ANALISIS MAHASISWA STRATA I DALAM MENULIS AKADEMIK (Sebuah Studi Kasus Mahasiswa Strata I)

Mega Lestari Hartono Putri (A 121 21 017). This thesis is entitled “The Analysis
of Undergraduate Students’ Problems in Academic Writing”. Under the
supervision of Aminah and Mukrim.
The objectives of this research are to identify the problems in academic writing
faced by the undergraduate students and to identify the solutions that have been
done by the undergraduate students to solve the problems in academic writing. This
research was a qualitative study. The research subject of this study were 42 students
of undergraduate students of English Education Study Program in Tadulako
University. In this study, the researcher use questionnaire, interview, and writing
sample to gather the data. The data was analyzed descriptively through data
interpretations. The result of the study revealed that the students experienced some
difficulties in line with the theory of Brown: (1) Internal difficulties that consisted
of anxiety, title and topic selection, research method and research problem
identification, and drafting proper literature review. The reason of the difficulty is
due to the lack of prior knowledge from the students before writing thesis; (2)
External difficulties that consisted of relationship between supervisee – supervisor,
and the format or culture of University This study also identified external
difficulties; (3) Lexical and grammatical difficulties, The difficulties in vocabulary
are caused by the limited diversity of vocabulary, poor spelling, weak sentence
structure, and lack of coherence and essay development challenges. The last
problem that was indicated was in grammar. The difficulty is caused by lack of
practice and knowledge. Additionally, the research demonstrated that the novelty
of this study lies in the students' endeavors to overcome the challenges. The
approaches mentioned include engaging in reading, practicing writing with teacher
feedback, and effectively managing time to complete the writing tasks. These
findings can inform curriculum and course designers in selecting appropriate
materials and teaching methods that address students' specific writing challenges.
It can also encourage teachers to create a curriculum that aligns with students'
preferences and interests, thus motivating them to write in English. Moreover,
teachers should develop teaching materials that incorporate various activities and
tasks focused on writing strategies, such as coherence, cohesion, unity, information
retrieval, paraphrasing, and summarizing. The limitations that should be
acknowledged in this research are Firstly, the study primarily yielded descriptive
data, making it difficult to generalize the findings. Additionally, the small number
of participants limits the ability to use the results as a definitive parameter for the
entire university or student population.
Keywords: academic writing, problems, thesis, undergraduate