Academic Writing is designed for first-year Master's students enrolled in the Didactics of Foreign Languages (DFL) program. The course develops the academic writing skills required to produce clear, coherent, and evidence-based texts for research purposes. Students are introduced to the principles that distinguish academic writing from general writing, including objectivity, formality, precision, and audience awareness, preparing them to write conference papers, research reports, and their final master's thesis.
The course is organised into progressive learning units that cover the foundations of academic writing, genre conventions, and research-writing frameworks, such as the IMRAD structure and John Swales' CARS model. Students also explore stance and metadiscourse by learning to use hedges and boosters appropriately in academic texts. Particular emphasis is placed on cohesion and coherence through lexical and grammatical devices, thematic progression, and corpus-informed writing using tools such as AntConc to enhance academic vocabulary and style.
The course adopts a process-orientated approach that emphasises drafting, revising, editing, and peer review. Through practical writing tasks and collaborative feedback, students develop the ability to produce well-structured, coherent, and academically appropriate texts that meet the expectations of postgraduate research and professional academic communication.
Before starting this course, students must be able to:
✓ Show that they have a good grasp of academic words and advanced grammar in English.
✓ Write well-organised paragraphs with clear topic sentences.
✓ Summarise or paraphrase an academic text.
✓ Use basic referencing conventions.
Dr. Lynda MESSAOUDENE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Letters and Languages, at Abderrahmane Mira University of Béjaïa, Algeria. She holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Jordan.
Her doctoral research focused on critical discourse analysis (CDA), comparative discourse analysis, and applied linguistics. Her research interests include academic writing, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics,
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