Exploring Writing Frames to Scaffold Health Sciences Students' Writing Skills in the Middle East

Several studies have shown the efficacy of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) genre-based approaches to teaching writing because it makes explicit the purpose and rhetorical stages (Swales, 1990; Hyon, 1996; Rothery, 1996; Hyland, 2002; Dirgeyasa, 2016). In EAP, textual moves, language features and writing frames or sentence starters have become popular scaffolding techniques and have been investigated in numerous research articles (Son & Park, 2015; Salehpour & Saeidi, 2016). However, there are limited studies that focus on the use of writing frames in foundation program contexts where students’ lack of English language proficiency often impacts on their motivation to engage in academic tasks. This qualitative study draws on one college of Health Sciences in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where students are frequently represented in deficit discourses of being low achievers and unmotivated. It explores the potential that EAP genre-based writing frames offer to health sciences students often seen as weak and underprepared for higher education. The data revealed that the use of writing frames contributed towards the improvement of students’ academic writing in terms of organization, sentence structure and paragraph coherence.