Written Assignments

The most obvious difficulties related to writing were of course grammar and vocabulary. Related to limitation on vocabulary is the ability to express and explain or describe ideas, situations or objects in a concise or extended manner as demanded. Furthermore, my cultural process background and socialization process had conditioned my thinking process. This was reflected in the following ways.

(1) There was often no theme running throughout my essay and it became instead a ;compilation of several unrelated ideas;

(2) there was an inability to draw out similarities or patterns from a variety of identified individual properties;

(3) there was an inability to present arguments in a logical and schematic fashion.

A Bangladesh student, who was working at Honours level, raised another problem common to overseas students:

There is still one more difficulty that I come across time and time again, and I haven't found any solution to it as yet. When I am puzzled about a particular topic that I am writing on and when I have this pressure to hand the paper in by a certain date - sort of being in a position where you are being forced to write on something you have no interest in and you do not care about - I lose my ability to form correct English sentences.

Somehow the words make sense to me but it gives me a headache thinking whether what I have written is correct English or not. It makes sense to me because I literally translate the sentence from my language to English ; as a result the syntax gets all

wrong but my mind stops then and I become unsure of my whole argument.

Writing is always difficult if the material and the ideas you are try­ing to express are complex. This problem is not confined to overseas students. One Australian student complained: `I know what I want w say but only 50% of it comes out on paper. Even then my lecturer can't understand what I'm getting at.' Yet this is an art which all students must develop, for so much of their progress and their future success depend on their skills in communicating their ideas in w riting.