Writing an Academic Paper in English: An Exploratory Study of Six Taiwanese Graduate Students

With an increasingly higher number of ESL/EFL graduate students writing and publishing in English, writing researchers and teachers find it important to understand the student¿s process of writing academic papers. This book reports a study that investigated the composing processes of six Taiwanese graduate students writing an academic paper in English. To examine their cognitive processes and the affect factors involved in the writing processes, the researcher used the think- aloud procedure, retrospective interviews, the writing motivation and effort questionnaire, and the second language writing apprehension test.The results showed the three more skilled writers were different from the less skilled writers in that they employed more higher-level reading strategies, planned more substantially in the pre-writing phase, and performed more reviewing acts throughout the writing process. They were also found to have higher motivation and lower writing anxiety. This book provides useful information for researchers who are interested in research into the process of writing for academic purposes in the ESL/EFL context.