Saudi English-Major Undergraduates' Academic Writing Problems: A Taif University Perspective

By M. Al-Khairy. 2013

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study attempted to investigate Saudi English-major undergraduates studying at Taif University to identify a) the types of academic writing Saudi English-major undergraduates carry out at English departments, b) Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems, c) the reasons behind Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems and d) the solutions to overcome Saudi English-major undergraduates' writing problems. To collect data for this purpose, senior faculty members were interviewed and a 32-item structured Likert-scale questionnaire was developed that was administered to 75 English-major students (sophomores, juniors & seniors) studying at foreign languages department, Taif University. Data generated through the questionnaire were subjected to descriptive analyses and mean and standard deviation were recorded using SPSS. The findings of this study reveal that Saudi English-major undergraduates are very weak in writing skills and commit lots of errors in their academic writings and are usually engaged in sentence-level or at the maximum at paragraph-level academic writing and they do not consider it important at this level to write different kinds of essays. It has been strongly recommended that the language courses should be increased to strengthen all the language skills in general and writing in particular, motivate the students to use English with the teachers as well as with each, introduce modern and novel teaching techniques, equip the classrooms with necessary audio-visual aids, diagnose students’ writing problems in the beginning of their studies at university, tailor the course contents according to their needs, introduce group/pair work, peer correction, use dictionaries frequently etc.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f318e04cc0f5e98549fabbc4dfbbf5db82945fd7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Language and Linguistics

1. Paul Thompson
2. Ken Hyland
3. Douglas Biber
4. Jim McKinley
5. Shih-Chieh Chien
6. A. Molino
7. R. Ruegg
8. Shulin Yu

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Paul Thompson
2. Ken Hyland
3. Raffaella Negretti
4. Douglas Biber
5. A. Molino
6. Jim McKinley
7. Shih-Chieh Chien
8. R. Ruegg

Citations in the corpus

• ESL Learners' Writing Skills: Problems, Factors and Suggestions (2016, unknown): “ESL learners tend to spell words according to their sound, a process referred to as phonetic perception by (Al-Khairy, 2013) resulting in incorrect spelling.”
• The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (2016, background): “Al-Khairy (2013) and Cai (2013) demand more attention to writing, and Taillefer (2007) a greater focus on speaking and listening.”