Email this article Teaching Academic Writing Features through Literature Reviews (LRs)
Abstract
This research is written with the belief that carefully reading and examining the LR sections in research papers published in academic peer-reviewed international journals warrants learning from others’ practices, regardless of any shortcomings that might be there. Hence, it presents the researcher’s practical teaching guidelines on how to use already published LR sections in helping tertiary level students learn about and acquire the academic writing conventions of LRs. It begins with a general discussion of the features of academic writing, how all these are all embedded in the LR sections, and then introduces the steps for sensitizing students to these features and their pragmatic uses. Adopting such strategies will, hopefully, bring about good understanding of the LR function, contents, structure, linguistic features, and will ultimately enable students produce informative LR sections for their research projects. This study utilized qualitative and quantitative tools to gauge the impact of the teaching method used. Results show improvements in students’ post teaching written productions. The paper concludes with a discussion of how such an exercise impacted students’ understanding of the LR writing process.
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