Importance of learning grammar for academic writing: difficulties faced by TESL students in academic writing

Abstract

The recently commenced TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) degree program at the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka has attracted students in the Humanities faculty towards the course. When students are enrolled for the course, they find it difficult to successfully cope with the course because of the writing difficulties which are usually associated with inadequate English language proficiency, especially grammatical knowledge. The department has arranged academic writing skills courses for the students to enhance their writing skills but students request direct teaching of grammar, which the department is hesitant to do. Explicit teaching of grammar has now drawn the attention of linguists for its usefulness for second language acquisition and has been a subject for debate. This study analyses the importance of learning grammar for academic writing from the point of view of learners and language instructors and assesses the impact of the two different approaches to teaching grammar: the inductive vs deductive approach for enhancing academic writing skills. The study collected data from almost all the TESL students in the year 2021 attached to the department. A questionnaire survey, followed by discussions with the students and the ESL instructors, was used to collect data. The study revealed the complicated nature of grammatical knowledge needed for academic writing and identified a mismatch between students’ expectations and instructors’ practice. The study suggests that instructors could help the students understand the required grammatical knowledge needed for academic writing and design their academic writing courses with more emphasis on grammatical components that are infrequent use