Developing professional skills in academic writing with postgraduate students

academic writing in foreign languages is typically taught at universities using the WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) approach. This approach is aimed at the knowledge and skills that are common for all academic disciplines. However, at the postgraduate level, of utmost importance is the development of professional skills, which with regard to academic writing include competencies to write a research paper in accordance with the conventions and expectations of the professional community. Such competencies are related to the WID (Writing in the Disciplines) approach. By conventions and expectations of the professional community, we mean discourse (communicative) practices approved and employed in this community. In this paper, we propose an approach to developing professional skills in English-language research writing through the analysis of communicative practices in the scientific-technical discourse. For this purpose, we employed two self-compiled corpora of texts written by (1) university students majoring in radio-engineering and (2) experienced international researchers from the same engineering field. The comparative corpus analysis allowed identifying distinctive features of each type of writing, with an array of features of student writing being viewed as difficulties of novice Russian-speaking authors and as deviations from the conventions of the international professional community. The analysis results were used to develop teaching materials aimed at eliminating difficulties and moving novice research writing closer to the international professional community norms.