When asked, most learners studying the university Direct Entry Program (DEP) state that academic writing in second language is challenging, leading to making errors. Rather than treating these errors on the surface, the underlying causes are salient; hence, this study has investigated the issue from a transdisciplinary perspective, looking at both language-related causes and the underlying factors contributing to issues in English as a Second Language (ESL) academic writing. A mixed methods approach was employed to investigate the issue by collecting surveys and interviewing both students and teachers. The quantitative research findings revealed that most of the language-related errors were lexico-grammatical, followed by discourse, orthography, and syntax. Source integration was also significant as roughly one-third of the participants did not use in-text citation in their responses, and those who did had some serious issues with in-text citation and paraphrasing. As far as the underlying causes of issues were concerned, the lack of academic writing input and practice, differences in teaching and learning styles in the source country compared to the target country as well as sociocultural, cognitive, and psychological factors were known to play a role in the quality and accuracy of ESL writing. The findings of the research are crucial as it focuses on a wide range of factors contributing to errors. The employment of both surveys and interviews with student and teacher participants in the University English Entry Course (UEEC) with little previous study contributed to some useful insights. They can be used by researchers, learners, teachers, and educational institutions to identify the causes of issues in ESL academic writing and respond appropriately to them.
Issues, ESL, Academic Writing, Direct Entry Programs, Errors Analysis, Lexico-grammatical errors, Psychological factors, Socio-cultural factors, Learning and teaching factors, Cognitive factors, anzsrc-for: 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE, anzsrc-for: 4704 Linguistics, anzsrc-for: 39 EDUCATION
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