Abstract:

It is a fact that today’s companies demand that L2 graduating students write with L1 proficiency as part of an international workplace. This is especially true for students in the College of Technological Innovation (CTI) at Zayed University (ZU), whose IT students must communicate at a professional level. However, after the elimination of the foundational English program, these students no longer have standard instruction in basic academic skills. The assumption is that undergraduate instruction in writing (paragraphs, summaries, and research papers) will prepare students for the specific demands of technical communication (professional correspondence, report writing, and proposals). This gap in instruction in part explains why over half of CTI graduates remain jobless a year after graduation. Past assessments have indicated that writing is perhaps the weakest communicative skill – and the one most desired by companies. Along with this, most ZU instruction is online. Mobile learning initiatives dictate that students be taught via screen-driven classrooms. This action research goes past self-access tutorials to give students direct instruction in writing. This can be purposed to help students with a variety of linguistic issues. Fifteen-minute mini-lessons start with cohesion and end with lessons on emphasis. Delivery combines via a combination of hypertexted powerpoints, quick writes, and quizzes so that students can study, learn, practice, and then use. Initial efforts have raised student scores on IELTS assessments. Now, this further research uses linguistic analysis of both student errors and frequently-used structures to provide targeted composition instruction within a content course. Student writing will be analyzed to assess changes in grammatical accuracy and syntactic variety as well as communicative effectiveness.

Keywords:

Mobile learning, linguistic analysis, curriculum design, writing, composition, learning management systems, applied linguistics.