Scaffoldings in Academic Writing: The Role of Intercultural Rhetoric and Genre Analysis in Academic Socialization

International postgraduate students have been found to face numerous difficulties in writing academic discourse. As intervention strategy via genre analysis in an earlier study (UKM-PTS-058-2010) has been found to be inadequate, this paper will report on further scaffoldings derived from contrastive rhetoric (Kaplan 1966), which has evolved into intercultural rhetoric in tandem with genre analysis. This paper will first delineate how the interventions were introduced and second demonstrate how effective they were. A qualitative action research design, employing focus group interviews, which captured the narrative voices from the students and document analysis of the written texts, was used for the study.