Investigating the Factors Impeding Tertiary Students’ English Writing Skills

Nafisa Sultana*

Abstract: Writing is a process of encoding, i.e., putting our messages into words keeping a reader in mind (McDonough, Shaw & Masuhara, 2013). Learning to write a coherent and an effective text is a challenging and lengthy process of cognitive development that sharply differs from the acquisition of speech (Kellogg, 2008). It is not often an easy, one-step journey to write a complete paper at the first attempt (Langan, 2005). Students at tertiary level in Bangladesh face a lot of difficulty to write in English. Their problems start from the thinking level, as they lack ability to generate ideas to write, to producing a sentence with correct syntactic structure and relevant vocabulary. This study investigates the factors that impede tertiary students’ English writing skills. Qualitative phenomenological research method was chosen to carry out the study. Questionnaire, interview and Focus Group Discussion were the tools to elicit data from 47 participants over a period of 12 weeks. Based on Creswell’s (1998) data analysis spiral, data was placed into categories for presentation. The study reveals that in order to develop tertiary students’ writing skills, there needs to be ample opportunity for writing practice with strong support from teachers based on individual student’s needs.

Keywords: Investigate, factors, impede, writing skill, tertiary level

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