Academic writing

Table 4 - The skills required by the course description documents in the HSE MA FL Program

As we can see from tables 3 and 4, most of the skills identified in the literature review section are indeed required from the students by the HSE MA FL Program faculty to successfully undertake the academic workload of the program. The analysis has also shown that some of the skills identified as essential by the designers of the courses have not been identified by the literature review.

Accordingly, we have updated the tables with micro and macro skills and put the results into the following table.

Table 5 - The English Language Academic Writing Macro Skills

Table 6 - The English Language Academic Writing Micro Skills

7. The Case Study Design

To carry out the qualitative research, our first step will be to explore the existing case study designs used to conduct research into L2 writing acquisition in the college (post-secondary) context. According to qualitative researchers (Duff, 2008; Yin, 2003), case studies can be classified into several categories:

Exploratory (allowing to generate date in absence of either previous research or clear research questions)

Descriptive (giving answers to questions “what?”)

Relational (investigating how multiple variables correlate)

Explanatory (giving answers to “why?/how?” type of questions)

Evaluative (attempting to compare cases within the study)

Confirmatory (corroborating studies)

Or the combination of these categories

Note: Adapted from Duff, P. (2008). Case study research in applied linguistics. Taylor & Francis.

Following our research objectives, we need to combine the exploratory design with the confirmatory design. The exploratory nature of the study will enable us to investigate the context itself and gather student's perspectives on their writing processes.. At the same time, because our assumptions rely on conceptual framework established in the community of the researchers conducting similar studies in their contexts and because we already have the existing findings from their research, we will attempt to either corroborate their results or establish their insufficiency for the HSE MA FL Program.

Our second step is to decide on the phenomenon we are going to analyze and define the unit of analysis. Here, given the socially contextualized nature of cognition, the determination of the boundaries of the HSE MA FL context is the primary influence on the case study design. Since no particular data have been gathered, the researchers may choose to study either one individual or a group, either in action or in stasis, the linguistic institution (HSE in general or the School of Foreign Languages ), or the development of competencies (a single English language academic writing micro or macro skill or a composite of several skills). Similarly, the researchers at the HSE are further invited to investigate patterns of classroom interaction or classroom instruction (once the English language academic writing curriculum is effective, for example). Probing into both positive and adverse experiences of the subjects, more conclusions can be made not only about instructional policies but also about particular educational practices.

The third step is defining and contextualizing the research constructs. By research constructs, qualitative researchers understand “theoretical concepts likely to be of greatest interest” (Duff, 2008, p. 108). For example, in one of its possible applications to HSE MA FL context, the constructs could shift from skills of cohesion to students' critical reading skills. This step is important to compile the description of the research and to identify the focus. Once the constructs are identified, they should be contextualized. Although the context is a very general term, it is advisable that the researcher describe its analytic level. For example, Miles & Huberman (1994) state that “it may be a linguistic or discursive context, a task or activity context, a social, political, historical, or cultural context, an instructional context, an interactional context, or a combination of these. The amount of contextualization needed depends on the nature of the study” (as cited in Duff, 2008, p. 125). Since the HSE FL Department context is characterized by the lack of data collected to date, the final discretion regarding the context should remain with a particular researcher. For our purposes, we can select any of the macro and micro skills determined in the previous chapters as our main research constructs, and to contextualize it we have narrowed down the context to the HSE MA FL Program.

Our fourth step is to put forward actionable research questions (Punch, 2013). The research questions in qualitative case-study frame and guide the design. There are several guidelines for the researchers. First, the questions should be conceptual, clear, and specific. Second, the questions must be answerable, or the researcher should be able at least to envisage the answer or several possible answers. Last, the research questions must have a clear focus and direction to guide the rest of the design of the study. Some researchers suggest an alternative to this view and offer a less direct/explicit approach to the case studies without statement of the research questions (Lam, 2004).

To illustrate our design, we can formulate the following questions:

What are some of the English language academic writing skills that HSE MA FL Program students demonstrate and lack?

