Integrated content and language scientific writing courses for graduate students

Abstract

To help graduate students in the fields of science and engineering to publish in international journals,universities are increasingly providing writing instruction (Li et al., 2020). Interdisciplinary collaborationhelps students to improve their texts and to adjust to a new genre (Eriksson, 2018) and enhancesstudents’ performance through discipline-specific language support (Lasagabaster, 2018). However,discipline-specific instruction for EFL graduate students is scarce especially in Asian contexts (Li, 2020;Li et al., 2018). The goal of this presentation is to examine how a South Korean science and engineeringuniversity has developed integrated content and language (ICL) scientific writing courses and howinterdisciplinary collaboration between language and content professors has been implemented in theprocess. The presenters conducted interviews with six language professors (LPs), five contentprofessors (CPs), nine teaching assistants (TAs), and 42 students involved in the offering of 25 ICLscientific writing courses. They also conducted questionnaire surveys among 225 students who hadtaken the courses. The results show that students made valuable contributions to the course by sharingdiscipline-specific knowledge, felt that the courses provided practical value for their writing needs, andwere appreciative of their instructor’s individual attention and feedback on their writing work. The studyalso highlights difficulties in collaboration between the language and content professors and the need toenhance the course’s relevance to students’ research fields. Difficulties in interdisciplinary collaborationrose mainly because the CPs were overburdened by their research responsibilities. The study presents arecommended model of collaboration among LPs, CPs, and TAs, where TAs figure prominently in thecreation, administration, and management of the course. Through discussion, audience members willhave the opportunity to consider and potentially revise the proposed model of collaboration. They willtake away sound suggestions on how to improve the interdisciplinarity of ICL scientific writing courses.