Academic Staff Perceptions of the Need for Proofreading for UK Postgraduate Students

When university students in UK have difficulties with writing, their lecturers encourage them to have someone proofread it. Research on proofreading has focused mostly on how proof-readers should proofread and edit the students' writing. Much less research has been done to ascertain the extent to which lecturers and academic supervisors should encourage their students to proofread their writing professionally or otherwise. This study seeks to explore lecturers' beliefs with regards proofreading and the extent to which they encourage their students to consult professional or non-professional proof-readers for help. Data were gathered from three sources: surveys administered to 42 lecturers, interviews with 8 of the lecturers, and content analysis on lecturers' feedback on students' writing; all of which were analysed in order to find out the extent to which they ask their students to get their work proofread. The analysis of the data indicates that most academic staff did not ask their postgraduate students to get services from professional proof-readers before they submited their work because it was unnecessary and costly. They also argued that students should proofread their work to develop proofreading skills. In contrast, academic staff who usually asked their students to refer to professional proof-readers agreed that the reason behind this was that students' written work often include grammatical and structural errors which made their ideas and arguments unclear, and consequently the student's intended meaning was lost.