Saudi Learners' Perceptions of Academic Writing Challenges and General Attitude Towards Writing in English

Abstract

Second language (L2) academic writing is one of the most fundamental, yet sophisticated skills for university students to master. It requires the ability to not only create ideas using sentences, but also construct meaningful, logical and comprehensible texts. Thus, understanding students’ attitudes towards L2 writing and exploring the challenges that they experience while composing texts are necessary for L2 teachers and curriculum designers. The overall goal of this study is twofold: (1) to investigate students’ perceptions of the difficulty that they experience while writing academic texts in English and (2) to explore learners’ attitudes towards writing assignments in English. The goal here is to explore these issues using data obtained from 109 Saudi university students. Data were first collected using a questionnaire and then quantitatively analysed. The results show that students tend to perceive academic writing as challenging and adopt a mildly to moderately positive attitude towards writing in English. These findings offer some implications for teachers and curriculum designers to improve the L2 academic writing skills of students.