Developing academic writing skills in a master’s program at a non linguistic university

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of developing master’s students’ academic writing skills in the process of learning a foreign language at a non‑linguistic university. The article highlights the importance of developing foreign‑language academic literacy as the most significant component of academic communication and the research activities of a future specialist. Academic writing is an essential component of master’s-level education. Students at non-linguistic universities are expected to prepare research papers, conference abstracts, literature reviews, and master’s theses, often in English. However, many of them experience difficulties with academic vocabulary, text structure, argumentation, source integration, and formal style. This article examines the main challenges involved in developing academic writing skills among master’s students at non-linguistic universities. It also discusses effective teaching strategies, including genre-based instruction, process writing, scaffolded practice, peer review, corpus tools, and responsible use of artificial intelligence. The article argues that academic writing should be taught systematically and integrated into students’ research and professional training.

The article emphasizes that students become familiar with the modern rules of written scientific communication, which must be taken into account when preparing academic texts in a foreign language. Students are encouraged to follow examples of authentic foreign‑language academic texts and to analyze the principles of constructing an academic text and incorporate them into the system of constructing their own written works. The article shows that the lexical content and examples of typical syntactic structures based on academic foreign‑language texts become the foundation for creating one’s own written text. The authors of the article note that the assessment of the development of academic writing skills is carried out both during classroom sessions and based on the results of students’ participation in scientific and practical conferences, where they present their materials in a foreign language.