This article presents a study investigating a relation between students' perceived of writing, their learning preferences, and their writing ability. The study was conducted prior to the development a cognitivegenre-based model of teaching academic writing to EFL students. The population was 105 students who had taken three prerequisite writing subjects. The data were collected through questionnaire and writing test. The questionnaires were distributed to all of the students to find out their perceived needs and their learning prefenrences. The test was given to thirty randomly selected students in order to see their writing ability. The students were required to write 2 different academic genres, a discussion and a report text. The result of the the first questionnaire analysis reveals that the students thought that they had fairly good knowledge about developing an academic text. Based on the second questionnaire it was found that the students tended to be dependent on teachers. The students' writings, however, indicated that the students had various factors problems in developing and oraganizing their ideas even though their texts contained the components of the generic structure. Furthermore, they had complex lexico grammar problems. Based on these results it can be concluded that there was a gap between the --------students need a model of teaching academic texts which gives attention to both discourse and language aspects.