Academic writing has become an indispensable part for students studying English as a foreign language at universities in Vietnam in general. This descriptive study conducted a survey of 193 final-year English-majored students at Nam Can Tho University to analyze their perceptions of the use of conjunctions in academic essay writing. The results showed that although final-year English-majored students at Nam Can Tho University are highly aware of the importance of conjunctions in academic writing, their actual use is still inconsistent and sometimes inadequate. This concludes that students have a relatively high awareness of the important role of conjunctions in writing essays, but they still encounter many difficulties in applying them in practice, though. Recommendations for future writing instruction should incorporate explicit, contextual, and visually reflective approaches to help students develop both technical accuracy and rhetorical flexibility in the use of conjunctions in their writing. Only through such comprehensive pedagogical support can learners move beyond the difficulties of using conjunctions to sophisticated, reader-aware academic discourse. Article visualizations:
Hoang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.