Grammatical Problems Encountered by English Language University Students in Writing

Abstract

Writing skill plays a vital role in academic and professional success. It is an extremely complex skill in which the students are required to produce well-structured essays, research papers, and reports that demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter and their ability to articulate complex ideas. This article investigates the problems that face the second semester students at faculty of Education Nasser / Zawia university and offers some remedies and suggestions in order to minimize the problems of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammatical structures. The students were asked to write a paragraph to test their writing abilities. Moreover, close ended questionnaire was conducted in order to obtain information from the students to identify their difficulties. The results showed that 95% of the students struggle in their writing due to the fact that they lack the necessary basics of writing, vocabulary, resources and support to improve their writing.  In addition, the study offers some suggestions that the researcher suggested to minimize such problems.