Key Obstacles in L2 Academic Writing Faced by Saudi English Major Students

Abstract

Academic writing is a vital skill for university students (Hyland, 2022), but it can be a daunting task to master. It is crucial to understand the specific challenges and, more importantly, the root causes of these challenges in order to overcome them. The main objectives of this mixed methods study are to investigate the challenges of academic writing and to explore the factors that contribute to these challenges. To achieve these objectives, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with four senior-year students in the English department, and a questionnaire was distributed among 33 English-majored students to investigate their general L2 academic writing attitude and whether it has a correlation with the difficulty they encounter with L2 academic writing. The results indicated that students face difficulties in several areas: (1) thinking about thesis, (2) writing introduction and conclusion, (3) writing an error-free sentences, (4) usingtransitional phrases, (5) difficulty regarding writing mechanism. The major reasons behind that are: (A) the assigned lecturer and poor implementation of the technology, (B) the students' educational background, (c) the students' negative attitude toward L2 academic writing. Furthermore, students' responses showed a great welcoming to the technology involvement inside the classroom and that would probably assist in reducing some challenges if it was implemented effectively.

Keywords

• academic writing
• l2 challenges
• efl students
• attitude toward academic writing saudi students writing