Present by :Yun Xiao LI (Stephanie) P64690

Academic literacy plays an important role in the English language learners, which may have good writing and reading, mainly for international Chinese students’ academic purpose.

The need to learn English as foreign language has increased, particularly in non-native English –speaking countries, teaching and learning of the four skills in English are crucial in the area of higher education. writing is conceived to be the most important and the most complicated of the four skills for students to master ( Richards&Renandya 2002).

In china, students start learning English not very early, also the materials and the text books for teaching are only mainly related to grammar and limited writing.

With the rapid development of using academic literacies in higher education, more and more international Chinese students are occurred some writing problem, use more times vocabulary, repeat to use more sentence pattern.

(a) To investigate academic literacy practices in terms of writing among the Chinese undergraduate students in the Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM.

(b) To find out the main causes of academic writing problems among these students in the Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM.

(c) To suggest some solutions to solve the academic writing problems among these students in the Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM.

1. What are English language academic literacy practices in terms of writing among Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM?

2. What are the main causes of academic writing problems among these students Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM?

3. How do the Chinese undergraduate students to overcome the challenges they faced in acquiring dominate academic literacies in terms of writing?

This is a small- scale study Does not include other international who might

experience a similar situation as the Chinese EFL learners in terms of their academic writing problems.

Will involve 50 international Chinese undergraduate students who are study in the Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM.

Which allows the Economics and Business undergraduate students to state their perception and experience about their difficulties in learning to compose in English as a foreign language, also can help them to improve their writing, enhance their interest on the academic literacies.

New times require new peoples, new literacies constituted and represented through the cultures and languages for communicators.

‘Literacies’ expressing the complex and variety of predispositions, capacities and competences required of the people to respond to the fundamental changes in the life of society and the globe. (Koo Yew Lie 2008)

Effective writing and reading are skills that are grounded in the cognitive domain, which contain learning, comprehension, application and synthesis of new knowledge.

Writing may instead be a laborious and even dreaded exercise of attempting to place thoughts on paper while developing mastery over the rules of writing, such as spelling, citation format and grammar (Joseph Defazio, Josette Jones, Felisa Tennant, and Sara Anne Hook 2010)

Lacked basic skills, such as understanding and executing simple instructions

Limited approach to write The characteristics of students with learning difficulties also

lead to limited academic writing.

Trioa (2003) suggests that the problems experienced by students in writing effectively are attributing, in part, to their difficulties in executing and regulating the processes which underlie proficient composing, planning and revisions of their work.

Cho and Schunn (2007) Given to writing and reading practice outside of the content covered was apparent in higher education is good way to train students’ writing and reading.

(Holtzman, Ellliot, Biber, and Sanders, 2005,p.285) The ability to communicate effectively has been recognized as a hallmark for membership in the learned professions.

Barton, Gee, Street, Lea and Street: new literacy studies

Journet(1990): New contrastive rhetoric Johns(1997): The theory of L1 and L2

literacy

Focuses on solve academic writing problems of L1/L2 students, and it is closely related to academic L1 and L2 literacy.

It is found that most of these academic writing approaches were used by non-native English speaking students.

Many of researchers such as attributed such difficulties partly to insufficient English language education in participants’ home countries, also lacking of English language education in many of EFL countries,with few opportunities to perform English particular academic writing in their home countries.

This is a descriptive and explanatory study using mixed method approach design, namely a integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches

For the quantitative method, a questionnaire For the qualitative part, an interview “a mixed method research design is a procedure

for collecting, analyzing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative researchers and methods in a single study to understand a research problem.” The reason for using these two types of research method is to get a rich data for the study.

In the questionnaire, 50 Chinese undergraduate students who study Faculty of Economics and Business at UKM will answer the questionnaire.

In the semi-structure interview, 6 Chinese undergraduate students will be chosen from the amount of 50 to participate in the interview.

Quantitative data The questionnaire helps the researcher in gaining

students’ feedback towards some questions and problems. using Monkey Survey which is a website for the researchers to do an online questionnaire survey for free

Qualitative data For the group interview, the researcher will

divided the interviewees into 2 groups, each group have 3 interviewees. the interview questions are asked about the perception and exiting knowledge to know about academic literacies, main writing problems they occurred, and how they overcome these difficulties.

Quantitative data analysis For the questionnaire part, the data will picked out and

analyzed, reported by using scale. The items in questionnaire used a 5-point liker scale ranging from 1 strongly disagree to 5 strong agree to identify the respondents’ accuracy information.

Qualitative data analysis

For the interview part, the interview transcription was made according to the record of chat, and then gets the main points to summarize. The reviewed transcripts will keyed in and descriptively analyzed according to emergent themes to answer research questions. Interview data will be summarized to show the main ideas and common answers from respondent.

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