Difficulties EFL students face when writing in a foreign language

Teaching a new language comprises 4 skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking. However, I believe that teaching students how to write successfully could be the most challenging task of them all. This is because writing entails following numerous methods and techniques. Not only this, we all know that writing involves different registers as well; hence, teaching these different registers (formal, informal, semi-formal, colloquial) in addition to different types like of writing (argumentative, opinion, descriptive, and expository) all require tremendous effort from the learners.  In fact, teaching writing has become difficult because of the challenges faced by the students in learning writing skills. Some of the challenges that are faced by the ESL students are lack of vocabulary, poor grammar, poor spelling, students’ readiness and lack of exposure to books and reading materials. To begin with, I guess that one of the challenges that encounter any language learner is the language barrier itself. To illustrate more, lots of the learners find that language rules are daunting and consequently they feel demotivated to learn the new language because they are certain that learning the rules will take a very long time and will not enable them to be fluent in the end, this is because fluency requires practice and this is not available most of the time. This language barrier will always be standing between the students and successful writing because of the required familiarity with the rules of writing and language structures. Knowing these areas would pave the way for successful writing to any student. Therefore, if we want to summarize the difficulties language learners encounter nowadays, it would be the lack of adequate knowledge regarding the semantic and syntactic fields, the enthusiasm of the students to learn the language, and the strong desire to have a solid foundation in this language. How are the last two points in this sentence difficulties? Another fundamental challenge which is equally important in limiting the learners’ writing skills is limited vocabulary. I believe that the most crucial feature of writing is vocabulary because it is a fundamental component of effective writing. In fact, missing word here lack of vocabulary is a problem that frequently arises during class activities, and it has become a significant issue for both the teacher and the pupils. To tackle this difficulty, teachers can urge the students to open any kind of dictionary available to them during the task or assignment and encourage them to consult it very often. Also, working on understanding the meaning of words within a certain context and being able to understand its usage in different contexts and enrich vocabulary through teaching individual word, word learning strategy and foster word consciousness. Grammar is very helpful for effective language skills too. Grammar, in missing word here writing skill, determines how a paragraph builds- up and how the ideas can be understood. Teachers often find their students lacking knowledge in this aspect this is because the students find so many exceptions to every rule in English grammar missing punctuation here because grammar rules are often tricky, confusing and hard to remember. This issue should be one the major issues that any teacher should be ready to address in the classroom. To accomplish all these things, I believe that several strategies could be followed to overcome such challenges, and to reach our target of good language acquisition. To start with, students should interestingly learn the rules of missing word here language, and this could be done through different types of activities such as listening to songs while reading their lyrics. Also, reading poems and challenging the students to find different sentence structures in these poems. In addition to other activities like gap-filling exercises which will help the students in mastering sentence construction. These mentioned activities, along with role-playing and writing poems of their own could help them to learn the language interestingly and excitingly and enhance their creativity in using this new language. Another strategy, which I think could equally beneficial, would be through debates, arguments and brain-storming exercises. Encouraging the students to write down their ideas concerning a debatable topic and discuss these ideas with other colleagues could enhance their confidence and improve the students’ writing skills. Moreover, encouraging the students to make their own journals and personal story-writing, would enable them to work through effective self-expression. Furthermore, introducing reading and comprehension tasks that are followed by summary writing and vocabulary exercises would make writing more approachable. To sum up, many student think that the writing skill is one of the most complicated skills because it requires better grammar, lots of vocabulary and any other aspect to make it perfect and readable. But, all of these are back to teachers since they have a great role in exploiting different methods to attract students’ attention and make them have a will in doing the task. Learning a new language and being able to write in this new language is an ongoing accumulative process that requires constant practice and effort from missing word here learners in addition to the teacher’s determination and well-prepared course plan missing punctuation here and clear learning objectives.