by Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (SELCS-CMII)

After half-term, Felix* realised that the academic rhetoric required of essays at UCL was very different from what she had learned in her BA in China.

Using lengthier and more elaborate sentences is typical in Chinese academic writing. However, Felix learned that this is seen as undesirable or unnecessary in academic English writing, which prefers short, plain language.

People assume that MA students are already skilled in writing coursework assignments, but often forget that many MA students come from radically different linguistic and academic backgrounds and are still learning new English language skills during the MA programme.

Photo by Sarah Elizabeth on Unsplash

This is particularly the case for the MA in Comparative Literature, which attracts a large number of Chinese overseas students each year.

To focus on this issue, Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (Programme Director in MA Comparative Literature and EDI Co-lead at SELCS-CMII) organised a series of Grammar and Proofreading Workshops in Term 1 2023-24 for students whose first language is not English and who have not written extensive academic pieces in English before arriving at UCL.

This project raised awareness about linguistic disparities among MA students. It also offered an extended learning opportunity to help students who are disadvantaged compared to students whose first language is English and who have already been trained in anglophone academic cultures.

Workshop sessions took the format of individual feedback sessions (lasting 30 min) between a tutor and the student, focusing on a short piece of writing that responded to a writing prompt. Two PhD students in Comparative Literature, Oli Eccles and Clara Ng, tutored the sessions and gave meticulous feedback to tutees.

Sophie* is an MA student in Comparative Literature who found the English-language requirements for her module overwhelming, especially since English was not her native language and she had never written entire essays in academic English before.

The feedback sessions in the workshop focused on the grammatical and stylistic details of writing, which helped her understand what argumentative writing in academic English required.

Jian, another student, told their personal tutor that they found it very difficult to keep up with readings from their Comparative Literature modules.

They needed to check dictionaries constantly, which considerably slowed down their reading speed, and often worked until 2 a.m. to finish the required reading before class.

Due to this, they did not feel confident about completing written assessments. However, they found the workshop feedback extremely useful as their workshop tutor worked very patiently with them on details of constructing phrases, clarity of expression, and maintaining a coherent focus in essay writing.

Felix — the student mentioned at the beginning of this blog post — often made self-deprecating statements about not being able to address a certain problem in the conclusion.

After discussing these issues with Dr Li and attending the workshops, Felix has a much-improved understanding of the writing style and format required at UCL. Writing shorter and more concise sentences has also helped her to avoid extensive run-ons and grammatical errors that typically arise from constructing longer clauses.

This project has highlighted that passing an English language qualification such as IELTS or TOEFL is not the best indicator of overseas non-anglophone students’ existing training and abilities for writing complex and argumentative essays, which is required for MA programmes at SELCS-CMII.

More attention should be paid to the varying linguistic, cultural, and academic cultures of our students, and to the most concrete aspects of writing such as how to formulate a clear phrase and avoid awkward passive tenses.

Overall, this workshop has proved very useful for MA Comparative Literature students, especially in Term 1 when students are still settling into their courses.

Many thanks again to the workshop tutors Oli and Clara for their dedication and work!

*Names cited here are not real names as students preferred to keep their comments anonymised.