An analysis of students’ writing: the design of an online repository as a writing support

Good and effective communication skills, in Global Competence Understanding global markets and business particular for technical and scientific writing in English, is practices: languages; work in multicultural important for engineering students who need to have good global environments; global ethics, safety and security; cultural, social and political whose first language is English. Generally, poor writing is also evident in the test statistics of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) where writing has consistently the lowest score band among four test categories, even for those whom English is the first language. Intrigued by this phenomenon, we analyzed the writing of final year technical knowledge as well as competent soft skills. This is awareness increasingly being demanded by professional accreditation bodies. In response, institutions of higher education nowadays have courses or programs that teach students the soft skills part of these requirements, with the hope that by graduation, students can successfully demonstrate that they have met the accreditation standards. Anecdotal evidence from our academic staff, however, have shown that many graduating students have poor writing skills. This is also true for students engineering students, by examining their honors year capstone project reports. By examining the writing competence of these graduating students, the writing mistakes encountered in the reports were collected, analyzed and we propose to develop an online repository, together with the suggested corrections, so that students have online access to additional English writing support. Through this investigation, so-far, we have also uncovered that simple writing mistakes exist in the final version of an academic supervisor approved report. Some perspectives have been offered as to why this may happen.

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