INVESTIGATING DIFFICULTIES OF ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS IN WRITING ACADEMIC ESSAYS

Truong Vinh Duy, Bui Thi Thu Trang

Abstract


The purpose of this study was to investigate the difficulties faced by English-majored students in writing academic essays. To collect the data for the investigation, the sample involved was twenty-seven English-majored students who have been studying English as their specialization at a public university in Vietnam. The instruments of this study conducted a mix-method as a qualitative and quantitative approach. To achieve the purpose of this study, the questionnaire was administered as the quantitative data collection and the semi-structured interview as the qualitative data collection. Then, five of the total participants were randomly interviewed to gain insight ideas of the difficulties that they face when writing academic essays in their writing course. The results of this study demonstrated that the majority of students had obstacles related to insufficient linguistic knowledge namely, lexicon-grammar, vocabulary, and the structure of sentences. The findings from the interviews also indicated that the participants had encountered linguistic knowledge difficulties. Based on the findings, both some recommendations and implications are presented.

 

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Keywords


difficulties, English-majored students, writing, academic essays

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejfl.v6i3.4512

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