the Integrated Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Leuven that investigated how a language-sensitive instructional approach could improve business students’ academic writing skills and thus facilitate their chances of academic success. The method we adopted was a (task-based) needs analysis in which multiple sources and methods were triangulated (Long, 2005; Van Houtven, Peters & Van den Branden, forthcoming). According to this needs analysis the most challenging task for first year undergraduate students was writing a source based paper in groups of four. Students and lecturers pointed out the following impediments: - gathering, interpreting, evaluating and synthesizing information; - meeting linguistic requirements and academic writing conventions; - writing in groups of four. The study aimed to explore the effect of writing support given to a part of the students, i.e. the experimental group. Both the experimental group and a control group were given lectures on content and form and were provided with detailed instructions and checklists. In addition to this, the experimental group was offered hands-on workshops focusing on the writing assignment itself. These workshops concentrated on the writing process in the writing groups and peer feedback. A pre-test/post-test design was adopted to investigate the effects of the aforementioned support on students’ performance in academic writing. We assume that in addition to clear instructions and checklists, product and process oriented writing support will positively influence undergraduate students’ academic writing skills. We therefore hypothesize that the experimental group 1) will outperform the control group on the posttest and 2) will show better academic writing in the assignment. In short, the paper reports on classroom-based research of content and language integrated academic writing in threefold by explicating the needs analysis, illustrating the writing support itself and discussing the measured effects. References Long, M.H. (2005). Methodological issues in learner needs analysis. In M. Long (ed.). Second language needs analysis (p. 19-76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, E., Van Houtven, T. & El Morabit, Z. (2010). Hoe staat het met de taal van studenten? Exploratieve studie naar begrijpend lezen en samenvatten bij instromende studenten in het Vlaamse hoger onderwijs. Levende Talen Tijdschrift, 11(3), 29-45. Van Houtven, Peters & Van den Branden (forthcoming). An L1 needs analysis for academic reading: a qualitative analysis of four case studies in Flemish higher education.status: publishe