Students’ Writing Difficulties in English for Business Classes in Dhofar University, Oman

Abstract

This study investigates students’ writing difficulties of English for business classes and the possible factors that might cause such difficulties. A corpus of forty essays of forty undergraduates was compiled. We adopted a textography approach to study writing practices. The results of the textual analysis informed an administration of questionnaire to both the students and four faculty members. The results of the corpus analysis indicate that students had a lot of errors in spelling, grammar, and many of them were unable to write thesis statement, as well as topic sentences. Some students also had problems in developing coherent essays. The contextual data suggests that about 90 per cent of the respondent did not know what thesis statement is. It also shows that the majority of students had problems in generating and organising ideas and nineteen out of twenty-one respondents also had a limited wide range of vocabulary. The course syllable did not allocate more than four hours for teaching essay writing throughout the semester. We strongly recommend more contact hours for teaching essay writing. Teachers could engage students in critical thinking activities, including how to generate and organise ideas. Teachers should be teaching more academic vocabulary to students.