Exploring the Methodological Problems Encountered by EFL Students When Writing their Dissertations

Abstract

The present research paper aims at exploring the methodological problems that EFL students encounter when writing their dissertations and finding the different causes that lead to this type of problems. It is based on the hypothesis that „providing EFL students with more practice in research methodology course will help the students to overcome the methodological problems and write a well formed dissertation‟. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to confirm the suggested hypothesis. Two questionnaires were designed for both students and teachers. The first questionnaire was handed to 35 Master two students in order to know students‟ perspectives towards the process of writing a dissertation, and whether the instruction of research methodology was successful or not. The second questionnaire was emailed to 10 teachers to evaluate the research methodology course. The results obtained from the students‟ questionnaire indicated that students face serious problems from right the beginning of the process and till the end due to the lack of knowledge of the basics of writing a dissertation, in addition, to the absence of practice in the research methodology subject. On the other hand, the teacher questionnaire indicated that despite the importance of the research methodology course for students in writing their dissertations, there are some challenges. It is found that the method of delivering the content of this course is not appropriate and there is also a lack of practice, which affect negatively the students‟ performance when writing their dissertations