Evaluating the Effectiveness of Year One Academic Writing Course in Preparing Students for the Final Year Project

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Academic Writing; Final Year Project Readiness; Writing Skills

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of a first-year Academic Writing course in preparing undergraduates with the necessary academic writing skills for their Final Year Project. The course teaches basic skills such as paraphrasing, summarising, synthesising and using sources responsibly. Responses were obtained from 40 final-year students who are writing their Final Year Project, at the Language Centre of a public university in Malaysia using a 19-item Likert-scale questionnaire. The questionnaire showed high internal consistency reliability, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.89. It was found that students rated paraphrasing and summarising to have high development, while synthesis has been developed at a moderate level. Students were also found to have transferred the writing skills and knowledge to other courses, which is a positive learning transfer. However, they felt that the work and activities in the course did not entirely prepare them for the long piece of academic writing needed for their Final Year Projects. Overall, it is suggested by the study that the course successfully develops foundational writing techniques. However, it fails in preparing students for the more advanced and complex forms of writing they would be expected to complete in their Final Year Project. In conclusion, it is suggested that the course should provide more synthesising practice, longer research-related writing tasks and ongoing writing support at all stages of the programme to reinforce students’ research writing readiness.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Fazillah Sulaiman
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/28
TI  - Evaluating the Effectiveness of Year One Academic Writing Course in Preparing Students for the Final Year Project
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Research on Language 2025 (IROLE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 383
EP  - 390
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_29
ID  - Sulaiman2026
ER  -