EFL university students’ difficulties in the essay writing process

Research on foreign language writing has shown that most EFL students faced some difficulties to produce a good composition in English. However, attention has mainly been directed to explore errors found on students’ written work. Little is known about what difficulties students have in the writing process. The present study investigated difficulties students faced in the six steps of writing process, namely (1) choosing a topic, (2) gathering ideas, (3) outlining or organizing ideas, (4) writing the first draft, (5) reviewing the content and structure, and (6) revising and making final correction. This study applied a qualitative method by using questionnaire and interview to collect the data. The subjects were English Language Education students who were taking an Essay Writing course in the third semester. The findings indicated that students faced difficulties in all steps of essay writing process. Among those six steps, outlining and gathering ideas were claimed as the most effortful steps students had to pass. Writing the first draft and revising were the next two steps considered as challenging. Lastly, choosing a topic and reviewing content and structure were also demanding for small part of students. The difficulties students had and suggestions they proposed are presented in this study. Those could be a basis for doing some improvements at institutional as well as individual level