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AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ PROBLEMS IN ACADEMIC

WRITING AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS IN 2019

ACADEMIC YEAR OF UNISMUH

A THESIS

Submitted to the Faculty of Teachers Training and Education Muhammadiyah University of Makassar in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Education in English Department

KHADIJAH

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR

MOTTO AND DEDICATION

Motto :

Isy Kariman aw Mut Syahidan (Hidup mulia atau

mati syahid)

“Tuntutlah ilmu sampai ke liang lahat.”

Dedication:

A Thesis for My Beloved Family

Especially for My Beloved Father, My Beloved Mother, My Beloved Husband, also, For My Self

ABSTRACT

KHADIJAH 2019. An Analysis of Students’ Problems in Academic Writing at the Fifth Semester Students of English Department Students in 2019 Academic Year of Unismuh. Teacher Training Under the Thesis of English Education Department, the Faculty of and Education, University Muhammadiyah Makassar, Supervised by Bahrun Amin and Muh. Arief Muhsin. This research has two objectives that were: (1) to find out the students’ ability in academic writing (2) to find out the problems faced by the students inthe academic writing of the fifth-semester students of the English department in 2019 academic year of Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar. The method of this research was descriptive quantitative research. This research used two instruments: academic writing tests and the questionnaire about students‟ problems in academic writing. The subject of this research was fifthsemester students of the English department at Universitas Muhammadiyah - Makassar in the 2019 academic year. This research used a purposive sampling technique. This research used samples that consisted of 32 from 220 students as the total population. as good with the mean score^ The result of this research identified the students‟ ability that categorized 81.02. The students‟ problem in the plagiarism aspect reaches 23%, grammatical error 25%, lexical difficulties 25%, and lack of planning 27%. It indicated that most students have various problems in academic writing. Keywords: Academic Writing, Students’ Ability, Students’ Problems.

ABSTRAK

KHADIJAH 2019. An Analysis of Students’ Problems in Academic Writing at the Fifth Semester Students of English Department Students in 2019 Academic Year of Unismuh. Skripsi Jurusan Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris Fakultas Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan, Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar. Dibimbing oleh Bahrun Amin dan Muh. Arief Muhsin.

Penelitian ini memiliki dua tujuan yaitu: (1) untuk mengetahui kemampuan siswa dalam penulisan akademik (2) untuk mengetahui masalah yang dihadapi oleh siswa dalam penulisan akademik siswa semester lima jurusan bahasa Inggris pada tahun 2019 tahun akademik Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar. Metode penelitian ini adalah penelitian kuantitatif deskriptif. Penelitian ini menggunakan dua instrumen: tes menulis akademik dan kuesioner tentang masalah siswa dalam penulisan akademik. Subjek penelitian ini adalah mahasiswa semester lima jurusan Bahasa Inggris di Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar pada tahun akademik 2019. Penelitian ini menggunakan teknik purposive sampling. Sampel penelitian ini berjumlah 32 dari 220 siswa sebagai total populasi. Hasil penelitian ini mengidentifikasi kemampuan siswa yang dikategorikan baik dengan skor rata-rata 81,02. Masalah siswa dalam aspek plagiarisme mencapai 23%, kesalahan tata bahasa 25%, kesulitan leksikal 25%, dan kurangnya perencanaan 27%. Diindikasikan, bahwa sebagian besar siswa memiliki berbagai masalah dalam penulisan akademik.

Kata kunci: Penulisan Akademik, Kemampuan Siswa, Masalah Siswa.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are no more appropriate words to say than Alhamdulillah, all praise is only for Allah, in His hands are all greatness and power, the Lord of the universe, master of the day of judgment, God Almighty, for all blessings and mercies so the researcher was able to finish this thesis. Peace and blessing be upon the final chosen religious messenger, the Prophet Muhammad Shallallahu „alaihi wasallam and his followers in this world. Alhamdulillah, with Allah‟s permission and gift, the researcher could finish her thesis after a long struggle and hard effort. Thus, the researcher also intended to express her most enormous gratitude to her beloved parents (Syamsuddin and Nur Amsi), who always pray, support, and motivate her of every part of her life, especially in doing this research. Also, she would like to express the enormous thanks and gratitude to her beloved husband (Muhammad Taqiyuddin), who gave his permission to live separately during the researcher finish this study, always gives his support, motivation, and pray especially in finishing this research. The researcher was realized many people were already helped her in arranging and writing this final project directly or indirectly. So in this opportunity, the researcher would like to express the deepest appreciation to:

