Ecuadorian Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of the Challenges Faced When Writing Persuasive Essays

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to identify undergraduate polytechnic students’ perceptions of the challenges they face when writing persuasive essays in their English classes. Methods: This research followed a quantitative design utilizing SPSS V.20 to conduct factor and descriptive analysis to answer the three research questions established. One hundred and thirteen students who enrolled in one of the last English courses taught at the university participated in the study. Data were collected using a researcher-designed five-point Likert-scale survey. Results: Data were treated with Factor Analysis to determine the challenges students face when writing persuasive essays. Principal component analysis was used for data reduction, and five dimensions were identified, “Introduction”, “Body Paragraphs”, “Conclusion”, “Sentence Structure”, and “Communicative Achievement”. The top five issues that polytechnic undergraduate students deal with are issues with word order, forgetting to write the call-to-action, not using adequate formality all the time in their sentences, failing to write the claim in the thesis statement, and writing topic sentences that are not related to the thesis statement. Also, the dimension that causes more challenges overall is “Body paragraphs”. Conclusion: This paper contributes to the literature in the following senses. Students recognized that writing their topic sentences usually takes a long time. Also, participants claimed that forgetting to write the call-to-action is a challenge they face when writing their essays. Another issue determined in this paper that contributes to the existing literature regards the poor skills students have in summarizing the essay’s contents when they write the conclusion of their papers. The last addition this paper makes to the literature is that “Body Paragraphs” has been established as the factor that learners believe is the hardest for them to cope with when writing a persuasive essay.