Do graduate students in HSE MA FL Program transform ideas from sources and integrate them with their own ideas and to what extent? What strategies of transformation appear in their drafts?

What are some of the sources of problems that HSE MA FL Program students have in reading and synthesizing?

Do HSE MA FL Program students use any strategies that help them successfully complete college writing assignments? How can they be described?

What kind of misconceptions the HSE MA FL students have about writing?

The fifth step is to establish the clear and coherent chain of evidence, or as some researchers say, “logic of design” (Yin, 2003, p. 14). This concept encompasses all the decisions regarding design of the research, including the number and kinds of cases, their contexts, various types of intended analysis the researchers are going to conduct, and all the kinds of evidence that will enable the researchers to approach the case study with authority and interpret its results (Duff & Bachman, 2004). Special attention, for HSE FL Department purposes and for the greater academic post-secondary Russian community, can be given to mixed-method designs. In such cases, the students of several large institutions are invited to participate in large-scale qualitative research; the consequent analysis can then be elucidated and made more specific by inclusion of multiple cases from various institutions, which accentuate differences or similarities among these institutions (Duff, 2008).

To illustrate our design, we have selected two tools of data collection: HSE MA FL Program students' portfolios and informal conversational interviews with the graduate students of HSE MA FL Program. First, we will investigate the program records. Then, we will look at the students' portfolios. The portfolios are a useful tool of students' recorded material, which has given us various data (freewriting samples, opinion essays, synthesis essays, drafts with professor's comments, and mind maps). Since--for our demonstration purposes--the study will not be conducted simultaneously with the students' writing for their assignments, we have not been able to collect homogenous material. In other words, all the participants disclosed only the data they were willing to disclose or the data that were available for them at the moment. Finally, we will conduct informal conversational interviews with the HSE MA FL Program students involved in the study. Our interviews will be mostly unstructured (although there will be consistency among some of the questions asked during each interview), and our questions will be based on the portfolios we have analyzed and on our literature analysis. Each interview will add information to our further analysis and will be built upon other interviews conducted.

To conduct a larger study, the researchers at HSE FL department may select two more tools that seem relevant but were excluded from the current study due to available sampling (more on sampling further in the chapter): questionnaires for students and interview with the professors. The questionnaires would allow the researchers to learn about students' assumptions or misconceptions about English language academic writing across a larger sampling of participants and then check whether those assumptions are reflected in students' portfolios during the case study with a fewer number of participants. These could be then checked against the data collected during the interviews with the faculty and the students. Such cross-interpretation of the data will allow the researchers to yield stronger conclusions and consequently inform the English language academic writing curriculum in the HSE MA FL Program.

One more important consideration influencing the case design is the decision whether the study will have a closed or flexible design (Hatch, 2002). With a closed design, all parameters are fixed and nothing is changed on-the-go, while the flexible research design--as its name suggests--allows for some flexibility in design. The main advantage of flexible design is that it allows the researchers--if the design is done right--to stay observant and responsive to the changes as data starts to arrive. The closed design, on the other hand, leaves the researchers without this opportunity, but promises clear timing and predictable longitude. The tradeoff between the two extremes is a valuable exercise of reasoning for the researchers since the right balance is essential for a successful study. In our case, we may opt for a flexible design since it will be the first of its kind conducted in the HSE MA FL Program.

The last step is selecting the sampling. Various researchers (see e.g. Patton, 1990; Huberman, 2004; Duff, 2008) give preference to different strategies, most of which can be arranged into the following table.

Table 3 - Case Study Sampling Selection

Note: Adapted from Duff, P. (2008). Case study research in applied linguistics. Taylor & Francis.

As can be seen from the table 3, a qualitative researcher can select from a number of possibilities. The choice of a particular sampling will depend on the availability of participants, purpose of the study, and the context within which the observable phenomenon manifests itself. For the purposes of the illustration of the case study design in this paper, we initially selected all 26 individuals comprising the group of graduate students in the HSE MA FL Program. Then, our task was to decide what kind of criteria will allow us to test our research questions and to minimize sampling while staying true to the goals of the study and not compromising representativeness. We have chosen criterion sampling, since the boundedness of our context and clear goals to learn about the students' writing skills in the HSE MA FL Program have allowed us to do so. To understand how many participants we need to study, we have looked at the possible differences among the participants, which have allowed us to compile a representative group reflecting the diversity of all individuals in the student body of HSE MA FL Program.