1. Prof. Dr. H. Abd Rahman Rahim SE., MM. as the rector of Makassar Muhammadiyah University and Erwin Akib M.Pd., P.Hd as the Dean of FKIP for their support and motivation during her study at UNISMUH.
2. Ummi Khaerati Syam, S.Pd, M.Pd. As the head of the English Department of FKIP, also for her signature, support, and motivation.
3. The Researcher‟s supervisor are Dr. H. Bahrun Amin, M.Hum., and Muh. Arief Muhsin, S.Pd., M.Pd., who have given guidance, valuable advice, and correction during the development of this research.
4. Dr. Syamsiarna Nappu, S.Pd., M.Pd. as the researcher‟s lecturer and also the lecturer of academic writing course of the fifth-semester students as the subject of this research, who always gives her help and support in completing the researcher‟s data of the study.
5. The researcher‟s beloved sisters, brothers, and all big family, who always give inspiration and motivation to continue her studies.
6. The researcher‟s friends who always help and motivate her in accomplishing this research in the English Education Department Class C 2015 (CHAZTALS) whose name can not be mentioned, may Allah give His blessings.
7. Her beloved friends who have always been on the researcher's side in facing all the laughter and tears during her study Sam Pravita Sari, S.Pd., and Mirdawaty, may Allah give His blessings.
8. The researcher‟s beloved sisters in Al-Qanitaat, Kakanda Irmayani Idris, Kakanda Sulistiawaty Hardiani, Kakanda Fika Sholeha Ilyas, Kakanda

Desy Filda Zulkifli, Kakanda Afifah Hadju, Kakanda Miftahul Jannah, may Allah give His blessings.

9. The researcher‟s beloved friends in Haamilal Qur‟an, Zakiyyah Darajat, Musdalifa M, Nurayu Rezki, Nurul Faizah, Nur Afiah, Mukhlisah Nurul Khair, and Nadiah Nursalam, may Allah give His blessings.
10. The students of the Muhammadiyah University of Makassar, especially the fifth-semester students of the English Department, have a great study. May the Almighty bless us now and forever, and this thesis can be useful, Aamiin! Finally, the researcher realizes that this thesis surely has lacks and deficiencies. Therefore, the researcher intended to express her gratitude to accept any suggestions and corrections from anyone for better writing.

Makassar February 2020

Researcher

LIST OF CONTENTS

TITLE ............................................................................................................. i LEMBAR PENGESAHAN ........................................................................... ii APPROVAL SHEET ..................................................................................... iii COUNSELLING SHEET 1 ........................................................................... iv COUNSELLING SHEET 2 ........................................................................... v SURAT PERNYATAAN............................................................................... vi SURAT PERJANJIAN .................................................................................. vii MOTTO.......................................................................................................... viii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................... ix ABSTRAK ..................................................................................................... x ACKNOWLEDGMENT ................................................................................ xi LIST OF CONTENTS ................................................................................... xiv LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................... xvi LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................ xvii LIST OF APPENDICES............................................................................... xviii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A. Background ........................................................................................ 1 B. Problem Statement ............................................................................. 5 C. Objective of the Study........................................................................ 5 D. Significance of the Study ................................................................... 5 E. Scope of the Study ............................................................................. 6 CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE A. Some Previous Related Findings ....................................................... 7 B. Some Partinent Ideas .......................................................................... 9

1. The Concept of Writing ............................................................... 9 a. Definition of Writing.............................................................. 9

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD

 - b. Elements of Writing - c. The Process of Writing........................................................... - 2. The Concept of Academic Writing - a. Definition of Academic Writing - b. Features of Academic Writing - c. Problems in Academic Writing 

