Academic Writing Experience of Iranian Postgraduate Students

The present study aimed at investigating the kind of writing instruction which Iranian postgraduate students have received in their writing courses. To achieve this goal, 30 postgraduate students were asked to participate in the study. The study applied quantitative and qualitative data collection methods. The participants responded to a questionnaire and took part in an interview. Analysis of data indicates that participants received a surface level instruction with focus on grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, and paragraph level form. It is also found that university writing courses did not teach academic writing skills such as organization of research papers, synthesizing information from different reading sources, producing coherent texts. Students did not receive instruction on how to evaluate and synthesize the words and ideas of others in order to develop their own academic voices. It is suggested that university writing courses should familiarize students with rhetorical, organizational, and linguistic features of academic writing and focus on macro level features of academic writing as well as the paragraph-level and sentence-level aspects of expressing ideas in a foreign language.Keywords: Academic writing, Teaching Writing, and EFL students