Abstract
In an era of publish or perish, researchers around the world are eager to write up their findings and submit to an accredited outlet. Following the trend of the internationalization of universities, this ever-growing pressure spreads quickly and has reached to graduate students of all disciplines, especially those in non-English speaking countries. For non-native speaking students, reporting scientific findings in appropriate and precise written English is undoubtedly challenging and demanding. With this growing academic publication demand, especially in recent years, the demand of these English for Research Publication Purposes(ERPP)instruction has greatly increased. In response to this trend of publishing in English, universities across Asia have put great effort and resources in preparing graduate students for this demand, such as writing workshops, 18-week courses, or even a more ERPP comprehensive curriculum. As most research-oriented universities have embraced a cross-disciplinary type of graduate writing program, accommodating diverse needs of students from different disciplines has remained a great challenge for graduate students and writing instructors. With an exploratory nature, this proposed action research is context-specific, data-driven and will undergo consistent reflections on measures and influencing components in the system, and develop well-informed actions (innovation pedagogy in this case) for better ERPP practices. The aim of this proposed study is to address pedagogical challenges in the context of ERPP instruction, meaning Technical and Scientific Writing courses. Through Activity Theory system analysis, two major potential conflicts that could impede effective ERPP instruction are Tool and Division of Labor components. Thus, an integrated approach combing an interactive writing environment, WriteAhead, and co-teaching methods is proposed to accommodate the issues regarding disciplinary differences and the language-discipline divide. Furthermore, WriteAhead system will be used to construct personalized corpus so it could best fit the student’s needs for English writing, promoting autonomous learning and reflective thinking. Lessons learned from this implementation of the integrated approach will be applied to revise the current design and pedagogical model, and bring positive impact to the larger teaching and learning communities.