The SUSU Academic Writing Office stuff took part in the IV International conference Academic Science Communication: Teaching Non-Native English Speaking Scholars in a Multidisciplinary, Multicultural Context, which was held from 20 to 22 October 2022. The conference was organized by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology together with the Association of Academic Writing Experts “National Writing Centers Concortium” (Moscow).
The transformation of modern science from monodisciplinary to multidisciplinary has led to profound changes in both the forms and methods of shaping non-native students’ foreign-language communicative competence necessary for successful communication in the field of science. The conference discussed methodological approaches to teaching English-language science communication in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary contexts.
The head of the SUSU Academic Writing Office Evgenia Khabirova reported on her author’s course for master’s students. The presentation was focused on the methods of teaching research writing and speaking to future philologists in the process of preparing a master’s thesis in English. The electronic course “Successful Strategies for Thesis Writing” is offered to NNSE students as an auxiliary self-study resource. The course is aimed to provide students with useful information on the stages of writing a master’s thesis, paper design requirements, academic writing style, research analysis, and methods of presenting the results.
Amanda Wegner, a proofreader of the SUSU Academic Writing Office, shared her experience of editing in the Academic Writing Office and discussed the most common errors and misconceptions in academic writing of Russian researchers.
David Mossop, a proofreader of the Academic Writing Office, summarized some of the most commonly encountered characteristics of non-native Russian-English translators and writers and attempted to make recommendations aimed at enhancing the English style, grammar and other linguistic features of the text, in order to harmonise the final product with comparable texts written and published by English native speaker academics.
Elizaveta Gromova, deputy director for international cooperation of the Institute of Law and associate professor at the department of Business Law of SUSU, and Daniel Brantes Ferreira, Senior researcher at SUSU, CEO of Brazilian Center for Mediation and Arbitration, shared their experience of creating an international research group, which unites young and experienced researchers from 7 countries (Brazil, USA, Russia, Italy, India, Portugal and Uganda) and 15 universities. They talked about activities with the group, advantages of this kind of education and problems they faced to make it work.
Leading experts in academic writing Elena Bazanova, Svetlana Souchkova, Irina Korotkina, Christine Feak, Angela Dadak, Betsy Gilliland, Kelly Metz-Matthews, Michele L. McConnell, Nadežda Stojković, Magnus Gustaffson and others took part at the conference.
All the presentations were distinguished by the relevance of the chosen topics, well-thought-out structure of the material, as well as practical recommendations from experienced experts in the field of academic writing. The conference was also attended by the staff of the Academic Writing Office – a translator Ekaterina Shefer and a consultant Olga Tolstykh.