An investigation into problems in the writing of conference abstracts by Japanese graduate students

Academic writing is one of the most difficult language competences to acquire for EFL students. In Japan, students in the first and second years of undergraduate non-English majors are likely to receive English language teaching that covers basic and foundational language skills, e.g. paragraph writing and 5-paragraph essays, which are considered to be EGP (English for General Purposes). Thus, most students enter graduate schools without having had exposure to authentic academic writing, including abstracts. This paper reports a case study of an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course at postgraduate level in a Japanese university of science and engineering, and identifies common problems within the genre of conference abstracts produced by approximately forty M1 (1^st year Master´s) students of ICT majors. Students were asked to write, in English, two drafts of a conference abstract either individually or in pairs. The second draft was revised based on the feedback on the first draft provided by the teacher using a feedback form. The same form was used for the feedback on the second draft for consistency and to analyze students´ improvements as well as areas that still remained difficult for students. Collated data from both drafts and the comparison of the two drafts indicate that the most difficult aspects to improve included grammar errors (e.g. word forms, subject-verb agreements, and plurals), incorrect balance of the moves, and insufficient highlighting of key moves.