STUDENTS PERCEPTIONS OF EAP WRITING INSTRUCTION AND WRITING NEEDS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

As English for academic purposes (EAP) writing instructors and writing curriculum planners, we need to know the degree to which ESL writing courses have been successful in gauging and providing for ESL students ' writing needs across the university curriculum. However, making this determination is difficult because many academic writing requirements may be implicit in the curriculum of the disciplinary course and thus not amenable to ready description by the outsider. Furthermore, we al so need to know how much carryover from ESL writing courses occurs wit h ESL students-that is, what elements of their ESL writing instruction have they found useful and available to them as students in content c ourses? This article reports on a survey of former ESL students now in university-level content courses that is designed to investigate stud ents' perceptions of the relationship between the writing instruction the students received in ESL writing classes and the actual writing ta sks they found in courses across the disciplines. The results of the s urvey include indications of which writing skills taught in ESL writin g courses students found most useful in dealing with the writing deman ds of other content courses. In their answers to open-ended survey que stions, ESL students also described their perceptions of their ongoing writing needs beyond the ESL writing curriculum.