Philosophy of academic writing: challenges faced by students of the faculty of philosophy

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Philosophy of academic writing: challenges faced by students of the faculty of philosophy

Svetlana Danilina

PhD in translation studies, associate professor, Department of Foreign Languages for the Faculties of History and Philosophy,

Scientific and Research Institue of Philology

Taras Shevchenko National Univeristy of Kyiv, Ukraine

Summary

The article discusses the academic writing difficulties that the university students of the faculty of philosophy usually struggle with. The quantitave data is presented in the paper against the backdrop of the analysis of the relevant research that might suggest why the learners may encounter the mentioned challenges. On the level of content, the most common problems are related to the usage of complex philosophical terms, as well as to the correct syntactical construction of the text. On the level of form, a problematic area is that of the correct referencing and failure to paraphrase the sources that the learners use. These challenges are usually rooted in the lack of the proper knowledge about the rules of academic writing, as well as of the lack of sufficient practice aimed at these problematic areas that should be provided in the classroom.

Keywords: ESP, EFL, academic writing, philosophy, writing conventions.

academic writing difficultie

Academic writing (AW) remains a notoriously difficult skill for foreign language learners, even though their level of general foreign language proficiency may be quite high. The difficulties have primarily to do with the fact that - although the learners may be quite fluent users of a FL in everyday setting, academic writing offers many specific challenges, which a student might not be up to. This failure will usually result in the loss of the quality of the academic text and its failure to produce the expected effect on the reader.

AW has consistently remained in the focus of teaching research given its centrality to both successful studies at higher education insitutions, and for a scientific career. According to Caroline Coffin et al. (2003) student writing fulfills a range of purposes according to the various contexts in which it occurs [9]. These purposes include student assessment, effective learning and entering particular disciplinary communities. Bjork and Raisanen (1997) maintain that the essence of writing lies on the fact that it can also be viewed as a thinking tool for learning in all disciplines. Being a complex cognitive process, academic writing involves a set of aspects crucial for it to be successful, among them the ability to access, evaluate, and paraphrase the ideas and sources relevant for the research, the skill of referencing them correctly in the text, formulating the author's own ideas based on the previous studies [7]. Other competences of putting together a scientific text include writing an outline, an abstract, and a summary, which are indispensable to properly carry out the learners' academic tasks. Not less important is forming a thesis statement, writing convincing supporting sentences, and finally editing the text [5]. Leki and Carson (1994) point out that the progress and attainment made by the students in specialisms other than the English language highly likely depend on their mastery of academic writing [11].

AW research has highlighted the methodology of teaching the skill, i.e. product approach (concentrating rather on analyzing the final text and its grammar and lexical features) vs process approach (concentrating on the process of drawing up a text itself) [1], as well as the challenges of academic writing, the latter being of a particular interest for this study. Accounting for its complexity, academic writing poses numerous difficulties for learners. A significant number of EFL teachers find students' academic writing to be weak, and proving particularly demanding for students of "non-Anglicized linguistic and cultural backgrounds" [3].

AW is a complicated skill to master and even more so to do it in a FL, as it requires "careful thought, discipline and concentration" [10]. Al Fadda (2012) argues that the main challenges AW poses for ESL students include identifying stylistic difference between written and spoken discourse, producing correct grammar including subject-verb agreement, as well as building proper connections between sentences to make a coherent passage [3]. A challenge in itself is coming up with one's own scientific thesis that would underly the research, as well as explore the studies that have been done before and then paraphrase their findings with one's own words, here learners are tempted to merely copy-paste from the original source.

The students with an overall low level of linguistic proficiency will be likely to struggle particularly much with the academic writing. Other factors that could result in the poor quality of academic texts are the interference of the learners' L1, inadequacy of theses, and unclear instructions given by the teacher [8].

