Academic Writing Intervention
An Alternative for Non-Thesis Track Students’ Final Paper Supervision
Nita Novianti
English Department, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jl. Dr. Setiabudhi No. 229, Bandung Indonesia
Keywords: Academic Writing Intervention, Non-thesis Track Students, Final Paper Supervision.
Abstract: Non-thesis track students in Indonesian universities are required to submit a final research-based or
scientific paper as part of the requirements for their graduation. However, they do not receive supervision as
is given to the thesis-track students. Therefore, this study aims to implement Academic Writing Intervention
program to help students produce quality scientific papers publishable in anthologies or journals and
improve their academic writing skills. Participants in this study consisted of two lecturers teaching non-
thesis courses and 15 students of an English literature program of a state university in Indonesia for the even
semester of the 2016/2017 academic year. The comparison between the papers written before and after the
Academic Writing Intervention program shows great improvement in the quality of the paper produced after
the intervention program. Overall, the students gave positive responses to the intervention program.
However, great reliance on the lecturers reduces the students’ autonomy in the writing process. Some
recommendations for the department and higher education in general regarding the implementation of this
program to assist students in writing publishable scientific papers are given.
1 INTRODUCTION
In accordance with the Circular of Directorate
General of Higher Education No. 152/E/T/2012
dated January 27, 2012 undergraduate students of
either the thesis or non-thesis track are obliged to
write scientific papers and publish them in scientific
journals, such as unaccredited national or
international anthologies or journals. However, non-
thesis track students, unlike their thesis-track
counterparts, do not receive any supervision for the
scientific paper writing. This lack of supervision
causes the produced scientific papers to be of low
quality, especially compared to those produced by
the thesis track students. This should be a concern,
considering the increasing number of students who
take the non-thesis track, especially in the English
literature program of a state university in Bandung,
Indonesia, under the study, and in any majors in
Indonesian universities in general.
While providing individual supervision seems to
be impossible, considering the large number of
students to supervise, academic writing intervention
program can be an alternative. The Academic
Writing Intervention program can be embedded in
the non-thesis courses, so students can use their
previous content knowledge and one reinforced in
the non-thesis courses to get ideas for writing
scientific papers. This is in accordance with the
argument of McWilliams and Allan (2014) that
“Embedding academic-writing interventions in
subject disciplines is a practical way of helping
students make explicit connections between
discourse variables of their subject and the particular
demands of a given assignment” (p. 1).
Thus, this research sought to investigate whether
the implementation of Academic Writing
Intervention can help improve the quality of
scientific papers produced by non-thesis track
students as well as their academic writing skills.
Out of the many types of academic papers, one
of the most difficult is scientific or research paper
for publication in scientific journals. Day (1983), as
quoted in Derntl (2014) defines research or scientific
paper as “a written and published report describing
the results of original research.” Similar to academic
writings in general, scientific papers also have
different conventions depending on the editor's
policy of a journal (Derntl, 2014). The differences
range from structure, format, content, to citation
styles. In terms of structure, some journals require
that papers be written with IMRAD structure or
Novianti, N.
Academic Writing Intervention - An Alternative for Non-Thesis Track Students’ Final Paper Supervision.
DOI: 10.5220/0007175608130817
In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference
on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 813-817
ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
813

introduction, method, results, and discussion (Peh
and Ng, 2008).
Unfortunately, there is not much research on
academic writing, especially scientific papers
written undergraduate students. Most research has
focused on scientific papers written by graduate
students (Al Badi, 2015; Seyabi and Tuzlukova,
2014; Al Fadda, 2012). The lack of similar research
at the undergraduate level is likely due to the novelty
of the trend of writing scientific papers among
undergraduate students, especially in Indonesia.
On the other hand, there have been many studies
of writing interventions conducted by previous
researchers, and many have demonstrated the
success of these writing intervention programs.
Archer (2008) investigated the influence of the
Writing Center Interventions on students’ academic
writing and found that the intervention provided by
the writing center improved students' writing quality.
Meanwhile, Nasir et al. (2013) provide interventions
in an action research project to improve the creative
writing skills of primary school students, and these
interventions prove to be beneficial to students.
