Writing In Foreign Lands: The Case Of Postgraduate International Students and the Introductory Sections of a Project Paper

Studies have shown that academic writing is the most challenging skill to be mastered and despite its difficulty, this discourse has to be mastered quickly as a mark of scholarship in today's world of ‘publish or perish’. This paper reports on an action research that enquires into the academic writing of a project paper by international post-graduate students enrolled at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). With the premise that such academic writing may be improved with interventions via gene analysis, a four-stage action research has been planned and executed to address the introductory sections of the research project. This self-reflective enquiry is designed to inform the practitioners on the viability of the interventions provided for at the early stages of the writing as these novice writers embark on the journey towards academic socialization.