Postgraduate TEFL Students' Performance and Perception on Research Article Writing and their Challenges in Conducting Research

Abstract

Writing publishable research articles is a great concern of academicians, which requires awareness on all its relevant aspects. However, the obstacles are elusive and postgraduate students' challenges are not fully explored. In this mixed methods research and for the purpose of investigating Iranian graduate and postgraduate EFL students’ performance on their research articles in terms of language and compositional conventions, 30 students participated. Their research articles were analyzed using a researcher-made scale. The same conventions were utilized as a questionnaire to investigate participants' perceptions on the essentials of language conventions in research articles to find the relationship between their performance and perceptions. Besides, a focus group interview was conducted among 12 of the participants to investigate challenges they face in conducting research and writing research articles. The results of the content analysis of the research articles indicated a mediocre performance, while the data analysis of the questionnaire indicated a high perception towards essentials of research article writing. This discrepancy was confirmed by the statistical analysis of correlation. The results of the analysis of the multifaceted challenges students have in both conducting research and writing a research article paved the way for pertinent implications to practitioners in terms of curriculum, syllabus, and methodology.