Writing Intervention on a large scale has also
been applied in some countries; for example, in the
United States there was the “Tiered Writing
Intervention Models” program to help improve
writing skills of high school students coming from
low-achieving schools (Shaver et al., 2015) and
“Self-Regulated Strategy Development” as a Tier 2
intervention for low-grade primary graders with low
achievement (Flanders, 2014). In the Netherlands,
writing intervention has also been proven to help
improve the ability of primary school children in
writing (Koster et al, 2015). Bangert-Drowns et al.
(2004) also proved the success of writing-to-learn
interventions in improving student academic
achievement. The same results are also shown by
research of Rogers and Graham (2008). At the
university level, Switzer and Perdue (2011) reported
the results of a study of the implementation of an
intervention model called "Dissertation 101" to
improve information seeking, evaluation, and
synthesis skills of postgraduate students majoring in
education by collaborating between academic
librarians, lecturers writing center, and the graduate
students themselves. Perin and Hare (2010) reported
a Reading-Writing Intervention program for students
preparing to attend university courses at a
community college. A program called Content
Comprehension Strategy Intervention (CSSI) has
been proved to be effective as an intervention
program to improve the academic community's
academic reading and writing skills.
Given the success of various academic writing
intervention programs at various levels of schools
and countries, the researcher is optimistic that
similar programs will succeed in improving
academic writing skills and the quality of scientific
papers produced by the non-thesis track students
participating in this study.
2 METHODS
This qualitative research was conducted in the study
program of English Literature in a state university in
Bandung, Indonesia. It involved two lecturers of a
non-thesis course and 15 students attending the
course.
Data were in the form of assessment results of
scientific papers before and after the Academic
Writing Intervention. Before applying the Academic
Writing Intervention, modelling and brainstorming
were carried out to help students write a scientific
paper. After the papers were collected, Academic
Writing Intervention Program was applied for eight
meetings. The papers produced before and after the
intervention program were compared to see whether
there was improvement in their writing. To support
the primary data, interviews with lecturers and
selected students were carried out. Questionnaires
were also distributed to students to find out whether
students felt the benefit of the intervention in their
academic writing skills. In addition, to ensure
reliability and validity, the instruments of rubric
assessment and questionnaire were validated by two
experts in the field of scientific paper assessment.
3 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
In this study, the Academic Writing Intervention
program is in the form of a workshop that
incorporates various elements of intervention:
Brainstorming, drafting, peer feedback, and editing
(Zúñiga and Macias, 2006), assisted by feedback and
assessment from lecturers of course subjects. The
Academic Writing Intervention emphasizes
collaborative writing that has been proven to help
improve academic writing skills, especially for EFL
students (Kwon, 2014), and continuous supervision
from lecturers, both in groups and individually. The
integration of several writing techniques in the
program is based on the argument that it is important
to integrate several elements of the intervention to
find out which works best for students, as quoted
from the recommendations given by research report
CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology
Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education
814

of Graham and Perin (2007): “The optimal mix. . .
[is] educators need to test mixes of intervention
elements to find the ones that work for students with
different needs" (p. 12).
In the first seven meetings, students were given
examples of articles published in reputable national
and international journals, and the course content
was tailored to the interests of students. Students
were also guided in their brainstorming to find the
topic to write about.
Once the modelling process was completed,
students were assigned to write their first paper
without any intervention from the lecturers. The
lecturers only provided overall feedback on the
topics and ways of writing. The result was
predictably not satisfactory. Most of the papers did
not meet the convention of scientific papers,
although in the modelling the conventions were
described in great detail. The results are further
described in Table 1.
Table 1: Assessment of Students’ First Drafts.
No.
Assessment
Item
Assess
m
ent Results
Number of
Articles
Meeting the
Requirements
Number of
Articles Not
Meeting the
Requirements
1 Abstract 7 8
2 Introduction 3 12
3 Literature
Review
5 10
4 Metho
d
10 5
5 Findings and
Discussion
1 14
6 References 4 11
Table 1 shows that almost all scientific papers
written by students with modelling and lecturing
only were not publishable. The most common error
is in the writing of Findings and Discussion, where
almost all students could not describe the findings in
accordance with the purpose of research. In addition,
students did not discuss the findings in comparison
to the theories and previous research results.
Meanwhile, almost all students were able to write
the method quite well.
Academic Writing Intervention was then applied.
