The Department of English, Notre Dame University Bangladesh (NDUB) organized a seminar entitled ‘The Art of Writing’ on 20 July which was conducted by Assistant Professor of the Department of English and Modern Languages at North South University (NSU), Mohammad Shamsuzzaman.
The chief guest of the seminar was Registrar Fr Adam S Pereira, CSC who is also the chairperson of the Department of English.
Assistant Professor Zaman talked on ‘Cross-linguistic Composition: Writing Skills and Self-report Strategies of University Students in Bangladesh’. His presentation reports the findings of a study intended to understand the correlation between an L1-Bangla, and an L2-English, to facilitate the teaching and learning of L2 writing in English in the EFL context of Bangladesh. The 70 participants (42 male, 28 female) of the study were freshmen at a private university in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The age of the participants ranged from 17 to 24 years. The participants completed a background questionnaire, a grammaticality judgment test, and a vocabulary test in English. They also completed the same writing tasks both in Bangla and English.
Moreover, Assistant Professor Zaman showed his paper where the writing tasks both in L1 and L2 included the same questionnaires at the end that gleaned information about participants’ usual practices and perceptions of writing across two languages. A critical finding of the study was that the essay scores in both the languages correlated, which implied that writing skills-or a lack thereof--transcend languages.
His study also discovered that L2 writing was significantly similar to and different from writing in an L1 given the foci, purposes, the times, and the areas of revision. The study indicated that knowledge in grammar and vocabulary significantly predicted proficiency in writing in English despite and because of participants’ unique cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds.
Mohammad Shamsuzzaman has been an assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at NSU. He earned two MA’s in English studies—the first one from the University of Dhaka in literature, and the second one from California State University, San Bernardino, in TESOL. He earned his PhD in English Education from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2015. He had been also a PhD candidate in English/TESOL and Composition, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania before he switched to New Zealand. His areas of interest include L2 composition, L2 acquisition, neurolinguistics, and post-coloniality. Including three international publications, he has six publications altogether.
Students and faculty members of the English Department were present at the seminar. The programme was coordinated by Dilip Kumar Sarker, assistant professor, Department of English, NDUB.
