Teachers’ and Students’ Perceived Causes of Reluctance to Writing

This study aims at examining English language teachers' and first year university students' perceived causes of writing reluctance. In order to achieve the objective, a total of 326 freshman students and 35 English language teachers of Adama Science and Technology University (Ethiopia) participated in this study. The instrument used to collect data was a questionnaire which had three parts: personal data, survey of motivation to engage in writing (SMEW) and perceived causes of writing reluctance (PCRR). As the second part of the questionnaire was prepared to identify reluctant writers, language teachers filled in only the first and third or PCRR part. Descriptive analysis, t-test and ANOVA were employed to analyze the data. The results show that teachers' and students' perceived causes of reluctance to writing were mostly convergent. Poor writing knowledge, skill and strategies including writing in their L1, disregarding the importance of writing, lack of proper feedback and exposure to reading literary works were the main causes of reluctance to writing. In this study, students' gender and age differences have not shown any significance relation to their perceived causes of reluctance to writing. The study concludes with few pedagogical implications and recommendations based on the findings of the present research.