Recount Writing Challenges Among First-Year EFL Majors in Vietnam: A Qualitative Review and Genre-Based Pedagogical Implications

Mastering academic writing remains a significant challenge in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) higher education, where tertiary learners must demonstrate advanced linguistic accuracy, rhetorical control, and genre competence. Within undergraduate curricula, recount writing serves as a foundational genre for developing macro-structural organization, chronological sequencing, and textual cohesion. However, first-year English majors consistently exhibit profound difficulties in producing effective texts. This study employs a qualitative synthesis methodology to systematically review and integrate theoretical and empirical literature at the intersection of EFL composition, genre pedagogy, and tertiary language instruction. The synthesized findings reveal that student writing challenges are not isolated mechanical failures but comprise an interlocking matrix of L2 compositional vulnerability across four distinct domains including linguistic (pervasive tense inconsistency and syntactic avoidance), organizational (the core cohesion gap), rhetorical (structural hybridization and genre confusion), and psychological (affective-driven regression and writing apprehension). These multidimensional barriers are heavily exacerbated by first-language (L1) syntactic transfer, secondary-school product-centric washback, and low writing self-efficacy. To resolve these challenges, this review demonstrates that Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-informed genre pedagogy specifically through the operationalization of Hammond’s Teaching-Learning Cycle provides a robust framework to make text-level functions and grammatical mechanics transparent to novice writers. The article concludes with actionable pedagogical strategies for university EFL writing courses and delineates critical future research pathways regarding generative AI integration, localized L1 constraints, and long-term learner autonomy.