The Writing Difficulties Faced by EFL Students in Intermediate English Writing

Abstract

Intermediate English Writing is a compulsory course which is taken after students have passed a Basic English Writing and Pre-Intermediate English Writing course for the BA program in English. However, after undertaking this course, students were still lacking in the areas of vocabulary, spelling, and demonstrated poor understanding of grammatical structure. The purpose of this study was to investigate what difficulties university students encounter when learning to write academic English in relation to the writing development process and to classify the most common errors made in Intermediate English writing by EFL students. The participants in this study consisted of 39 undergraduate students enrolled in the Intermediate English Writing course. A checklist questionnaire was administered and semi-structured interviews were implemented for data collection. Data of the students’ writing was also obtained from the writing tasks that were given to them. The overall results of the study revealed that students face many difficulties in their writing such as, difficulty in communicating ideas, difficulty with sentence structure and word order, as well as difficulty making links between paragraphs. This study has implications for English writing pedagogy, especially in effective writing instruction.