Since our task was to make the sampling small, we decided to use a two-dimensional contingency table. (This matrix table shows the researchers the frequency distribution of two characteristics pertinent to the population of the group under investigation). In our research, we used one binary parameter (undergraduate education: linguistics-related [LR] or non-linguistics-related [NLR]) and one ternary parameter (geography: Moscow [M] or Russian regions [RR] or International students [IS]). We had to narrow down the number of characteristics to two, since adding one more characteristic would make the contingency table three-dimensional, the matrix leading to a projected minimum number of 27 participants.. The selection of parameters for other purposes, however, can be distinct; other researchers are invited to pay attention to the factors, depending on their goals. For example, to figure out what characteristics may potentially affect the performance of the students in writing classes or to conduct the needs' analysis, the researchers can factor in the number of years the students have been learning English or whether English is their first foreign language. Since we are not conducting needs analysis, we simply focused on diversity of the student body to minimize the number of students. Table 4 shows the distribution of the parameters across the student body. Table 4 shows the distribution of the parameters across the student body.

Table 4 - The Contingency Table of Distribution for the Sampling of HSE MA FL Program Students

The table has allowed us to determine the groups of people with a certain set of features in a population and assign each of the portions a corresponding weight. These manipulations--after rounding up figures to the closest integers--yielded 3 ratios:

MLR : MNLR = 2 : 3

RLR : RNLR = 3 : 1

ISLR : ISNLR = 4 : 1

From this set of ratios, we were able to determine the minimum number of participants, which would represent the diversity by the parameters we had chosen. In other words, we took the number of people according to each attribute in proportion and calculated the minimum number of people for sampling; this number was determined by the minimum possible set that preserves the proportions of each feature in relation to other characteristics. We, thus, determined that for our study we are going to select ten people (n=11): two students who have linguistics-related background and who have graduated from Moscow universities, two students who have non-linguistics-related background and who have graduated from Moscow universities, three people who have linguistics-related background and who have graduated from universities in Russian regions, two students with non-linguistics-related background and who have graduated from universities in Russian regions, and two students who have linguistics-related background and who have graduated from universities in countries other than Russia. (We have excluded one student with non-linguistic background and who has graduated from university in a country other than Russia from the sampling: the general rule we followed is that the lesser the ratio of the number of participants in the subgroup to the population, the more likely it is that the exclusion of the smallest representative of this subgroup in the final sampling will not hurt the representativeness.) As a result, in relation to the selected two characteristics, the sample has remained resembling the population.

8. Design of the Quantitative Study and Illustration of the Quantitative Study

Our final aim in this research paper is to suggest the design of the method that would help check the assumption that the skills necessary for completing the academic writing tasks have influence on academic success. Since in the HSE, we have the hard parameter identifying success, we can check whether there is a linear correlation between the English language academic writing skills identified in the paper and the position of the student in the HSE department rating system.

Following the statistical method described by Christensen (2006), we have built the linear regression using standard tools of Microsoft Excel software (employing regression tool from Data Analysis add-on). To see whether there is a linear correlation, we need to input the number of determinants (skills) into the spreadsheet and the accumulated rating grade provided by the HSE rating system. It is important for the future researchers to allow the number of observations (the students) to be at least three times the number of the determinants (Christensen, 2006). The spreadsheet will calculate the regression, and the researchers will be able to interpret the results. If the P-value for a certain determinant in the spreadsheet is indicated as 95 percent correct, it means that statistically there is only a small chance of a mistake that the linear correlation exists. If the P-value for the certain determinant is less than 5 percent, the determinant is not important for the parameter.

