DOHA: Qatar University’s Department of English Literature and Linguistics hosted a roundtable on English Writing Pedagogy.

The roundtable was aimed at addressing challenges to teaching writing in Qatar such as developing effective strategies and materials to ensure students are moving towards a critical approach to writing that embraces their own voices, identities, and career goals, the organisers said.

In her opening statement, Dr Moneera Al Ghadeer, Head of the Department said: “This is an opportunity for the department to foster dialogue and share research and pedagogical experiences with colleagues from the Foundation Programme and Qatar Foundation. We share a common concern which is to seek the best approaches and methods to help our students understand the importance of critical writing, analysis, argumentation, and identifying the difference between plagiarism and citation”.

Dr Al Ghadeer said she hoped that the roundtable would become an annual tradition to engender professional scholarly exchanges among Qatar University departments and those from external institutions in Qatar.

“Toward a Critical Knowledge-Centered Approach to Writing”; “Rhetorical Education through Writing Instruction Across Cultures: Lu Liu’s Comparative Analysis of Argumentative Genre”; “Integrating Grammar, and Using Technology in an English Language Curriculum” ; and “Successful Online Tutoring without the Hype: Exploiting Skype and What It Can Do For Your Writing and Learning Programme” were among other topics which were presented by the respective experts at the roundtable.

Discussions were also held on issues such as critical thinking, contrastive analysis, grammar, evaluation, student motivation, and utilising technology in the classroom.