In the process, intensive supervision was given by
lecturers for all parts of writing, ranging from
content, style, to technical and mechanic aspects of
the writing. The intervention was mostly done in
three ways: the first was a workshop in the
classroom. In this activity, the lecturers provide
enrichment in the class. The lecturers explain how to
write a paper for a particular section and give an
example. The lecturing is completed with
discussions with students. This activity is followed
by peer review and editing, where students read their
scientific papers and provide feedback to each other.
The third activity is teacher conferencing, which is
an activity where students have an individual face-
to-face supervision with one of the lecturers.
After going through the academic writing
intervention program, improvement of the quality of
student papers was obtained.
Table 2: Assessment of Students’ Final Drafts.
No.
Assessment
Item
Assessment Results
Number of
Articles
Meeting the
Re
q
uirements
Number of
Articles Not
Meeting the
Re
q
uirements
1 Abstract 14 1
2 Introduction 15 0
3 Literature
Review
15 0
4Metho
d
15 0
5 Findings and
Discussion
12 3
6 References 13 2
Table 2 indicates that almost all students who
participated in Academic Writing Intervention
activities are able to produce papers that meet the
criteria specified in the rubric. There are still some
students who make errors in their papers, with the
most common errors found in the section of findings
and discussion. Generally, the error lies in: 1) The
absence of general findings that answer the research
question(s) or the purpose of the study; 2) Some
missing important findings; and 3) Findings not
discussed in accordance with the theories presented
in the literature review section and/or in comparison
to the findings of previous research. Meanwhile,
generally errors in citation style are in the forms of
inconsistencies or missing volume, issue, city of
publication, etc.
When interviewed, the students who still wrote
parts of this article incorrectly admitted that they did
not make revisions as suggested by the lecturers, and
submitted the papers at the last moment.
Nevertheless, the quality of papers written by
students in general has met the requirements of
scientific papers publishable in scientific journals.
Hence, it can be said that the Academic Writing
Intervention program has helped improved the
quality of academic papers produced by the non-
thesis track students. This success corresponds to
previous successful intervention programs using
workshop method in EFL (English as a Foreign
Academic Writing Intervention - An Alternative for Non-Thesis Track Students’ Final Paper Supervision
815

Language) or ELT (English Language Teaching)
settings (Echeverri et al., 2011).
Results of questionnaire further reveal that
students had positive responses to the academic
writing intervention program. This positive response
is similar to that obtained by previous writing
intervention programs (Archer, 2008; Nasir et al.,
2013). Of the three types of intervention activities
undertaken, based on a questionnaire filled by
students, almost all say that teacher conferencing is
the most useful activity. According to the students,
in the conferencing, they get valuable feedback and
they can ask questions related to the writing process.
Meanwhile, peer review and peer editing activities,
according to most students are the least helpful. This
is because they consider their average ability to be
the same as their peers’, so no significant input is
obtained from the process to improve their paper.
Although the papers produced improved in their
quality, and students gave positive responses to the
intervention program, it cannot be claimed that
students have improvement in their academic
writing skills in general or whether the improved
skills will last long. This is in line with Keranen and
Munive’s (2012) argument that although most
writing intervention programs have helped to
improve the academic writing skills of participants,
the impact is not long. Often, shortly after the
program is over, participants lose the ability they
have gained through the experience of the workshop.
Therefore, it is also important to help increase the
motivation and love of students in writing, so that
the skills they acquire in this intervention program
will last long, even after they graduate and work.
4 CONCLUSIONS
This research has attempted to implement the
program of Academic Writing Intervention in the
non-thesis courses for English literature students in a
state university in Bandung. In general, this program
is very helpful for students in writing papers
publishable in journals as one of the prerequisites for
their graduation. The program also assists the study
program that cannot facilitate the supervision of
writing papers or final assignments for non-thesis
track students.
Although overall the program can be declared
successful, there are some things that need to be
noted, among others, is that this program requires
the seriousness of lecturers in guiding students to
write a publishable paper, and this program also
requires students to be able to independently develop
their papers in accordance with suggestion from the
lecturers. This research has also shown that peer
review and peer editing are not so popular among
students. Meanwhile, when applied properly,
students can benefit greatly from both of these
processes. Therefore, the lecturers are expected to
arrange two of these activities better so that the
students are more motivated to do peer review and
peer editing and so that students will not just rely on
the supervision of the lecturer.
