Academic writing: Perceptions of students of human sciences and engineering sciences at a chilean university

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory cross-sectional quantitative study, the main goal of which was to know the perceptions about academic writing from two groups of student at a Chilean university. The first group was enrolled in a program in the field of human sciences (20 students in the Translation program) and the second was enrolled in Engineering Sciences (32 Engineering students). For this purpose, a Likert questionnaire was designed and applied, based on a scale to identify problems in academic writing and on the five dimensions covering the before, during and after academic writing (planning, textualization, revision, postponing writing, attitudes towards writing). The results show that students of Engineering Sciences perceive greater difficulties in writing than students from Humans Sciences. In the dimensions of textualization and revision, statistically significant differences were also observed between both groups. This demonstrates the need to teach writing in different specialized fields at the university.