Task2-EAP

Academic writing: Starting with Wikipedia.

Academic summary.

Moving from personal writing to formal academic writing is a big challenge students have to face when going through higher education. Students must adopt styles, conduct research, summarize, paraphrase and meet audience expectations (Tardy, 2010). Another skill that must be learned is how to avoid plagiarism. Therefore, a certain level of expertise is required even though students do not see themselves as experts on the topic.

All these academic literacy skills are even more difficult in a second language. As a consequence, writing academic texts for second language (L2) L2 writers is a gruelling task. Tardy (2012) states that this arduous task of creating academic texts can be solved by “introducing the skills of academic writing for L2 writers through the process of composing an article for the web-based encyclopedia site Wikipedia” ( p.13).  

Tardy (2010) also affirms that writing for Wikipedia makes students face the challenges of academic writing and  it also raises awareness of the importance of reliability and credibility. Additionally, in order to support what she has claimed before, she makes reference to an assignment students had to accomplish in which students were expected to write a Wikipedia article. She also describes the steps learners had to go through and how successful this assignment has turned to be.

 To sum up, Tardy (20120) claims that even though writing formal academic texts could be a difficult task, its difficulty can be diminished by starting with small-scale research projects so that students can develop literacy skills gradually. She also states that writing a Wikipedia article can be one of those small projects for the students to start working with academic texts.

Reference

Tardy, C. M., (2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to academic writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27. Retrieved October 2012 from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=19958