THE CHALLENGES THAT KAZAKHSTANI GRADUATE STUDENTS EXPERIENCE WITH ACADEMIC READING AND WRITING IN ENGLISH

Abstract

"Since Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, several English medium universities have appeared in the country. These universities were created to educate a new generation of thinkers and change agents who will lead Kazakhstan in concordance with the new global tendencies and directions. The staff and faculty members to serve at these universities were invited from across the world. It has been around 29 years since the official launch of the first English medium university in the country; however, there is no research on how students cope with reading and writing in their L3, after Kazakh and Russian. Against this backdrop, a team of professors and researchers of Nazarbayev University, KIMEP University, and Suleyman Demirel University have designed a study to examine graduate students’ struggle with academic reading and writing at English medium universities in Kazakhstan. This article elicits early findings related to graduate students’ challenges in reading and writing obtained from an online survey. This study employed a mixed-method approach. Graduate students’ perceptions of reading and writing in English were obtained through an online survey comprising closed- and open-ended questions. The result of quantitative data was analyzed employing inferential statistics. The total number of respondents is 269. The findings of the study reveal that Kazakhstani graduate students face several challenges in reading and writing although they have obtained the required scores in their IELTS and TOEFL tests. They asserted that reading in English is challenging because the ideas, concepts, and terminologies used in academic papers are difficult to grasp. The study confirms that there is no significant difference in challenges among genders; however, in terms of age, more mature students respond to challenges less stressfully compared to their younger counterparts. "