ABSTRACT
Little research has aimed to characterise doctoral students’ reported challenges in writing English journal papers, and to examine whether there are differences in perceived challenges between students with varying backgrounds. To help Chinese doctoral students with varying backgrounds develop writing skills for international publication, an understanding of their perceived challenges in terms of taxonomy and in consideration of background variety is an important prerequisite. Thematic analyses of open-ended questionnaire data and interview data showed that challenges could be classified into three sub-themes: language proficiency at the micro-level of journal papers, thinking skills and rhetorical organisation of journal papers at the macro-level. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the eight participants selected for in-depth analysis. At the lexical level, 145 responses were concerned about difficulties in using academic vocabulary and discipline-specific vocabulary. At the syntactic level, 107 responses were found related to restricted syntactic variety, and fundamental grammatical issues.
