An Analysis of Arab Undergraduate Students’ Writing Performance: Applying SWOT Framework

Abstract

Writing is an indispensable skill in the academic as well as professional lives of individuals. As such, an in-depth multi-layered delve into the writing of students becomes necessary to gain a better understanding of these texts from different directions. This study explores the writing skill proficiency of undergraduate Arab business students using the SWOT framework: analyzing its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The SWOT framework was adopted as an analytical framework for this study to achieve interdisciplinarity between the different fields of knowledge during face-to-face and hybrid sessions. This, in its turn, could contribute to viewing a persisting issue in the field of language teaching and learning, such as students’ writing performance, from a different angle. An analysis of a written corpus of 80 students’ written analytical essays was thoroughly conducted to depict the nature of students’ writing. The participants of the current study were business major students enrolled in an ESP course at the Arab Open University in Kuwait. Data analysis has yielded interesting findings with respect to the internal strengths and weaknesses in the students’ writing in the business field. The data has also provided valuable insights on the future opportunities as well as the pitfalls to avoid in order to improve the quality of students’ writing as external factors that might be affecting their performance in analytical business writing. Such findings could also be helpful for writing instructors when planning, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing.