International Journal of Social Science Research ISSN 2327-5510 2016, Vol. 4, No. 1 http://ijssr.macrothink.org 126 Causes of Poor Academic Performance among Omani Students Manizheh Alami (Corresponding author) Salalah College of Technology, Sultanate of Oman E-mail: manizheh.alami@yahoo.com Received: January 28, 2016 Accepted: February 23, 2016 Published: March 3, 2016 doi:10.5296/ijssr.v4i1.8948 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijssr.v4i1.8948 Abstract Nowadays, poor academic performance is among the main concerns of teachers, syllabus designers, curriculum developers and the whole educational body. The issue becomes worse in non-English speaking countries where the medium of instruction at colleges/ universities is English but students are exposed to English for a limited number of hours before beginning their study at college/university. To answer the question ‘what are the causal factors that affect students’ poor performances in non-English speaking countries like Oman? 151 essays written by students who enrolled for post foundation program at Salalah College of Technology were examined carefully. The factors involved in students’ low academic achievements categorized into four macro groups; student-related factors, teacher- related factors, family- related factors and some other factors such as marriage, health problem, toxic friendships and transportation problem. The findings show that while student-related factors have the highest impact on students’ performance, teacher-related factors had the lowest effect. Keywords: Academic performance, student- related factors, Teacher-related factors, Family-related factors 1. Introduction Understanding the goals of education and students’ needs are necessary for an educational system to prosper. Surfing in the Internet and googling, we would come across ample number of articles and studies conducted to find out the factors that have impact on students’ academic performance in different contexts and countries (Cascio 2015; Rahamneh, 2012). The findings yield some prominent factors among which are: poor teaching method, improper evaluation instruments, stress and emotional factors like feeling towards teacher, subject and