Transcendental Phenomenology Into the Lived Experiences of Iranian EFL Teachers and Students in FL Academic Writing

Prior research in foreign language (FL) academic writing in tertiary education has been promising, but the extent to which the lived experiences of English-as-foreign-language (EFL) teachers and students may play a role identifying areas which may contribute to the development of such writing remains limited. This qualitative study was aimed at exploring Iranian EFL teachers’ and students’ lived experiences for better understanding the factors, challenges, and solutions which may possibly result in improving university academic writing. To that end, six language teachers and 18 students (six BA, six MA, and six PhD) participated in semi-structured interviews for data collection purposes. The researchers used transcendental phenomenology as the research design to frame the study, drew on interviews to collect the data, and followed inductive thematic analysis to analyse the interview data. The results showed the following major themes: The challenges, factors, solutions, and nature of academic writing as a distinct genre. The paper ends with the conclusion that effective EFL academic writing may benefit from incorporating a balanced treatment of top-down policies at institutional levels and bottom-up strategies followed by EFL leaners. The implications of the findings for teacher education programs and curriculum development are discussed.