Academic Writing for Postgraduates Across Disciplines: A Lexico-syntactic Perspective

Abstract

Postgraduate academic writing is an essential skill that students must acquire, but mastering its conventions continues to be problematic, particularly for foreign English-speaking students. This study examines postgraduate students’ lexico-syntactic trends in academic writing across various disciplines. With a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 150 postgraduate students through surveys, a corpus of 100 academic texts, and semi-structured interviews with 10 academic writing instructors. The findings reveal that building arguments, selecting appropriate academic vocabulary, and acquiring discipline-specific conventions are primary challenges students face. Furthermore, linguistic challenges such as grammatical complexity and positioning oneself within academic discourse are more prominent for non-native speakers of English. Corpus analysis detects profound disciplinary variation: natural sciences stress brevity and technical correctness, humanities opt for interpretative density, and social sciences balance factual reporting and analysis. Effective pedagogic interventions include teacher response, peer feedback, guided reading, and writing workshops, and 70% of the students reported increased writing skills after structured training sessions. The study underscores the need for discipline-based pedagogic approaches to assist postgraduate students in overcoming writing problems. The long-term impacts of academic writing interventions and the role technology has in being able to write need to be researched further.