The challenges faced by english undergraduate students in writing their final papers

Abstract

The process of English language academic writing is a complex task faced by college students around the world. Complexity tends to increase when a student has to write his or her homework in a foreign language. To find evidence about the difficulty encountered by the students of the night English language course of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), three questionnaires and interviews were applied to two focus groups of participants, in three stages. In the first stage, Group 1: composed of ten newly graduated students answered the questionnaire. In phase 2, Group 2, Formed by seven students who were in the writing phase of the TCC answered the questionnaire. The present study analyzed which factors were mentioned in both focus groups. In the third stage, a follow-up interview was conducted to help understand how this process of teaching English academic writing has been taking place within the UFC undergraduate course. The theoretical framework used to analyze the answers was a study by Lavelle (2001), The Writing Approaches of University Students. The study revealed that students feel that they could be better oriented from the beginning of the course and not just at the end, and reflect on the importance of academic writing for the academic and professional life of participants. Data analysis has suggested that one of the major factors in preventing students from achieving a satisfactory result in English-language academic writing is that students have little or no such practice in primary and secondary education. The data showed that the need to follow specific rules regarding the academic writing genre tends to deprive students of their creativity, making it difficult for students to expose their voice in the text.