The difficulties encountered in the AW of higher education students feature the failure to choose the appropriate academic vocabulary, wrong punctuation, and linguistic and grammar mistakes [2]. Additonally, somes students will generate their ideas in their native language and then translate them into English, which makes their writing more vague and incoherent. Al-Mubarak (2017) suggests that punctuation, prepositions, irregular verbs, and the correct use of tenses are among the main difficulties faced by English language students in academic writing [4].

Altaeb (2018) remarks that students normally lack the practice of AW in the classroom, as in the lesson they are usually supplied only with the theory, while practically have to do the writing tasks at home. Most students are not willing to struggle with the difficult task and prefer to use the internet for cut and paste instead. Another factor, which could discourage the learner, is the negative feedback provided by the teacher, which may lead to the student's unwillingness to use new vocabulary and grammar structures in their writing and result in their using only familiar words and expressions to avoid making mistakes. This strips their writing of creativity, while learners fail to make any progress in their writing competences. To overcome these difficulties and facilitate the process of acquiring academic writing skills, researchers have suggested various remedial measures, such as encouraging students to do a lot of extensive reading, look at good examples of academic writing,

practice writing, in addition to adhering to the instructors' advice and feedback [2].

The paragraphs below discuss the samples of the AW coming from the module tests completed by the second and third year students of Taras Shevchneko National University of Kyiv majoring in philosophy, whose level of English proficiency corresponds to B1+/B2 level according to CEFR. The difficulties in AW that the learners struggle with could be split into the following categories:

Misuse of articles: the definite article tends to be consistently used with the names of abstract notions, e.g.:

We know that the humankind came up with a mythological vertical model of the world which brought about the hierarchy of the most influentional powers in society.

...because the individualization always leads to the egoism.

Bacon belongs to the empiricism.

The selfishness would just not fit Feuerbach's criterias.

Wrong syntactical constructions or misusage of the lexical item: with the vocabulary items that frequently occur in the field of academic writing and/or those of philosophy and history:

People not only ascribe him an independent existence... (ascribe to him).

Understanding that time is here and your actions postulate your life is the big thing (probably, shape your life).

I highly resonate with Kant's ideas (Kant's ideas resonate with me).

It's hard to prescribe complex definitions to primitive people (ascribe).

Marxist ideology entrenched the society. The author must have meant “permeates society", or Marxist ideology “is entrenched in society” (entrench is a synonym to establish, you can entrench ideology, not society).

All our actions may be reviewed so, as they are the synthesis [...] and antithesis (viewed).

As a young man, of course the idea of Hobbes appeals to me more (syntactically ambiguous sentence, where the adverbial phrase “as a young man" could be attributed to both “Hobbes" and to “me").

Enlightenment for a lot of people is about declining the importance of Church and saying "yes" to science (decline is not a transitive verb).

These gatherings caused permanent comparison of each other (the author means caused people to compare each other, but fails to include this object of the verb caused into the sentence, thus making its sense vague).

Mistakes that distort the meaning of the utterance: due to the complexity of the concepts that students deal with in the realm of philosophy, they tend to misuse the collocations and set phrases in their writing, hedging language and linkers, which leads to the distortion of the sense of their text:

Civilisation is the product of nature of human beings, so that (^therefore) they're behind it.

Now consider that this way is our life as we never actually know what waits for us ahead according to (=as a result of) our irrational choices of free will.

Personally (lexical redundancy), this imperative reminds me of a saying.

Still he was very radical regarding (=in) his beliefs.

Punctuation errors - here the most common problem is identifying defining and non-deifning relative clauses and choosing the correct punctuation accordingly, as well as going by the rules of L1 and transferring them onto English:

I think, that this point of view was widespread in the times of enlightenment

There, the man and God are brought to the same level and the church, that argues that idea, don't understand what God is.

Failure to follow the conventions of the academic style of writing and slipping into the lexis of casual register and the usage of contractions:

It's kind of subjective.

I can't say it's actually something bad...

It was one of the main things why Rousseau was so upset about society of his time.

