Literature review

It is commonly known that EFL learners need to be skillful enough at the four language skills specifically: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Particularly, becoming acceptable writers on writing skill is not an easy task for EFL learners. Nowadays, writing skill is considered to be one of the most essential skills, so it’s an important form of communication and a key part of education. Writing is the primary basis upon which one’s work, learning, and intellect will be judged- in college, in the workplace, and in the community. In addition, equipping us with linguistic and critical thinking skills offers students the opportunity to simultaneously catch on to many other vital facilities that can help them succeed in their academics, career. However, many EFL students struggle with their serious difficulties that forbid them from producing a high-quality essay writing. This study is going to include extensive research into the cause of having bad writing skills as well as giving 3 suggested solutions for improvement.

1. Definition of Essay-Writing

The study of writing, along with the other modes of language, has received attention from divergent researchers. According to Belkhir and Benyelles: “An essay is a sizeable piece of writing on a particular subject undertaken by an individual”. They also regard writing essay as composition is arguably an arduous task because of its inherent nature consisting of competence in the medium of writing, composition, rhetoric, aesthetics, philosophy and logic. It is approached by Harmer (2007), as a process that should be undergone over different stages including, the drafting stage, the editing stage, the planning stage and the final draft. Similarly, Damiani et al. (2011) regards the writing skill as the process that calls planning, reflection and the organization of ideas, in addition to the required effort and attention that EFL students are invited to respect. Therefore writing an essay is not an unchallenged task that can be done in a certain time, writing an essay has to go through many different stages to get it done.

1. Common problems

This heading covers the reasons behind EFL learners essay writing difficulties that are said to be the lack of reading and lack of practicing essays.

• Lack of reading

Writing is the transmission of thoughts in language through text, which requires the writer to have aware of various aspects of writing such as style, vocabulary, organization and structure. Reading is a useful learning tool that can improve these aspects. In fact, evidences has shown that better readers are better writers and better writers are more likely to language exposure than poorer readers (Belkhir and Benyelles). It is assumed that the students who read more will also write better than those who don’t (Cottrell, 2017). For example, if they cannot recognize the main point of an argument in their reading, they obviously cannot respond to this point in their writing. Low level of reading habit had been accused as the cause of inadequacy essays written by EFL learners, as the result, such qualities as clarity, simplicity, unity and coherence is disappeared in student's essay.

• Lack of practicing essays

In addition to the lack of reading among EFL students, they do not raise the sense of initiative refers to an individual's ability to turn ideas into essay. Most of the students are still shy when expressing ideas in the essay, whether right or wrong, students hide their weaknesses and convince themselves not to carry on writing, there will be no mistakes. This leads to poor grammar and syntax, lack of English vocabulary. Moreover, students tend to depend on translate google translation for their writing tests. There is a fact that students often have a hard time to get started and feel overwhelmed by the task. They need a lot of time to concentrate to form letters which is not an automatic process. It really hard for them to retrieve the right words to express an idea. They also struggle to organize and use mechanics of writing.