Improving Academic Writing with Oklahoma State University

Marina Predvoditeleva, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Management and  Elizaveta Slevitch,  Associate Professor  at  the Department of Hotel and Restaurant Administration (Oklahoma State University)  talk about the first results of cooperation between Oklahoma State University and HSE on the specialisation 'Tourism and Hotel Management' on the Master’s programme 'Experience Economy: Hospitality and Tourism Management'.

Marina Predvoditeleva

Associate Professor

 

We have established a good tradition on our specialisation of students delivering papers at international conferences. But for this to happen, applications from students keen to participate have to go through a strict selection process to show they have a good command of the requirements of the genre. We introduced an Academic Writing course into the programme to teach students the skills they need to write a paper, how to structure it,  what language to use, how to present their argument in a logical way, etc. We turned to our colleague at Oklahoma State University, Professor Elizaveta Slevitch for help and this year she gave the first research seminar on academic writing to 1st year students on our master’s programme specialisation.

Elizaveta Slevitch

Associate Professor 

Fortunately, all the students in the group have a good grasp of English so I didn’t have to translate the textbook material for the course. I taught them via videoconferencing and LMS (Learning Management System) - we have a similar system in Oklahoma State University. The way it worked was that when the students doing research as part of their coursework prepared the usual sections of an academic article (introduction,  book review, etc.), I marked them and made comments. They made changes and I was very pleased with the articles they wrote as a result. They were on a level with the best student research papers and could easily be presented at an international conference.