The aim of this research was to explore the writingstrategies used by ELT students and the difficulties they experience inacademic writing. A questionnaire was used to collect the data that wasobtained from 34 second-year students, studying at the English LanguageTeaching Department of Education Faculty at a foundation university inIstanbul, Turkey in 2017-2018 academic year. The results of the presentresearch revealed that the participants of the study are aware of theimportance of using metacognitive writing strategies in the completion ofquality writing assignments. It also became clear that the participants payattention to the identification of what they specifically want to say at thepre-writing stage. That is, they use brainstorming techniques and prepare anoutline before they begin to write their first drafts on a given topic. Theparticipants favor peer feedback at the pre-writing stage but not at thepost-writing stage. The most frequently used writing strategy was found to berevising strategy. However, it also became clear that the participants preferself-revision or teacher feedback for the improvement of their papers. Finally,the findings of the study indicated that the participants experience manydifficulties in writing, such as finding relevant references, choosing asignificant topic, paraphrasing, referencing and citation, expressing ownvoice, coherence and cohesion, using conjunctive cohesive devicesappropriately, and language use, respectively.Keywords: Academic writing difficulties, writing strategies.