Exploring ESL Students’ Current Competency and Needs in Academic Writing Skills at University

Abstract

Mastering academic writing is one of the skills to be acquired by all university students. Ability to master academic writing skills enables university students to be more competent in presenting ideas and information related to their field. Inability to master required skills in academic writing will consequently impact the students’ performance in fulfilling the graduation requirement. Generally, students in higher learning institutions (HLIs) are constantly struggling with unfamiliar styles and mechanisms in academic writing. The current situation subsequently resulted students’ incompetency in presenting their ideas and discussion. In this study, the researchers aim to discover the students’ expectation for an academic writing skills course and their current competency academic writing skills. An adapted questionnaire from Choo (1998) was used as the main instrument in this study to 65 undergraduate TESL students in public higher learning institution (HLI) in Malaysia. Analysis of data was done quantitatively using statistical software. Results from the analyses revealed that more than half of the respondents (76.9%) agreed that academic writing skills are regarded as complex skills to be acquired. In addition, the results also yielded that almost half of the respondents (46.2%) believed that literature review section is the most difficult section in an academic paper. Results from this study will be able to guide future researchers and educators in producing more teaching and learning related to academic writing mastery.