As a writing teacher, i find teaching writing most challenging. To begin with, writing skills are not meant to be taught, and students cannot just “know how to write” after they had attended lessons on writing skills. Writing is a process. Learners may master one process easier than others. Academic writing is a fear many undergraduates face when they enter higher institution. To make matters worse, learners may “acquire” their fear for writing in high schools. When they enter universities, the difficulties of writing reach a different level- especially for those who already feared essay writing in schools. One may see the fear of academic writing in universities as the unresolved fear from essay writing in high schools and this unresolved fear snowballed into the fear of academic writing in universities. This study is done to explore the fear of writing among undergraduates. This quantitative study is done investigate if there is a relationship between beliefs, expectations, behaviour and results when it comes writers’ perception of writing difficulty. 373 participants were purposely chosen to participate in this study. They are undergraduates in a public university in Malaysia who attended one semester of academic writing. The instrument used is a survey. A summary of the findings showed interesting information the reasons why learners find academic writing difficult. The summary also revealed the sources of fear of academic writing and their influence on the learners.
Bulqiyah, S., Mahbub, A. A., and Nugraheni, D. A. (2021) Investigating Writing Difficulties in Essay Writing: Tertiary Students’ Perspectives. English Language Teaching Educational Journal, Vol 4(1), pp 61-73. Retrieved from
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1296404.pdf
Graham,S. (2019) Changing How Writing is Taught. Review of Research in Education, Vol 43, pp 277-303. Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.3102%2F0091732X18821125
Jackson, S. L. (2015) Research methods and Statistics-A Critical Thinking Approach (5tH Edition) Boston, USA:: Cengage Learning.
Klimova, B. F. (2014) Constraints and Difficulties in the Process of Writing Acquisition. Procedia Social and Behavioural Sciences. Vol 122(2014), pp 433-437. Retrieved from https://doi.org.10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.01.1367
Maznun, M. D. B., Monsefi, R., and Nimechisalem, V. (2017) Undergraduates Difficulties in Writing the Introduction for Research Report. Advances in language and Literary Studies, Vol 8(1), pp 1-8. Retrieved from
http://www.journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/alls/article/view/3017
Merton, R. K. (1948)The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The Antioch Review, Vol 8(2), pp 193-210. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4609267
Moses, R., and Mohamad, M. (2019) Challenges Faced by Students and Teachers on Writing Skills in ESL Contexts: A Literature Review. Creative Education, Vol 10, pp 3385-3391. doi: 10.4236/ce.2019.1013260.
Rahmat, N. H., Arepin, M., Rahman, S. A. S. A., Yunos, E. R. M., Mohandas, E. S., Sukimin, I. S., & Razlan, Z. (2022) Finding a Balance in Self-Imposed and Other Imposed Prophecies for the Fear of Oral Presentations. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, Vol 12(7), pp 133- 148. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v12-i7/14118
Rahmat, N. H., Aripin, N., Razlan, Z., and Khairuddin, S. (2021) The Influence of Metacognitive Scaffolding on Learning Academic Writing Online. International Journal of Education, Vol 13(3), pp 48-63. Retrieved from
http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ije.v13i3.18902
Sabti, A. A., Rashid, S. M., Nimehchisalem,V., and Darmi, R. (2019) The Impact of Writing Anxiety, Writing Achievement Motivation , and Writing Self- Efficacy on Writing Performance: A Correlational Study of Iraqi Tertiary EFL Learner. SAGE Open, Vol 9(4), pp 1-13.Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2158244019894289
Sajjad, I., Sarwat, S., Imran, M., & Shahzad, S. K. (2021) Examining the Academic Writing Challenges Faced by University Students in KFUEIT. PalArch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology, Vol 18(10), pp 1759-1777. Retrieved from https://archieves.palarch.nl/index.php/jae/article/download/10082/9268/19770.
In-Text Citation: (Rahmat et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Rahmat, N. H., Thasrabiab, T., Taib, S. A., Jenal, N., Sukimin, I. S., Zamani, N. F. M., & Amir, N. (2022). Perception of Difficulties and Learners’ Reasons in Academic Writing: A Self-Imposed Prophecy. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(10), 486– 499.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by Knowledge Words Publications (www.kwpublications.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
