METHODOLOGY FOR DEVELOPING INTEGRATED (SYNTHESIS) ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS IN ENGLISH AMONG PHILOLOGY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS BASED ON MULTI-SOURCE TEXTS

The development of academic writing competence in English among undergraduate philology students requires more than the acquisition of grammatical accuracy, academic vocabulary, and conventional essay organization. In university contexts, students are increasingly expected to read several academic sources, identify relevant information, evaluate and compare competing perspectives, transform source material through paraphrasing and summarization, establish intertextual relationships, and construct an independent written argument. These requirements make integrated synthesis writing a particularly important component of academic literacy. The present article develops a literature-informed methodology for improving integrated synthesis academic writing skills among philology undergraduate students through systematic work with multi-source texts. The study adopts a qualitative analytical methodology based on established research into integrated writing, source-based writing, reading-to-write processes, discourse synthesis, source use, and academic argumentation. The analysis indicates that synthesis writing should be understood as a recursive reading-writing activity rather than a linear process in which reading simply precedes writing. On this basis, the article proposes a five-stage instructional methodology comprising source awareness, source mapping and comparison, controlled synthesis, guided academic synthesis, and independent research-based writing. The methodology incorporates source matrices, comparative reading, synthesis maps, paraphrasing and transformation tasks, citation and attribution practice, argument construction, peer review, and recursive revision. A multidimensional assessment framework is also proposed, covering source comprehension, source integration, synthesis and argumentation, organization and coherence, and academic language and citation. The proposed framework is particularly relevant to philology education because students routinely engage with interconnected linguistic, literary, theoretical, and critical texts. The article provides a theoretically grounded methodological model that can subsequently be subjected to empirical validation in an undergraduate EFL context.