Helping students develop their writing skills - a resource for lecturers

It is not surprising that many students find writing difficult since it is a cognitively and emotionally challenging and demanding activity. While there are many books aimed at helping students to develop their writing, most offer only tips and suggestions, focus on grammar and syntax rather than on managing the process of writing, and rely on students to teach themselves how to write better. Merely offering advice to students is not enough because developing effective writing skills and positive attitudes towards writing take time and effort, require support, instruction and opportunities for practice and feedback.

Current theory and research on developing writing skills suggests that writing is best developed by the discipline lecturer in the context of subject learning. Therefore, all lecturers, irrespective of their discipline, need to take responsibility for helping their students develop writing skills. Ideally, they should adapt curricular goals, teaching and learning methods and assessment practices in order to integrate writing support into their subjects. Many lecturers, however, may be reluctant to make these changes to support writing because they believe that they do not have the knowledge and skills to do so. One way to encourage and support lecturers who do not have experience in teaching writing to help their students develop writing skills is to provide "user friendly" instructional activities and strategies which they can easily adapt and use as part of their regular teaching.

In this paper, we describe a project funded by a Committee for University Teaching and Staff Development Grant aimed at developing a resource, in the form of a book, to help lecturers across the disciplines to develop their students' writing skills. The book responds to the many calls to teach writing as an integral part of all disciplines and is underpinned by a five step problem solving model (Five-by-Three Writing Model) that has been successfully used by students across a number of disciplines. The book recognises the complex nature of writing and includes simple and practical strategies that can be used to help writers manage any writing task. We describe the rationale and philosophy underpinning the design and development of the book, discuss feedback from lecturers and students who trialled the activities included in the book and reflect on the importance of empowering lecturers to help their students develop writing skills for learning and for life.