Academic Writing In The Modern University Curriculum

Today, Russian universities face the administrative demand for boosting research publication rates, which presupposes the acquisition of appropriate academic writing skills. The discipline of Academic Writing appeared in the curricula of separate Russian universities only in the last decade. Feedback from the teachers shows that there are still many questions that need to be answered to move the learning outcomes to a satisfactory extent. Problems arising with teaching academic writing range from the absence of academic writing tradition in the national education system to the lack of students’ motivation for learning. Teachers confess they are stepping blindly in the darkness as the methodology of academic writing is still developing, and there are many unresolved questions. The matter is the discipline was borrowed from the Western and American education and needs to be adopted to the realities of Russian academic and social discourse. This proves to be a challenging task as the development of writing skills has lately been paid little attention to by our education system. Students meet serious difficulties on their way to the creation of academic texts following the norms of the international academic format and the requirements of scholarly journals. The present paper explains why the discipline of Academic Writing taught in Russian universities cannot advance the skills of research writing to the expected levels.