• C. Conceptual Framework
• A. Research Design
• B. Research Variable and Indicators.......................................................
• C. Population, Sample, and Sampling
• D. The Instrument of the Research
• E. Data Collecting Procedure
• F. The Technique of Data Analysis
• A. Findings CHAPTER IV FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
  • 1. Result of Students‟ Academic Writing Test.................................
  • 2. Result of Students‟ Questionnaire................................................
• B. Disscussion
  • 1. Students‟ Ability in Academic Writing........................................
  • 2. Students‟ Problems in Academic Writing
• A. Conclusion CHAPTER V CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
• B. Suggestion
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Table 3.1 Final Score of Students‟ Ability..................................................... LIST OF TABLES
• Table 3.2 Score of Students‟ Answer in Questionnaire
• Table 4.1 Categories of Students‟ Ability in Academic Writing
• Table 4.2 Percentage of Students‟ Ability in Each Aspect of Writing
• Table 4.3 Questionnaire of Students‟ Problems in Plagiarism
• Table 4.4 Questionnaire of Students‟ Problems in Grammatical Error
• Table 4.5 Questionnaire of Students‟ Problems in Lexical Difficulties
• Table 4.6 Questionnaire of Students‟ Problems in Lack of Planning
• Table 4.7 Percentage of Students‟ Problems of Each Category.....................

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 The Conceptual Framework ......................................................... 19

LIST OF APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1 Scoring Rubric of Students‟ Ability in Academic Writing

APPENDIX 2 Test Instrument of Students‟ Academic Writing

APPENDIX 3 Questionnaire of Students‟ Problems in Academic Writing

APPENDIX 4 List Name and Code of the Samples

APPENDIX 5 Result of Students‟ Academic Writing Test APPENDIX 6 Percentage of Each Aspect of Writing

APPENDIX 7 The Score of Students‟ Problems in Academic Writing Questionnaire

APPENDIX 8 Percentage of Each Category Problem

APPENDIX 9 Result of Students‟ Academic Writing Test

APPENDIX 10 Documentation

APPENDIX 11 Result of Students‟ Questionnaire

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. Background One of the skills in majoring English Language is writing. Brown in Ramadani (2013) stated that writing is the other forms of spoken language that represented graphically or symbolically. In Oxford Living Dictionaries, writing is a sequence of letters, words, or symbols marked on a surface. From all the definitions mentioned, it can conclude that writing is the process of the way people express their ideas or thoughts using language symbols or words. When writing something, people must have their purpose. One of the writing purposes is for academic interests or more often called academic writing that usually done by the students of schools or colleges.

Teachers or lecturers often give academic writing in schools or universities or, moreover, occur in the educational curriculum. Bowker in Swarni (2016) said that academic writing is a particular genre of writing that prescribes its own set of rules and practices. In my.cumbeia.ac.uk site, academic writing is a specific style used in formal essays and other assessments for the course. It requires official language, a logical structure, and should prop by evidence. Swarni (2016) said that some urgent things should be paid attention in writing such as grammar, choice of word, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, vocabulary, and unity among the paragraph. Leo in Dwinhandini et al. (2013) claims that three basic principles

that considered in a piece of academic writing are content, register, and topic. In short, the definition of academic writing is a type of script that has an educational purpose with particular rules. The rules should be applied to reach the goal of academic writing.

There are some types of academic writing, such as essay, research, summary, journal, book review, proposal, thesis, and so on. An essay is a kind of writing that describe or show the writer‟s perspective or story about a subject. While research, according to Nordquist, R (2019), is the collection and evaluation of information about a particular essay. A summary is the small or simple type of writing that rewritten from a long text. A book review is the commentary of book content. A proposal, thesis, and dissertation are the academic writing that usually occurs in colleges as the obligation task for the students that write about a subject. Before doing research, students in college mostly asked to write a proposal first as a college requirement. Academic writing has its specific purpose and characteristics.

In writing any academic writing, many undergraduate students, especially in the English Education Department, face some problems that influence their writing task, writing skills, and further might also their writing of proposal and thesis. Many students in college cannot write some academic papers such as essays, research proposals, thesis, dissertations, and so on. That lacks skill in academic writing makes some students do plagiarism in any task of their college activity. The students‟ problems caused by some factors, internal or external, such as the minim of knowledge they understand in English, lack of doing exercise,

lack the motivation to learn more, and so on. Cause of some factors, some students have problems doing their academic research primarily to fulfill the requirements of academic writing.