To illustrate the application of the spreadsheet, we have chosen random sections of the preliminary research papers we have collected from the eleven students selected for the case study. We then have graded their papers to see what kind of results the regression will give us. In assigning the grades, we have used three criteria for writing task of Cambridge English: Proficiency test (Topic development, Language Use (Grammar and Lexical resource), and Coherence and Cohesion). For the fourth skill (Knowledge transformation), we have checked whether the student paraphrased the information or copied the original text, and whether the paraphrasing distorted the meaning of the source.

Afterwards, e have inputted the grades into the spreadsheet, which showed no correlation between the determinants of content (topic development and knowledge transformation skills) and the student's position in the HSE MA FL rating system. In other words, for this sampling of students, the spreadsheet does not show that writing skills such as topic development and knowledge transformation are conducive to better overall academic performance. This may be interpreted as either a result of low weight of academic writing tasks in the overall curriculum in the HSE MA FL Program or the low importance of these two skills for the instructors in the HSE School of Foreign Languages. The other correlation, however--between the determinant of language use and the position of the student in the HSE MA FL rating system is strong (see theSpreadsheetSkills.xlsx). This suggests that for this sampling of students it is true that language use (appropriate use of grammar and lexical resource) may have an impact on the students' overall academic performance. Since in our example the grading has been done by a single rater (which interferes with the objectivity of the assessment), these results may not be considered conclusive.

To conduct a proper experiment, the HSE School of Foreign Languages is invited to come up with a proper way to assign grades to the skills identified earlier in this paper and to test the whole population of the department to see the final results. The spreadsheet may allow the HSE School of Foreign Languages to see whether some skills are more important for students' academic success in general than others. These findings can be then used to support WAC and WID approaches to the academic writing courses and ensure support from the content subject departments in setting academic writing goals in the curriculum of those departments.

9. Illustration of the Case-Study Design

The case-study researchers typically present their research in the forms of narratives that describe each case and pay equal attention to the case's distinctiveness and possibility for generalizations. For illustration purposes, of eleven students we have identified for the illustration, we have randomly chosen one individual. The reason that only one student has been chosen is attributed to the limitations of our sampling: since the number of students selected is representative only of the second-year MA FL Program students, the generalizations are possible only for the MA FL Program second-year students. In fact, as qualitative researchers state (see e.g. Duff, 2008), selecting more than one individual has to be considered only if adding more cases to the research has the potential of enhancing transferability.(To refer to the student, further in the paper, we deliberately use words “the student”, “they”, “their”, “them” to hide the identity of the student since the student wished that their identity be kept secret.) As a result of our case study, we have compiled a narrative, using data coming from the analyzed assignments, interview logs with the student about their writing process, assumptions about writing, and the strategies they used to cope with assignments and academic writing in general. Such narratives can be used to conduct needs analysis of the students.

During the interview, it became clear that the student shows a marked degree of consciousness about their academic writing strategies and can explain clearly why they wrote a particular piece in a particular way.

The first assignment we looked into was a freewriting assignment. It has to be noted that none of the students were familiar with this type of assignment. Freewriting is a particularly Western approach, in which the stress is placed on writing as process, not product. Elbow identifies freewriting as a writing exercise aimed at breaking the habit of editing the writing simultaneously with producing the writing (Elbow, 1998). As we looked into the student's example of freewriting, the first analyzed assignment from the research seminar class, we noticed that the student has an interesting pattern of putting forward their ideas. The task was to freewrite about possible problems of education in the student's country and solutions to those problems. As Dr. Debra Abrams, the instructor of the research seminar class explains: “The assignment was prompted by the fact that the students in the research seminar class were complaining about particular issues with Russian education system, and the topic was offered as an opportunity to critically think about what the students find problematic and to make suggestions for changes.” The student, however, failed to come up with the solutions. Even though the student tried to approach the answer two times, both these times the student stated in the freewriting that they had no idea how to change anything. It surfaced during the interview that even though the student had had several solutions in mind, the student felt reticent to share them since the topic involved the problems at the government level, which the student felt uncomfortable to discuss. The student explained that not discussing decisions of the Government is a part of the students' cultural identity. Thus, even though the whole class was complaining, the student was psychologically not ready to be involved into discussion. Therefore, if similar problems become apparent during the proper experiment with other students in the HSE MA FL Program, the HSE School of Foreign Languages can either adjust the curriculum or conduct the needs analysis, taking into account the diversity of cultural identities, and the considerations and constraints that this diversity entails.

