An investigation into molecular biology and genetics department students' academic english writing needs

Abstract

There is a lack of research demonstrating the extent to which the English language preparatory year programs and their components meet the departmental needs of students and expectations of faculty tutors. In this regard, the overall purpose of this study is to investigate the academic English writing needs of university students in their English-medium content courses and to determine the extent to which the writing course in the English preparatory program could meet these needs. The data were collected from three stakeholders, namely students, faculty tutors and language instructors through questionnaires and analyzed descriptively such that frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations were calculated. The findings showed that students and faculty tutors had similar opinions regarding the academic English writing needs of the students at the department while English language instructors differed in their perceptions.