Developing a contextualized and scaffolded pedagogy for the writing of scientific abstracts in English: Abstract Package and Conceptual Template

Abstract

In this paper we aim to contribute to pedagogical practice in the teaching of scientific abstract writing in English. We present a tailored pedagogy we have developed for our local scientific communication courses which have a diverse student profile in terms of research disciplines, research stages, and writing challenges. To meet our students’ needs, we have built our pedagogy around four pillars: awareness of the genre based on the course textbook, a flexible schematic map for the top-down planning of the abstract (Conceptual Template), a combined abstract-related genre based on real-life submission scenarios (Abstract Package), and a scaffolded writing path which includes instruction, writing practice, formative feedback, and writing milestones. Thus far, we have successfully implemented our pedagogy with master’s students and partially also with doctoral students. We hope that our approach is transferable to other contexts and can be widely adopted both by teachers of scientific communication and by researchers.

Developing a contextualized and scaffolded pedagogy for the writing of scientific abstracts in English: Abstract Package and Conceptual Template