Academic Writing Challenges Among English Majors at Kabul University: Anxiety, Idea Organization, and Feedback

Academic writing is a core requirement for undergraduate English majors, yet little empirical work has examined the difficulties these students experience in Afghanistan. This study aimed to examine writing anxiety, organization of ideas and paragraph coherence, and perceptions of feedback among undergraduate English majors at Kabul University, and to identify the instructional solutions that students support. A quantitative descriptive survey design was used. Seventy-two students from Years 1 to 4 of the English Department completed a 21-item, five-point Likert-type questionnaire distributed through Google Forms, and the responses were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and comparisons across year of study. Writing anxiety (M = 2.93, SD = 0.86), organization difficulties (M = 2.94, SD = 0.66), and feedback-related difficulties (M = 2.87, SD = 0.77) were all moderate. Time pressure was the strongest anxiety trigger, concern about grammar the weakest, logical organization of ideas the most strongly endorsed organizational difficulty, and limited peer-review opportunities the highest-rated feedback problem. Students strongly supported all proposed solutions (M = 3.79, SD = 0.98), particularly sentence-combining activities, model texts, and specific written suggestions for reorganization. The three challenge areas were moderately and positively intercorrelated (r = .39 to .42). The findings suggest that performance conditions and the design of writing instruction, rather than linguistic accuracy alone, shape students’ difficulties, with implications for course design, feedback practice, and teacher education.