NNS Postgraduate Students’ Academic Writing: Problem-solving Strategies and Grammatical Features

Abstract

ESP academic writing, especially postgraduate dissertation writing, is a formidable task for Non Native Speaker (NNS) students. Grammaticality is one of the common challenges faced by students who turn to various strategies to compensate for their insufficient grammar mastery. Hence this study was firstly aimed to identify the effectiveness of these strategies acro ss “Construction Contract Management, TESL, and Chemical Engineering” disciplines in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and secondly to explore “grammatical accuracy, complexity, and variety” through a qualitative analysis of a number of dissertations from these disciplines. The results revealed significant patterns across the disciplines. Furthermore a method for measuring grammatical complexity was offered.