Difficulties Faced by Iraqi University Students Of English in the Area of Writing their Academic essays From the Students' Point of View

Abstract

Academic writing, is a formal style and usually adopted by writers in academic community in Higher Education Institutions. However, there are several forms of writing where students are assigned to write in various genres ranging from an essay to report and dissertations. As such, it is one of the key ways by which students are assessed at university in their writing of a coursework, essays and thesis to measure their progress in learning and understanding. Academic writing is of specific features that should be taken into account when writing for academic purposes. Thus, an academic piece of writing should be formal, organized, accurate, referenced, and clear, in a way that can be read and understood readily by readers. To fulfil the aim of the research, a sample of (100) fourth year students of English Department / College of Education for Humanities\ Diyala University have been selected as the subjects of this research. A scaled questionnaire as an instrument of measurement is used in this research to be an investigatory tool. The results of this research proves that the hypothesis of this study is verified and accepted which reads that Iraqi students of English face challenges in writing academic essays. The focus of the study has been on probing the views and the discursive practices of fourth year students in relation to academic writing. So this paper sheds light on the most important features of academic writing such as organization, coherence and cohesion, accuracy, referencing and many other features. Finally, this paper focuses on challenges that might arise for non-native speakers of English when writing for academic purposes such as problems in spelling, punctuation, tense misuse, and electronic illiteracy.