View Article |
The academic writing experience of Jordanian postgraduate students at a university in Malaysia
Anas Hmoud Mohammad Almatarneh1, Radzuwan Ab Rashid2, Kamariah Yunus3.
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.
Affiliation:
- Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia
- Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia
- Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia
Download this article (This article has been downloaded 178 time(s))
|
|
Indexation |
Indexed by |
MyJurnal (2021) |
H-Index
|
3 |
Immediacy Index
|
0.000 |
Rank |
0 |
|
|
|