Exploring Master’s Dissertation Writing Common Problems: Students’ Perceptions and Internal Examiners’ Reviews

Abstract

The fact that English master students are facing challenges in their thesis and dissertation writing process has taken a large proportion in the researchers’ studies over the past few decades. The existing study attempts to provide an insight into both students’ challenges writing and supervisors’ perceptions of the difficulties encountered by master two students during the course of this academic process. Furthermore, it explores their needs to enhance their writing skills in thesis writing process and investigates the major challenges in order to provide suggestions for improvements. To meet this significant issue, the researcher used a mixed method for data collection to get both quantitative and qualitative data for our research. A total number of eighty five master two students from the English department or Tiaret University have been questioned using the questionnaire tool and other eight English teachers have been interviewed in order to have a vision into their experience within the examination and review of master theses. The findings revealed that the majority of candidates are having challenges with almost all the chapters. These challenges include inappropriateness in presenting the chapters, lack of academic writing skills and lack of supervisor support. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the methodology courses should be reviewed and much more practice must be focused rather than the theoretical form.