Breaking EFL Writing Challenges for Competence Development

Abstract

Demonstrating knowledge and application of grammar and sentence structure; vocabulary and word choice; organization and structure; and content development in EFL writing is a challenging task among EFL university students. The challenges on these components stem from EFL students’ lack of opportunity to practice English writing during elementary, high school, or even at university level. The goal of this study is to provide better opportunities to EFL students to achieve writing competence leading to proficiency. By breaking the EFL writing challenges, this study analyzed the challenges of EFL writing among eighty (80) volunteered respondents mirroring the struggle of EFL students in Thailand. In general, EFL writing competence can only be achieved when students learn to correctly connect and organize ideas effectively to develop a stronger voice and a more confident writing style. This study applied quantitative research design and utilized descriptive statistics, and one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to examine the differences in means across the challenges components. The result shows that there are no statistically significant differences among all the components of challenges signifying that each EFL university student encounters specific challenges in EFL writing which makes it imperative to re-evaluate and refine their English writing pedagogy provided to EFL students to achieve university-level English writing competence.