Identifying Academic Writing Problems Faced by Undergraduate Students at Shah Abdul Latif University Ghotki Campus

Abstract

It has always been a challenging task for the students at undergraduate level to have mastery in English academic writing. The researcher being a teacher, at the locale of the study had particularly observed that at undergraduate level at Shah Abdul Latif university Ghotki campus, the students are not even able to produce a well coherent and cohesive write-up, when it come to their academic writing in English. This observation persuaded the researcher to investigate and to identify the problems that hinder them in English academic writing. Thus, the study was conducted with an aim to identify the problems that students at Shah Abdul University Ghotki campus face in English Academic writing. The population of this study was the undergraduate students of Shah Abdul Latif University Ghotki Campus. In this connection, purposive sampling technique was employed to select a representative sample from the above mentioned population. The sample for the data was twenty enrolled undergraduate students of Shah Abdul Latif University Ghotki Campus. The design of the study was purely quantitative. The students were asked to write/type an essay on a topic of their choice by using a computer. Their write-ups were analyzed with the help of Markin 4.Ink software. Moreover, the analysis was cross-checked by two (03) other experts in order to establish the reliability of the study. The results showed that most of the students were facing the problems like, sentence formation, subject-verb agreement, punctuation, lack of ideas and vocabulary etc. As a future implication the researcher shall try to design a study to study the causes of the academic writing problems that these students face.

Key words: Academic writing, English language, Error Analysis, Content Analysis, writing problems.

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/10-2-07

Publication date: January 31^st 2020