eng Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Educational Research 2327-6150 2018-09-12 6 9 1251 1256 10.12691/education-6-9-2 EDUCATION2018692 article Sakineh Jafari 1 Samaneh Jafari 2 Reza Kafipour rezakafipour@gmail.com 3 English Department, Izlamic Azad University, Zanjan, Iran Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Southern Illinois Univeristy, Carbondale, United States English Department, Shiraz University of Medical Sceinces, Shiraz, Iran This study focused on doctoral students' English article writing practices and the challenges they have faced in this process. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 Iranian PhD students from different disciplines individually. In addition, drafts of the participants' English articles were collected for data verification. The results revealed that the linguistic elements of writing in English, especially grammar, were regarded as the most problematic aspects, whereas the meta-linguistic and discourse features of the article writing as well as knowledge of technical vocabulary were not identified as problematic areas by these doctoral students. A common need which was felt by almost all of the participants was a comprehensive and explicit instruction on sentence structure and grammar in ESP courses. Although participants of this study pursued some strategies in order to respond to some challenges they faced in writing English articles, they called for greater cooperation with ESP/EAP practitioners in order to ease the process of publishing their work in English. http://pubs.sciepub.com/education/6/9/2/education-6-9-2.pdf ESP English article writing explicit instruction grammar linguistic elements