Another assignment of the student came from the Text Theory and Discourse Analysis class. This time the task was to create an emotive prose with a description of a natural phenomenon and to demonstrate the use of phonetic expressive means to convey ideas and make the text appear stylistically more complete. The student's work is marked by absence of coherence and cohesion, and during the interview, in retrospect, the student was not able to reconstruct the logic behind paragraphing. Nor were the student able to explain what function certain sentences play in the text. When asked about the reason that they neglected the meaning, the student responded that they understood the task in the following way, “So we were asked to come up with this text, connected to the nature, and so I largely disregarded the need to think about ideas, and I was focused on the selecting vocabulary.” The student explained that they were ready to sacrifice the substance for the appearance (inserting pieces of vocabulary that would impress the reader), since this is a more important criterion of a good writing assignment. Therefore, if the misconception that the sophistication of the words will prove to be held by many other students, the researchers at HSE School of Foreign Languages will be able to address this misconception, when planning the English language academic writing curriculum.

The next assignment from the Text Theory and Discourse analysis class yielded several other insights into the student's assumptions about writing. This assignment asked students to create an argument, in which the students had to prove that a particular person deserves the gratitude. In the argument, the student uses the linking word of contrast (“although”) to indicate that the following idea is going to be surprising to the reader. However, the student presents information that is generally considered common knowledge. Our initial assumption was that the student was either unaware of the norms of writer-responsible writing tradition or not familiar with the meaning of the linking word. But this assumption turned out to be wrong. The student explained that they had a lack of ideas but felt the need to add to the word count of the task. As a result, the student inserted one more sentence into the paragraph, blurring the focus of not only the sentence but also the paragraph on the whole. When asked whether the student believes that writing more words equals better overall quality, the student responded positively. The student said that the students are expected to write more, not better. However, as we learned from our Literature Review, English language academic writing values brevity. Thus, if the needs analysis shows the prevalence of the misconception that having the great word count means having the writing of supreme quality, the HSE School of Foreign Languages will be able to address this misconception in the HSE academic writing curriculum.

Answering the question about another assignment--the literary analysis of Bill Clinton's speech (an address to the American Association of Retired Persons) given at Henry Gonzales Convention Center in 1994--the student said that they assumed no particular audience. The student explained that although they realized that the professor was going to read the assignment, “there are such texts that are not intended for the reader”. Consequently, in retrospect the student noticed that the text lacks topic sentence in paragraphs. “It's like I was talking on paper and told the knowledge to air”, the student stated.) The student then was asked about the structure of the first two paragraphs. The first paragraph begins with the sentence saying when the speech took place. But it then discusses target audience. The second paragraph starts with the sentence saying where the speech took place, but it is followed by a discussion of verbal and non-verbal means of expression. The student's comment was, “When I began writing I knew I had to describe when and where the speech has taken the place to explain the context, but I forgot to talk about the place of the speech in my first paragraph, so I put into my second”. Also interesting was the fact that the student considers using clichйs in academic analyses as a means to make the texts more authentic, not to fill it with unnecessary words. Even though their writing would become more concise and direct without the clichйs used, the student inserts them, thinking that they improve the overall appearance and enhance authority of the work. Finally, the work is marked (by the standards of Cambridge English: Proficiency examination writing rubric) by the lack of coherence and cohesion (disorganized sentences, absence of progression of ideas, and a lack of clear argument structure). The student explained that they never had even considered that each paragraph must have a particular structure. They looked at global coherence between the paragraphs when they revised their work, but they never looked into local coherence within and between the sentences. In terms of using linking devices, the student had very strong beliefs about the appropriateness of the use of certain linking words but not about the meaning of linkers. They stressed that the only thing they checked when they revised for cohesion of the text was the register and style. Therefore, from this analysis we learn more about lack of training of writing as a process: the student does not revise information in the paragraphs. We can also learn that the student has a limited idea of coherence and cohesion since the student does not organize the ideas in paragraphs and the student's checking of the linking words reveals poor understanding of their role. Additionally, we can see that the student does not write for a particular audience and thus does not put enough emphasis on communication. Therefore, the HSE School of Foreign Languages can test whether these findings are relevant to the rest of the population through questionnaires. For example, the questionnaires that ask the respondents to agree or disagree with the misconceptions identified during a comprehensive case-study can be given out to all students studying in the HSE MA FL Program. This survey will allow the researchers to determine whether the misconceptions about English language academic writing identified in the case-study can be generalized.

