Identifying students' academic writing difficulties and the factors behind them at the Faculty of Education of Tripoli University, Libya.

الملخص

This paper is a summary of a study was conducted with the aim to identify the academic writing difficulties encountered by some university students. It also aimed to find out the factors that affect their academic writing . Therefore, 38 students majoring in English at the Faculty of Education of Tripoli University participated in this study. A questionnaire was designed based on the literature reviewed and was used to identify the students' academic writing difficulties and the main factors behind those difficulties in order to answer the research questions. The data analysis revealed that undergraduate students experienced some major difficulties in academic writing. More specifically, those difficulties were in providing a clear thesis statement in their writing, distinguishing types of genre in academic writing, providing a proper in-text citation in their writing (APA style), using appropriate discourse markers in their writing to connect the sentences and writing coherent sentences, whereas almost no difficulties seemed to pose a challenge for students in using grammar and mechanics of writing such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in their academic writing and in writing introduction for their essays as well as little difficulty in providing clear conclusion in their writing. Those difficulties were attributed to a number of reasons, such as  students' poor English language proficiency  and Inadequate access to resources (library, internet, books, articles, audio & visual facilities),  and the lack of writing practice opportunities in class room were the main reasons behind those major difficulties. The findings of this study will hopefully add new information to the new current research and provide fruitful insights to the writing teachers and writing materials developers to help learners overcome the writing difficulties they might experience in future. However, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to the EFL students due to the scope of the study and the small size of the sample.