Challenges of Writing Dissertation among University Students: Based on South Eastern University of Sri Lanka

Abstract

The undergraduates of Bachelor of Arts Honours degree have to write a dissertation in their fields. When they write it, they have been facing challenges. Therefore, this research sought to investigate the challenges of writing a dissertation as a requirement of the specialisation Bachelor Degree in the Arabic Language among those who are speaking Tamil as a mother tongue and who learning Arabic as a foreign language. This research is a qualitative study through the descriptive methodology. The researchers selected 30 dissertations randomly from the Faculty of Islamic Studies and Arabic Language, the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka and analysed them. The review of the documents focuses on students’ abilities to write dissertations. Also, 25 students who submitted their dissertations were selected randomly to fill the questionnaire to reveal the challenges they faced. Writing a dissertation in a foreign or second language is difficult than writing in a native language. As pointed out in the previous sections, there are challenges in writing dissertations such as the influence of the Tamil language, Lack of knowledge in research writing, Selecting a new topic, Lack of reading, Experience of using the software. At the same time, findings of the review of the dissertations reveal that language fluency and data analysis are the common errors observed in the dissertations.