The final writing assignment that we looked into was writing a letter, which had been assigned in the research seminar class. Dr. Debra Josephson Abrams, the instructor of the research seminar class, explains that “the assignment asked students to write in letter form about political system of the country the students come from. The directions explicitly stressed that the students were not allowed to do any research for the assignment, since the point of the assignment was to bring to the students' attention how little they know about the governments of their own countries. It was also an assignment in addressing audience and purpose, which are key in academic writing.” In contrast to the previous assignments, this assignment is marked by a great level of cognitive control in the overall product. The paper is clear, coherent, and exposes the topic to a general reader, using appropriate grammar and vocabulary (according to the rubric of Cambridge English: Proficiency examination). Additionally, the student's approach to the task was different from the student's approach to the assignments analyzed above. The student explained that in this assignment, they began their work by critical reading and note-taking. The student said, “Even though we were not allowed to do any reading for the assignment, I was so unaware of the political system that I had to spend two days on reading and read the Constitution of my country twice. Then I almost never looked into the sources because I had my notes when I was writing the task.” What also helped the student is that the task specified the audience: the research seminar professor. The task was formulated as “I have been explaining the American national political system and the presidential election process. Now it's your turn to teach me. Imagine that I am your pen pal and am living in the U.S. I am coming to your country (it doesn't have to be Russia) for 10 months, and I am eager to learn about your political system. You know that I, as your audience, am an American who is well-educated, well-traveled, has a passion for politics, civics, history, and culture, and has lived through and witnessed a great deal of the most tumultuous, terrible, and progressive 20th century American and world history (and all 21st century events).” The student explained that since they knew they were writing to someone, they assumed that they had to communicate their ideas rather than telling the knowledge they gained from the sources. This insight supports what we have learned in the Literature Review section about the necessity of critical reading skills to produce English language academic writing of high quality. We can thus tentatively conclude that this finding is applicable for the students studying in the HSE. The proper study that may be conducted with more participants can support this. Moreover, the analysis of the assignment shows one of the approaches to the task that is likely to produce writing of high quality. Thus, the HSE School of Foreign Languages can check whether the approach taken by the student--critical reading and note-taking--is conducive to producing the writing of good quality for other students in the population. However, despite all the useful information the analysis of this assignment has provided, the fact that the student violated the instructions accompanying the assignment cannot be overlooked. This situation calls for a thorough investigation into the reasons that the student had for doing so and underscores the necessity to reinforce the academic-integrity policies in the HSE MA FL Program. Although during our interview, we have agreed not to disclose the personality of the student, during further studies, it will be necessary to highlight in the agreement between the participants and researchers that every instance of any violation of the task instructions will be severely punished.

Overall, although we cannot draw any transferrable conclusions from the illustration of one case-study provided above, such case-study research can inform the theory and help either corroborate the theory (such as findings analyzed in the Literature Review section) or instigate more research into various writing issues relevant for HSE MA FL Program students. It can also be successfully used for the needs analysis and to check what kind of assumptions the students have about writing.

10. Discussion

10.1 Limitations

The illustrations of the quantitative and the qualitative studies presented in this paper have the following limitations.

