ABSTRACT
Academic success in Higher Education largely rests on an ability to write well (e.g. Douglas, 2010; Hewings, 1999; Leki and Carson, 1994; Lillis and Scott, 2008; Nation, 2008; North, 2005a). At undergraduate and postgraduate level, written assignments are usually the primary means through which students are judged, given feedback and ultimately awarded a degree. Given that success or failure in tertiary education is likely to have a great impact on the lives and careers of individual students, the ability to write in the preferred ways of the academy is of paramount importance. This reliance on assessed writing can present difficulties for both ‘home’ students whose first language (L1) is English and who have gone through the UK secondary education system, and the growing number of international students, the largest cohort of whom are Chinese. Both groups have to contend with difficulties such as producing extended pieces of writing for assessment, learning to write within the accepted style of their discipline and writing within a large and often unfamiliar range of text types or genres (see discussion of genres later in this chapter). However, relatively few large-scale studies have been carried out on assessed undergraduate writing from native speaker (NS) students in the UK, and fewer still have been conducted on non-native speaker (NNS) students’ tertiary level writing, despite the recent rapid growth in numbers of international students in UK universities (UKCISA, 2011).
