Abstract:
This study investigates how a group of 13 Turkish scholars from the humanities faculty of a prominent Turkish university perceive the development of their discipline-specific second language writing skills. Personal interviews were used to elicit data and excerpts from the interviews have been recorded in this paper. The acquisition strategies identified in the data reveal that the acquisition of scholarly writing expertise was an extended process of exploration of genre conventions, with a strong component of largely self-directed analysis of linguistic and organizational norms. The study considers how these strategies can be incorporated into a field study or portfolio-based academic writing program, with a view to training junior researchers to recognize the rhetorical, organizational, and linguistic characteristics of scholarly writing from their own discipline, and to monitor the development of their own writing competence.