Understanding Students' Perceptions of Difficulty with Academic Writing for Teacher Development: A Case Study of the University of Tokyo Writing Program

Abstract

This paper examines students' perceptions of difficulty with academic writing in English. Writing seems to be one of the most important, yet difficult, academic skills for university students to learn. This is particularly the case with foreign or second language (L2) learners. While it is often claimed that the understanding of students' difficulties is a necessary condition for becoming an ideal L2 teacher, few implications have been offered for teacher development in the literature of academic writing. The present study aims to deal with this issue using data obtained from 95 first-year Japanese university students. The results of the study show that the students tended to perceive academic writing to be difficult. In particular, they perceived language-related components of academic writing to be more difficult than structure/content-related components. Moreover, it was found that a great number of students expressed a high degree of difficulty with research design. This paper concludes with a discussion of some of the implications for teacher development.