Exploring the Postgraduate Students’ Challenges and Needs in Learning Academic Writing

Writing skills are regarded as the most challenging skills to be acquired by all language learners. It is a complex cognitive activity that requires effort by the learners. In university context, writing becomes twice as hard by the students as it requires them to be aware of their own writing. The researchers in this study identified the gap in the current context on the students' learning of writing in tertiary levels. Before proposing an intervention of a current problem, it is essential for the researchers to identify the problems and challenges in writing before proposing the solutions to the current problem. In this study, the researchers ought to discover the academic writing requirements of postgraduate students who are non-native English speakers (ESL postgraduate students) and to distinguish between their desired outcomes and areas for improvement. Focus group interviews were utilised as the method of data collection to ensure that the needs identified were based on the participants' perspective. An interview was conducted with three ESL postgraduate students who were enrolled to test the interview protocol. The interview sessions were recorded, transcribed, analysed, and organised. Upon analysis and categorization, it was found that the participants expressed both target and learning needs. The desired outcome includes the skills that students are expected to have by the end of the course, which are typically outlined as course goals. On the other hand, the learning needs refer to the challenges that students encounter while striving to achieve these goals. It was determined that in addition to the desired outcomes outlined in the course goals, there are also learning needs that ESL students face due to their prior experience and language background. The study presents several implications for teaching ESL writing.