Abstract : This small-scale survey investigated the academic writing challenges of ESL learners. It aimed at answering two questions which are what are the academic writing difficulties encountered by ESL learners and what are the factors that may cause these difficulties? The subjects were 20 postgraduate students of four nationalities studying at a university in Australia. Two questionnaires were used to gather the data of this study. Questionnaire 1 contains closed questions. To support the quantitative data collected from the first questionnaire, 2 subjects were asked to complete a similar questionnaire and it mostly contains open-ended questions. The results suggest that the subjects tend to have similar difficulties in academic writing regardless of their previous educational contexts.