Iranian Postgraduate Students’ English Proficiency Problems at Malaysian Universities

In this study, an attempt was made to determine the Iranian postgraduate students’ perceived problems in English language proficiency and their level of satisfaction with their language proficiency as well as their academic performance in Malaysian universities. The data was provided by 120 students studying at UM, UPM, UKM, USM, and UTM through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that Iranian students' main problem is writing the different required genres such as term projects, research articles, and theses or dissertations. More specifically, their difficulties in all these genres are source use, the required moves in each section, grammatical accuracy, cohesion, coherence, and the mechanics of writing in the required writing convention, that is, APA. Although they mostly had reasonable IELTS or TOEFL scores and were satisfied with their proficiency, most of them were not content with their academic performance specially in writing the academic genres that are new to them. It is also found that such a literacy problem has negatively influenced their self-confidence and is a source of supervisor's dissatisfaction with the postgraduate students' performance. Pedagogical implications and some recommendations for improvement in academic writing are discussed.

English Language Proficiency, Academic Performance, Academic Genres