Abdulkareem (2013) researched a related study aimed to investigate the academic writing problems encountered by Arab speaking postgraduate students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). The findings of the research showed that participants were mostly made errors in simple writing task. The result described that students have many errors in the sentence structure, vocabulary, and expressing ideas in academic writing. The errors are varies from high percentage to low in the aspects of academic writing problems.

Alfaki (2015) also conducted related research aimed to identify university students‟ writing problems in the English language and to encourage ways of solving those problems. The findings revealed that those university students have various writing problems: language problems at the levels of morphology and syntax, usage errors, and mechanical mistakes, that is, spelling, punctuation and capitalization, lack of several writing development skills, cognitive problems and graphomotor problems. Al Mubarak (2017) has researched a related study aimed to look into various challenges encountered by English second language students in academic writing in ordinary graduation project in the context of universities, specifically focused on identifying the problems faced by the Arts Colleges within the University of Al-Imam Al Mahdi, Sudan. He found that the students faced numerous challenges relating to academic writing at the university level. It

discovered that many problems with academic writing experienced by the students while writing were articles, punctuation, prepositions, irregular verbs, weak expressions, consistency paralleled structure, and use of verb tense. This study may have similarities with previous studies in terms of students‟ problems in academic writing such as the mechanical mistakes, sentence structure and grammar, the cause of the issues, the purpose of plagiarism, and so on. The thing that makes this study is different from the previous research is the place where this study took. This study took place in the Muhammadiyah University environment, especially in the English Education Department. The subject of this study was also different. This research subject is the students in the 2019 academic year of Unismuh in the English Education Department. The condition of the students also has some particular situation based on their experiences and environment while doing or learning academic writing. The methods applied, the techniques in learning, the media used and other learning conditions also influenced their interest and motivation in learning academic writing course.

Over time, the problems faced by college students in academic writing in many changes by the times. Some issues reduced with the existence of solutions that implemented correctly, but not a few problems that developed. Besides, the researcher observed themselves and people in the researcher‟s environment, which are the student friends who still lack the knowledge of academic writing so that they often make mistakes and face many problems when working on tasks with educational goals. Base on this, the researcher intends to research under the

title “An Analysis of Students’ Problems in Academic Writing at English Department Students in 2019 Academic Year of Unismuh” The research focused on the analysis of the problems do the students face in doing their academic writing.

B. Problem Statement Based on the description in the background above, the researcher formulated the research questions that are:

1. What are the categories of the students‟ ability in academic writing?
2. What are the problems that students face in academic writing? C. Objectives of the Study Based on the problem statement above, the goals of this research are:
3. To find out the students‟ ability in academic writing.
4. To find out the problems students face in academic writing. D. Significance of the Study There are some significances of this research that are;
5. This research will be beneficial to the writer who researched to find out the objective of the study as the answer to the research question.
6. This research would provide information that can be a benefit to the English teacher or lecturer about the students‟ problems in academic writing.
7. This research also would be beneficial to the reader or the researcher who will conduct further research.

E. Scope of the Study This research focused on analyzing the students of the English Department of Unismuh of 2019 academic year about their ability in academic writing with five categories of assessment that are content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. And also, the analysis of the problems faced by them in academic writing based on four categories of common problems that are plagiarism, grammatical errors, lexical difficulties, and lack of planning.

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

A. Some Previous Related Findings Abdulkareem (2013) researched a related study aimed to investigate the academic writing problems encountered by Arab speaking postgraduate students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). The result of the study showed that students committed many mistakes in academic writing concerning sentence structure, vocabulary, and expressing ideas. The results presented the most errors made by the participants in a simple writing task. The mistakes ranged from the highest percentages to the lowest about the aspects of academic writing problems. Alfaki (2015) also conducted related research aimed to identify university students‟ writing problems in the English language and to encourage ways of solving those problems. The findings revealed that those university students have various writing problems: language problems at the levels of morphology and syntax, usage errors, and mechanical mistakes, that is, spelling, punctuation and capitalization, lack of several writing development skills, cognitive problems and graphomotor problems. Raza (2015) researched a related study aimed to identify problems that the students encountered in writing their academic papers and which strategies they reported to be employing to find solutions to their problems. The findings of the study indicated the most significant difficulties in „cause of plagiarism‟, „deciding