NNS Master’s Academic Writing Challenges

Abstract

Written academic genre is one of the most important written genres studied during the last few decades as a result of the large number of students who travel abroad to continue their academic studies. Academic writing has always been a great challenge especially for non-native speaking (NNS) students, mainly because of their insufficient second language mastery. Thesis writing as the final requirement for a postgraduate program is of high standards which many students fail to meet in their efforts to produce high quality academic language. Thus this study investigated nine master’s thesis in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) across different disciplines to identify some of NNS master’s students’ second language difficulties in their academic writing. The results revealed second language insufficient mastery and knowledge especially in terms of grammar and sentence structure among NNS master’s students.