The impact of project-based learning and interdisciplinary cases on the development of academic writing skills in a foreign language among students of non-language majors

Abstract

The article examines the impact of project-based learning and interdisciplinary cases on the development of academic writing in a foreign language among students of non-language disciplines in the context of the transformation of requirements for graduates, including the need to produce genre- and rhetorically appropriate written outputs for international scholarly communication. It is shown that the key difficulty lies not only in a lack of lexico-grammatical resources but also in underdeveloped discourse skills: the ability to construct argumentation, ensure cohesion and logical textual architecture, and observe the conventions of English-language academic style under a high cognitive load imposed by professional content. On the basis of a systemic-structural analysis of pedagogical and psycholinguistic approaches, it is revealed that project work functionally aligns with the logic of research activity and thus creates an authentic motivating context in which writing serves as a tool for solving professionally significant tasks rather than as an isolated practice of formal rules. Interdisciplinary cases enhance this effect by requiring the synthesis of heterogeneous data and shifting attention to meaning, which reduces anxiety and frees resources for idea generation, while simultaneously stimulating the search for precise formulations to ensure the persuasiveness of the outcome for the team and an external audience. The importance of group work, peer review, and iterative editing is emphasized as mechanisms for developing metacognitive control and a reader perspective that are critical for preventing communicative breakdowns. The risks of error fossilization under the dominance of a content focus and the need for embedded stages of reflection and targeted language refinement are analyzed separately. The contribution of working with authentic texts and digital collaborative platforms to the acquisition of genre models, general academic vocabulary, and learner autonomy is noted. Organizational constraints are discussed, including requirements for teacher qualifications, interdepartmental cooperation, and the development of assessment criteria for individual contribution and process-related parameters of writing, and the practical relevance of the approach for training specialists capable of producing diverse professional written documents in the global scientific and technical environment is emphasized.