Writing Skills for Undergraduate Students in Fiji: Tackling Educational Inequalities, Facilitating Epistemic Access - Dataset

Abstract

The fieldwork component of this study comprised of academic English language tests with 120 participants and 30 open-ended in-depth interviews with first year undergraduate university students in Fiji. To this end, the fieldwork involved administering academic English language tests, using writing interventions and using these to evaluate educational inequalities faced by the students. This process was aided by the use of open-ended questions. The participants were required to sit two academic English language writing tests, one at the beginning of their first year and one at the end of the first year. This research was carried out as a longitudinal study by administrating a writing test in the second week of the first year (beginning) of their university program, followed by a second test at the end of their first year, namely, in the final week of classes in semester two of the year. The test was conducted at the beginning and at the end of their first year which lasted 1 hour. There were three writing interventions and feedback was given throughout the yearlong study. The writing interventions were academic essays, paragraph writing and summary writing. Tasks in the writing intervention involved students to write and submit to the researcher in their leisure time. I provided feedback on each of the three interventions individually to the cohort after assessing them throughout the year. Feedback involved highlighting nonstandard forms of writing style or grammar, discussing ways of improving the writing pieces and suggesting resources on academic writing. A total of 30 interviews (30 - 40 minutes each) were conducted at the end of the participants' first year via Zoom and on Skype. Volunteers from the same cohort of 120 participants were recruited at random based on their performance in the tests, both high performers as well as low performers were interviewed. The interviews were conducted after the end of the students' one-year university program.