Challenges in Academic Writing: Libyan Undergraduate EFL Students' Summarizing and Paraphrasing of English Source Texts

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the primary challenges that EFL students encounter in paraphrasing and summarizing any academic English texts, as well as their perspectives on strategies to overcome these challenges. a quantitative research design was employed, using a questionnaire as the main instrument. The participants consisted of 69 fourth-semester EFL students from the Faculty of Education, Misurata University. The findings revealed that students face several difficulties in paraphrasing and summarization including 1) unknowing how to restructure the sentence in new style, 2) inappropriate use of synonyms, 3) making plagiarism, 4) poor grammatical competence, 5) weak reading comprehension, 6) difficulty understanding unfamiliar terms, and 7) the tendency to translate lengthy texts into Arabic. The study concluded with practical recommendations for both teachers and students to address these challenges.