Postgraduate academic writing is an essential skill that students must acquire, but mastering its conventions continues to be problematic, particularly for foreign English-speaking students. This study examines postgraduate students’ lexico-syntactic trends in academic writing across various disciplines. With a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 150 postgraduate students through surveys, a corpus of 100 academic texts, and semi-structured interviews with 10 academic writing instructors. The findings reveal that building arguments, selecting appropriate academic vocabulary, and acquiring discipline-specific conventions are primary challenges students face. Furthermore, linguistic challenges such as grammatical complexity and positioning oneself within academic discourse are more prominent for non-native speakers of English. Corpus analysis detects profound disciplinary variation: natural sciences stress brevity and technical correctness, humanities opt for interpretative density, and social sciences balance factual reporting and analysis. Effective pedagogic interventions include teacher response, peer feedback, guided reading, and writing workshops, and 70% of the students reported increased writing skills after structured training sessions. The study underscores the need for discipline-based pedagogic approaches to assist postgraduate students in overcoming writing problems. The long-term impacts of academic writing interventions and the role technology has in being able to write need to be researched further.

Cite as:

Strochenko, L., Smaglii, V.,Viktoriia, C., & Yukhymets, S. (2025). Academic Writing for Postgraduates Across Disciplines: A Lexico-syntactic Perspective. Arab World English Journal, 16(1):285-297.

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol16no1.17

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Keywords

Academic writing, disciplinary differences, linguistic features, non-native English speakers, postgraduate students, writing challenges

About the author

Lesia Strochenko, Doctor of Philological Sciences, associate professor, professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Civil and Economic Justice, National University “Odesa Law Academy”, Odesa, Ukraine. Her research interests are Language Teaching and Learning, English for Specific Purposes, and Communicative Linguistics.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3619-3484

Valeriia Smaglii, doctor of philological sciences, professor, head of the Philology Department, Odesa National Maritime University, Odesa, Ukraine. Her research interests are Language Teaching and Learning, English for Specific Purposes, and Cognitive Linguistics.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6222-7652

Chetaikina Viktoriia, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine; Guest Scholar, University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research interests cover a range of linguistic problems, many of which fall within the scope of foreign language teaching methods and communicative linguistics. ORCID ID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0332-7925

Svitlana Yukhymets, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor, Associate Professor at Philology Department, Odessa National Maritime University, Odessa, Ukraine. Her research interests are Methodology of Teaching English, English for Specific Purposes, Linguistics, Theory and Practice of Translation. ORCID ID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3350-7310

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