Second -Year English Majored Students' Perception of Possible Problems in Writing Essays

To acquire a language, learners need to be skillful at the four skills namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among them, writing is usually considered a complex skill to learn. This study is aimed to investigate the second-year English majored students’ perception of essay writing problems encountered and solutions to overcome these problems. The participants of this study are 44 second year English majored students at a public university in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, consisting of 32 females and 12 males. The data were collected by a questionnaire to explore the difficulties encountered by EFL learners in writing essays and their expectations from their lecturers as well as from themselves to have better performance. The results revealed that students face major difficulties in writing essays including linguistic, psychological, cognitive factors. With the hope to get better writing performance, the students expected more assistance from their lecturers, including giving more feedbacks on their writing pieces, recommending appropriate reading materials and providing more grammar courses. They also admitted that their writing pieces will be improved when they themselves practice more such as forming their writing habits, gaining more vocabularies and self-editing or asking feedback from peers