DEVELOPING ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS OF PROSPECTIVE EDUCATORS : CHALLENGES AND TEACHING STRATEGIES

Abstract

Academic writing plays a key role in the professional development of prospective educators, since they must not only have professional competencies, but also be able to effectively express their ideas and research through written work and scientific articles. Based on this, this article focuses on the importance of developing academic writing skills among prospective educators in the modern educational environment. As part of the theoretical part of the article, based on the analysis of previous studies, the main challenges faced by prospective educators when mastering academic writing skills were identified, such as insufficient understanding of academic standards, inexperience in structuring and arguing their ideas, as well as limitations in language competence.The empirical study was conducted using thematic analysis method using semi-structured interviews with 15 fourth-year students, during which the following research questions were posed: “What difficulties do students experience when writing scientific papers? What strategies can be used to improve academic writing skills during learning process?The thematic analysis methodology was based on six steps, which included becoming familiar with the data, creating preliminary codes, exploring themes, scrutinizing themes, identifying theme labels, and preparing a final report. The results showed that prospective educators face a number of problems: a lack of specialized university disciplines aimed at developing academic writing skills, difficulties with organizing a literature review, problems with structuring research work, and a general lack of motivation.Based on the identification of challenges and teaching strategies in the development of academic writing skills, practical recommendations were proposed to improve the process of preparing future teachers.