Abstract:
Departing from a socio-constructivist perspective, the main purpose of the research on
which this article reports was to indicate the effectiveness of both discipline-specific and generic
approaches in teaching academic writing to undergraduate university students. A quasi-experimental
design was followed, comparing the pre- and post-test essay ratings as well as the results
of post-intervention opinion surveys. The statistical analyses of the essay scores show that both
the discipline-specific and the generic interventions were effective in their own right. Although the
size of the improvement on the dimensions of the scoring instrument differs, the overall improvement
of the students in each group is statistically significant. Overall, the discipline-specific group
performed significantly better than the generic group. Their performance was also more consistent
across the dimensions of the scoring instrument. The results of the opinion survey indicate that
students in both groups were generally positive about the effect of the respective interventions on
their academic writing abilities. The only significant difference was the discipline-specific group’s
more positive experience of skills transfer. It is likely that their more positive appraisal of transferability
resulted from more in-depth exposure to authentic materials, a deeper level of engagement
with scholarly sources, more content knowledge, and more extensive discipline-specific writing.
