Assessing the statistical differences in academic writing skills across disciplines in higher education

Abstract

Writing different forms of text at different levels for responding satisfactorily to issues in the academic community is important. Thus, this paper examines the statistical differences between tertiary students’ academic writing skills in different disciplines and at three different levels. We use a quantitative approach and descriptive design to extract and analyse data comprising students’ essays from four departments of a public university in Ghana. We analyse the data using descriptive statistics and ANOVA in SPSS. The results show that there is a significant difference between students’ academic writing skills across levels within a discipline. On the contrary, there is no significant difference between students’ academic writing skills across departments. We successfully generated corpus data and analysed the same statistically which is not common in the English as a second language learning context, thereby contributing greatly to the academic environment. This paper also focused on the students’ general vocabulary knowledge as a crucial factor in their academic writing skills.

Keywords:

• Discourse community
• vocabulary knowledge
• academic writing
• higher education
• ghana

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Stephen Darwin, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile

SUBJECTS:

• Applied Linguistics
• Corpus Linguistics
• Discourse Analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivy Jones-Mensah

Ivy Jones-Mensah is an applied linguist whose research interest is in corpus linguistics, academic writing, and English and literacy education. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana and an MPhil in Applied Linguistics from the same University. Ivy also holds an MA in Teaching Communication Skills from the University of Cape Coast, and an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Ghana. She teaches English Language and Communication Skills at the University of Professional Studies, Accra, and she is an associate editor of the University Journal.

Kris Hilton

Kris Hilton is a financial economist and a leadership scholar. He is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Cape Coast. He teaches Applied Macroeconomics and Managerial Economics at the College of Distance Education of the same University. He is the Chief Research Officer of Kricet Insight, London, UK. His research interests include Financial Economics, Applied Macroeconomics, Managerial Economics, Applied Statistics, and Leadership.