Barriers to Effective Written Communication Insights from Education Undergraduates at KUST

Written communication plays a significant role among university students, especially in the Education field, since this skill prepares future teachers to plan lessons, create assessments, write effectively, and also act as good language role models to their students. Although it is a critical issue, the majority of undergraduate Education students in Pakistan have endured the challenge of writing grammatically correct and coherent English. This paper examines the obstacles to successful written communication among undergraduate students at the Institute of Education and Research (IER), Kohat University of Science and Technology (KUST). A quantitative descriptive research design was used, where a 17-item untimed grammaticality judgment test, based on Ellis (2005, 2006) and Erlang (2006), was administered to a sample of randomly selected 150 final-year BS Education students. It was found that there were significant difficulties in basic grammatical patterns such as verb complements, subject verb agreement, modal verbs, comparatives, unreal conditionals, ergative verbs, embedded questions, adverb position, relative clauses, and question tags. Proper answers were between 32 and 61 percent, which means that they were partially familiar, yet did not always master them. These challenges were caused by a number of reasons such as the use of conventional grammar instruction methods, lack of writing skills, vocabulary and memorization. The study based on these findings suggests that the curriculum could be changed, writing instruction should be taught through processes, incorporation of formative feedback, and combination of reading and speaking tasks to enhance the writing skills. The findings have implications on the teacher educators, curriculum developers and language teachers who wish to improve the written communication skills of future teachers, and hence overcome some of the major obstacles to effective academic writing.