First, the illustration of the quantitative design is limited by the small sample size. Consequently, it is difficult to identify consequential links between the data because the statistical tests call for a large sample size to guarantee transferability of the results to the population. Also, although the sample size is less relevant in qualitative research (Duff, 2008), we were still limited by the fact that the participants identified for the study were not representative of the whole population of the HSE MA FL Program, but were only representative of the second-year students in the program.

Second, we have encountered a lack of available data both in qualitative and quantitative research. In fact, not all the students were able or ready to provide the assignments for the analysis, so it was not possible to verify the approach to the same assignment within the sample. The main reason that the data was unavailable is that the study was conducted after the courses were finished. Consequently, not all students were able to locate the assignments on their storage devices, and some of the students had either lost their handwritten assignments or were unwilling to share the necessary assignments.

Third, a major limitation of the study is the little amount of prior research into English language academic writing skills necessary for graduate students in Russian universities, and the lack of research into division of English language academic writing skills into micro and macro writing skills.

Fourth, the measures we used to collect, process, and analyze the data in the illustrations of the qualitative and quantitative design have also been limited. In both qualitative and quantitative illustrations we have collected the self-reported data. Therefore, we have had no chance to verify the answers to the interview questions externally. In addition, for the quantitative illustration, to assign the grades we have used the skills we were able to assess, not the micro and macro skills we identified. When assigning the grades, we have used the Cambridge English: Proficiency examination rubric because only the raters familiar with this rubric were available for us. Additionally, only one rater conducted the assessment, which could hinder the objectivity of the assessment. Also, we have used the HSE rating system as a measure of the academic success, which has its own inherent limitations. These limitations include inability to guarantee the fairness of the grades given to the students and the objectivity of the rubrics used by the professors when assigning the grades.

10.2 For Future Research

This thesis has attempted to illustrate the potential of gathering data about English language academic writing skills of the students in Russian universities. This section presents several points that need to be addressed by future researchers to successfully conduct the quantitative and qualitative research suggested. First, the researchers will need to verify the skills identified as pertinent to the students' academic success in the HSE MA FL Program since the HSE MA FL Program itself is evolving and new courses may be added to the HSE MA FL curriculum. Second, once the skills are verified, the researchers may rearrange the English language academic writing micro and macro skills. Third, the researchers will need to devise a rubric to evaluate the students' academic writing skills identified in the previous step. Fourth, the researchers will need to decide what kind of students' writing assignments it will be necessary to collect for evaluation. Fifth, the researchers may choose an assessment measure of academic success, which may prove more reliable than the HSE rating system. Sixth, the sampling future researchers identify for the quantitative studies must be representative of the whole population of the HSE MA FL Program. Finally, while conducting the qualitative research, the researchers will need to decide on the number of cases to ensure transferability of results. This will allow the researchers to make generalizations we have not been able to make because of the sampling size. Also, the researchers are advised to use interviews with professors as one more tool of data collection. The professors may offer the proper insights into the directions of the assignments and comment on the purposes of the assignments. These insights will allow the researchers to compare the students' perceptions of the task with their intended purposes. The results of the case study can be then used to conduct the needs analysis. To conduct the analysis, the researchers may choose a format of a questionnaire with agree/disagree statements to check what kinds of assumptions the students have about academic writing.

10.3 Conclusion

In this paper, we have set several goals.

First, we have aimed at determining where the line has to be drawn between the goals of the English language academic writing course designed for undergraduate students and the course designed for graduate students. Our literature analysis has shown that graduate-level students are supposed to be guided on their way from employing knowledge-telling strategies to argument-building strategies. Such aim will allow the students studying in the HSE MA FL Program to share their research with the global academic community.

Second, we have reviewed the academic literature on academic writing to identify the micro and macro English language academic writing skills the students need for academic success in the global academic community. We added to this list the micro and macro English language academic writing skills the students in the HSE MA FL Program need to meet the writing demands placed by the HSE MA FL Program.

Third, we have identified the lack of data gathered in Russian universities and suggested the design of the methodology that will allow the HSE FL faculty not only to generate data but also to assess whether the skills determined by the analysis have influence on the graduate students' overall success in the HSE MA FL Program.

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