He criticized religion, but he wouldn't totally vibe with today's atheist vibe

Feuerbach would probably be more interested in finding ways to keep the good parts of religion--like community and shared values--while ditching the supernatural stuff.

Non avoiding plagiarism:

The lack of strategies and understating of how to avoid plagiarism in academic work is another serious issue. Students do not seem to be aware of the importance of paraphrasing the extracts of text that they use in their writing, nor do they seem to care to reference the sources of quottaions they rely on. A recent problem is the advent of AI software that generates texts and all the students have to do is copypaste from an AI chat.

The analysis of the mistakes made by learners shows that it is important to teach them not only the passive understanding of a lexical item but also train them in the correct usage thereof. Here the challenge may lie in the fact that - unitl the student actually misuses the word in their text - the teacher fails to accurately predict, what kind of difficulties may be encountered. This is the case with the words like to credit smtb with something, to ascribe smth to somebody, to resonate with smth, to postulate, to entrench smth, etc. Even after training the correct usage of these items in class, the students turned out to still misuse them, because the possible incorrect usage of such items had not been analysed in class. Thus, it seems that the feedback on the actual mistakes they make is the most effective remedial policy in this case, so in other words it is important to bring to the sudents' attention both the correct and incorrect instances of the vocabulary usage.

A perpetual difficulty for Ukrainian speaking students, who do not have articles in their L1, remains the usage of articles in English, especially relevant for students of the faculty of philosophy in the context of writing about abstact concepts. It seems there can never be sufficient practice of using articles with abstact nouns and students will always continue making mistakes with those.

Another persistent challenge remains the usage of punctuation. Because in the students' L1 the comma needs to be put in front of the conjunction щє, which is the analogue of that in English, learners will put the comma in front of that in English sentences. This also includes the instances of consistent failure to identify defining vs non-defining relative clauses, the incorrect usage of relative pronouns and punctuation. Thus, this syntactical feature of the English language needs also to be regularly addressed and students reminded of the rules of the correct usage of punctuation in these complex sentences.

Students will also favour the usage of contractions and low-key register, including pause fillers like “kind of” or “sort of', “things like that”, etc. Thus, they need to be reminded of the stylistic conventions of academic style of writing. On the other hand, in the case of their module test writing this could be connected with the fact that they know me too well and feel it is not necessary to write in a more formal register, whereas when they submit a piece of writing to a journal, for example, they might be more aware of the fact that they need to adjust their style appropriately.

Last but not least is the problems of plagiariasm in their writing. Whereas earlier it was easy for the teacher to identify the parts of the text copy-pasted from the internet, today it has become more of a challenge due to the widespread use of AI generated texts and the lack of legal regulations that would explicitly define which software teachers could apply to spot this kind of texts and how this kind of plagiarism should be assessed. In the case of misappropriating the parts of a text that belongs to a certain writer or come from a certain article in the internet without proper referencing, it is easy to identify these parts of the text as plagiarism and justify that the student should be penalized for the lack of academic integrity. But we still lack well established guidelines of how to assess the usage of AI, as this text has not been created by a human being but rather by a machine, so the question is raised whose rights are infringed in this case.

Apart from obvious strategies that could assist learners in mastering academic writing skills, like encouraging students to read academic texts in their specialism to enrich their academic vocabulary, or combine theory with practice in the classroom setting, the learners could also be offered some remedial instruction, aimed at benefitting their learning outcomes. One of them is the feedback on the mistakes they tend to make in their texts and the joint correction and discussion thereof, which increases their awareness of the difficulties they struggle with and enhances their learner autonomy. Students should also be made aware of the stages of academic writing, i.e. planning, writing, revising, and editing, with the special attention paid to the latter two, as they will tend to overlook them. Generally, it is hoped that the practical analysis of the writing issues encountered by the students of the faculty of philosophy may provide some ideas for EL instructors in terms of planning their classes, as well as addressing the writing difficulties in the university curriculum design.

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