A Thematic Analysis on the Obstacles Experienced by EFL Students and Supervisors in Master’s Thesis Writing

Abstract

As academic writing has become a daunting task for most English Foreign Language (EFL) students, the study at handattempted to scrutinize the significant obstacles in writing theses from Master two EFL students’ and supervisors’ outlooks. To reach this aim, a purposive sampling consisting of 30 EFL graduate students and 10 supervisors was chosen from the Department of English, Ain-Temouchent University. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and the findings were analyzedusing the so-called thematic analysis. The findings highlightedsomeobstacles confronted by the students in writing master theses as reported by the students themselves and their supervisors. Among these obstacles, some were common for both groups and thus, the main challengesreported by both the students and supervisors lay in the students’ lack of research knowledge including the inability to write academically using academic vocabularies, lack of sources and flaws with supervisors. Implications of the study for universities, EFL graduate students, and their supervisors were also discussed in this study.