Surmounting Major Difficulties Facing AOU Students in Acquiring and Upgrading their Writing Skills: Institutional Study

Abstract

This paper probes issues related to the learning of advanced English writing skills by Arab Open University (AOU) students majoring in English Language and Literature at AOU’s Kuwait Branch. A questionnaire answered by 93 students comprised the corpus of the study. The questionnaire (Appendix I) is divided into three parts which reflect students’ experience in learning writing before and after joining the AOU. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how students’ academic writing skills developed, and how these skills can be bolstered. The data were analyzed, tabulated and interpreted to mark, inter alia, the learning difficulties which persisted in the development of the target students’ writing skills.

The researchers’ findings are expected to aid tutors and syllabus designers in their quest to have more research-supported knowledge of the areas that need to be addressed and to recognize the most adequate teaching strategies that ought to be implemented in order to upgrade students’ writing capabilities.

The researchers reached the following conclusions:

• There is a genuine relationship between home literacy and school literacy.
• The reading opportunities through the dynamic role of class, school libraries and the internet support the subjects’ writing.
• More in-class writing is genuinely needed.
• There is a need for a writing support center (WSC).
• There is a need to teach grammar in context rather than dealing with it as an abstract subject.
• Each writing class should not exceed 15 students.
• Students in writing classes should be grouped based on their English language proficiency.