Finally, this academic writing intervention
program is a pilot qualitative study that only
involved a small number of participants. Meanwhile,
most writing intervention programs were conducted
in a large scale. Hence, future research is expected to
expand this study in terms of scale and to also use
mixed research methods to further validate the
results.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article reports part of the results of research
funded by the Institute of Research and Community
Service of Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia to
which the writer expresses her utmost gratitude.
REFERENCES
Al Badi, I. A. H., 2015. Academic writing difficulties of
ESL learners. The 2015 WEI International Academic
Conference Proceedings. pp. 65-78.
Al Fadda, H., 2012. Difficulties in academic writing: From
the perspective of King Saud University postgraduate
students. English Language Teaching. 5(3), pp.123-
130.
Archer, A., 2008. Investigating the effect of Writing
Centre interventions on student writing. South African
Journal of Higher Education. 222, pp.248-264.
Bangert-Drowns, R. L., Hurley, M. M., Wilkinson, B.,
2004. The effects of school-based writing-to-learn
interventions on academic achievement: A meta-
analysis. Review of Educational Research. 74, pp.29-
58.
Derntl, M., 2014. Basics of research paper writing and
publishing. International Journal of Technology
Enchanced Learning. 6(2), pp.105-123.
Echeverri, K. B., Marín, L. E., Castillo, V. M., 2011.
Improving academic writing in an ELT program
through writers’ workshops (Unpublished research
report), Universidad Technologica de Pereira.
Colombia.
CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology
Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education
816

Flanders, C. A., 2014. Self-regulated strategy development
(SRSD) for writing: A tier 2 intervention for fifth
grade (Unpublished dissertation), The University of
Southern Maine. USA.
Graham, S., Perin, D., 2007. Writing Next: Effective
strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle
and high schools—A report to Carnegie Corporation
New York, Alliance for Excellent Education.
Washington, DC.
Keranen, N., Munive, S. M., 2012. Short and long-term
effects of writing intervention from a psychological
perspective on professional and academic writing in
higher education—the EFL writers’ workshop.
Journal of Academic Writing. 2(1), pp. 48-58.
Koster, M. P., Tribushinina, E., De Jong, P., Van-den
Bergh, H. H., 2015. Teaching children to write: A
meta-analysis of writing intervention research. Journal
of writing research. 7(2), pp.299-324.
Kwon, C., 2014. Student perspectives on group work and
use of L1: Academic writing in a university EFL
course in Thailand. Second Language Studies. 33(1),
pp. 85-124.
McWilliams, R., Allan, Q., 2014. Embedding academic
literacy skills: Towards a best practice model. Journal
of University Teaching and Learning Practice. 11(3),
pp. 1-22.
Nasir, L., Navqi, S. M., Bhamani, S., 2013. Enhancing
students’ creative writing skills: An action research
project. Acta Didactica Napocensia. 6(2), pp. 27-32.
Peh, W. C., Ng, K. H., 2008. Basic structure and types of
scientific papers. Singapore Med Journal. 49(7), pp.
522-525.
Perin, D., Hare, R., 2010. A contextualized reading-
writing intervention for community college students.
Community College Research Center Brief. 44, pp.1-4.
Rogers, L., Graham, S., 2008. A meta-analysis of single
subject design writing intervention research. Journal
of Educational Pyschology. 100, pp. 879-906.
Seyabi, F. A., Tuzlukova, V., 2014. Writing problems and
strategies: An investigative study in the Omani School
and university Context. Asian Journal of Social
Sciences & Humanities. 3(4), pp. 37-48.
Shaver, D., Wagner, M., Greene, S., 2015. Tiered writing
intervention models for secondary students: Project
findings in brief, SRI International. Menlo Park,
California.
Switzer, A., Perdue, S. W., 2011. Dissertation 101: A
research and writing intervention for education
graduate students. Education Libraries. 34(1), pp. 4-
14.
Zúñiga, G., Macias, D. F., 2006. Refining students’
academic writing skills in an undergraduate foreign
language teaching program. Ikala, revista de lenguaje
y cultura. 11(17), pp. 311-336.
Academic Writing Intervention - An Alternative for Non-Thesis Track Students’ Final Paper Supervision
817