The Academic Writing Experience of Jordanian Postgraduate Students at a University in Malaysia

Abstract

Writing in English for academic purpose is a difficult task for many Jordanian postgraduate students (JPS) as English is a foreign language to them. This study aimed to explore academic writing problems encountered by JPS at a Malaysian university and to investigate how they address the problems. Employing a case study approach, a total of 182 online questionnaires were administered via email to registered JPS at UniSZA to which 90 responses were received. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 17 of the respondents to get further clarification of the questionnaire data and to gain rich insights into the phenomenon being investigated. The findings reveal that JPS faced several problems such as lack of vocabulary, difficulties in expressing the ideas, organizing the sentences and creating paragraphs, paraphrasing, the inability to build critical discussions and ideas, erroneous grammar, spellings, weak referencing and difficulty in finding the article/journal for literature review. In order to address these problems, they acquire help from their classmates, seniors, teaching faculties, participate in educational forums, workshops and lectures, attend paid tuition classes, translate Arabic to English, subscribe to journals and magazines and used online resources. The JPS recommend the provision of extensive language support at the university, regular lectures and workshops on improving academic writing and availability of language enrichment centre at the university to aid JPS to resolve their problems related to academic writing.

An Investigation into the Challenges and Strategies Utilization in Academic Writing: A Case Study of Indonesian Postgraduate Students

“…As it was discovered, most participants had written academically before. The development of writing tools like Grammarly and Google Translate (Almatarneh et al, 2018) and search engines like Google Scholar and Zotero were considered tools to help students find references.…”

“…According to the study's findings, postgraduate students should be urged to use the resources at their disposal to negotiate the challenges of EFL students writing a thesis successfully. Similarly, Liu et al (2022) andAlmatarneh et al (2018) researched to learn more about the students' experiences with writing in a foreign language. The researchers established a substantial parallel between the students' motivation and attentiveness levels and their academic writing performances, as well as a significant impact of the student's experience with academic writing fluency on their writing performance.…”

A techno-pedagogical design for the production of academic essays in university students

“…In the academic university context, it is the most widely used medium for communicating the findings of academic-scientific research. However, various studies (Amlatarneh et al, 2016;Iwasaki et al, 2019;Rey-Castillo & Gómez-Zermeño, 2021;Tan & Carnegie, 2022) warn that university students show a high degree of difficulty in writing academic texts in terms of vocabulary, difficulties in expressing ideas, organization of sentences, critical inability, limitations in textual revision, grammar and spelling.…”

Calidad del servicio universitario y autoeficacia para investigar en maestrandos peruanos

“…Por otro lado, Reyes y Gutiérrez (2015) hallaron en México que muchos estudiantes de posgrado que no realizaron actividades investigativas como: el aplicar instrumentos, analizar resultados, colaborar en la realización de investigaciones de su escuela o de sus docentes y sobre todo por no haber realizado una tesis, un informe de investigación científica, que les permita conseguir su título profesional, perciben ellos que son poco eficaces para realizar una investigación. En Malasia, Almatarneh et al (2018) estudiantes jordanos de posgrado presentaron serias limitaciones al momento de emplear la escritura académica en la redacción científica, siendo estas [24] Frida Jaqueline Palomino-Arpi, Fernando Joel Rosario Quiroz limitaciones entre otras razones causadas por su bajo nivel de autoeficacia. De igual modo, Poh y Abdullah (2019) también en Malasia, expresan que en estudiantes de doctorado existe la relación entre la autoeficacia para investigar, la capacitación en investigación, el interés en la investigación y la mentoría en investigación; en cambio, no se relaciona la autoeficacia para investigar con el conocimiento de la investigación, por lo que tal autoeficacia determina su perseverancia en su conducta de investigación como en su persistencia con la realización de investigaciones y actividades relacionadas a esta capacidad.…”

“…De igual manera, Reyes yGutiérrez (2015) expresan que el no contar con experiencias previas ni aprendizaje vicario que fortalezca su eficacia, disminuye el sentido de autoeficacia de los maestrandos al pasar los años de estudios Almatarneh et al (2018). afirman que estudiantes de posgrado con un bajo nivel de autoeficacia muestran, entre otras cosas, limitaciones en su redacción científica Díaz (2019).…”