Thinking and Writing in EFL

Abstract

Abstract This research examines university students' writing problems and strategies; it also tries to investigate the way learner difficulties and strategies are perceived by students and teachers. Two questionnaires were conducted to find out both students' and teachers' assessment of these difficulties and strategies, and a corpus of 25 exam copies was examined, errors were classified, their sources analysed and strategies defined. This study aims to point out the major difficulties that our EFL learners encountered in writing and to find out some of the reasons that could explain them. It also tries to see whether there were any discrepancies between the students’ and teachers’ assessment of writing difficulties and strategies and the students’ ‘real’ problems and strategy use, at least, as they were displayed in their exam copies. One of the major goals is also to identify and define Tunisian learners’ writing strategies and see whether they match those of ESL and EFL learners in the literature. The research is based on the following hypotheses: a) Students have difficulties in expressing their thoughts and ideas in the FL because they generate them in the L1 and then try to translate them in the FL. b) Students’ problems are mainly conceptual; i.e, they result from a lack of understanding of the new concepts introduced in the course and course materials. The results showed that the learners’ difficulties were mainly grammatical and organizational and that, just like other learners, our students made use of metacognitive, cognitive, social and affective strategies when handling their linguistic tasks.