Scrutinizing Algerian EFL students’ challenges in research teaching and writing

Abstract

Writing to report research writing may be a daunting task since it requires motivation, interest, background knowledge and hard work from the part of students. This paper focused on the major obstacles faced by the English foreign language learners in research writing at Belhadj Bouchaib University, Algeria, in addition to the teachers’ attitudes towards their students’ work. The study relied on a triangulated approach which enclosed quantitative and qualitative methods and its importance lied in providing insights into the nature of flaws and challenges as regards students’ academic writing practices. A questionnaire was used among 30 students followed by an interview with six teachers. The findings revealed that developing a research project and reporting the findings were among the most difficult challenges encountered by the learners. While the former requires them to identify the area of interest, choose a topic and formulate a researchable problem, the latter typically entails writing the methodology, results, and discussion sections. Between the two tasks, the students found academic writing the most challenging. The findings also revealed that teachers display negative attitudes towards their students’ research because of these reasons: lack of motivation following traditional methods of learning, insufficient background knowledge about research, paucity of library resources, sketchy number of courses related to research, and the unavailability of the Internet inside the university context. Following these flaws, some recommendations were provided.

An Inter-Country Critical Analysis of Online Studies on the Academic Writing in English of University Students Using the Toulmin Model

“…Backing in this study of Hamzaoui (2021) for the first data of poor education and deficiency in methodology are that students were taught methodology only by a parttime teacher who may not have taught them well, and that the students encountered the following challenges in research writing: distinguishing between formal and nonformal academic writing, selecting appropriate words to convey ideas, grammar, textual organization, paraphrasing and summarizing authors' ideas, writing a literature review and selecting the sample of the research, dissatisfaction with the teaching from courses and subjects in their programs.…”

“…Data were gathered by Hamzaoui (2021) in this study from thirty (30) Master two level students and six (6) teachers in a Department of English at a university in Algeria. The only claim of this study is that Algerian EFL students lack proficiency in research writing because they are not knowledgeable of the significance of research and are not prepared well for it.…”

Exploring Writing Difficulties in the Composing Process: A Case Study of ESL Writing

“…Writing strong academic paragraphs in English requires the writer to have a strong command of the language and an understanding of the structure of its content because they need to fulfill a number of distinct but related tasks such as gathering and ordering content, shaping content into correct and clear expressions, and meeting the genre requirements of the writing (Mahmud & Rahman, 2023). However, achieving cohesivity and ensuring that their writing is syntactically developed proves to be a problem (Harris et al, 2017;Ruscetti et al, 2018;Hamzaoui, 2021), as they face writing difficulties in major aspects of writing in English, such as their lack of vocabulary and understanding of grammar, lack of knowledge on the mechanics of writing (Ferguson et al, 2011;Singh, 2017;Phuong, 2021), the studies' organisation Hanauer & Englander (2013); Komba (2015); Mahammoda (2016); Flowerdew (2019), and genre conventions (Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006;Kao & Reynolds, 2017;Finn, 2018). The errors in identifying appropriate content for their research article would cause the students to either exaggerate or underplay the big claims of their topic and the significance of their study.…”

Exploring Challenges in Utilizing English Resources for Research and Its Remedies

“…Students' writing for final assignments and research encounter obstacles caused by psychological (Anas, 2021), lingual (Tiwari, 2019), and technological factors (Alamri, 2021). Most students have insufficient skills in expressing and constructing ideas into words, finding supporting resources, and using writing tools (Hamzaoui, 2021). Previous studies examined the difficulties students face when writing for academic purposes and suggested some strategies to overcome these challenges.…”