Punctuation in academic writing of non-anglophone authors

academic writing of non-native English speakers often features various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetoric inaccuracies. Punctuation is among the most dominant types of inaccuracy; however, it has received insufficient interest in academic writing research and instruction. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that targeted academic writing instruction based on a cross-cultural approach can considerably improve punctuation skills of Russian novice researchers, and this improvement can be controlled with regard to the complexity of punctuation issues. These issues were classified into «easy», «moderate», and «complicated» categories according to their frequency in academic texts, complexity of the associated English grammar, and correlation with the Russian grammar. To test students’ skills in English punctuation, we chose five issues: two from the «easy» category and three from the «moderate» category. Two groups of students were tested: those who did not have an academic writing course (Group 1) and those who completed the course (Group 2). The results demonstrated that Group 2 performed significantly better than Group 1 in both the overall test results and the results for each punctuation issue. In addition, in Group 2, there was a correlation between students’ correct answers and the complexity of issues. The findings suggest that the most essential punctuation issues, whether easy and explicit or complicated and uncertain, should be elaborated and practiced in goal-oriented academic writing instruction.