ABSTRACT

Dewi, Risna. N.F. 2023. The Difficulties in Writing Argumentative Essays Experienced by English Language Students FKIP ULM Banjarmasin. Sarjana’s Thesis. English Language Education, Faculty of Teachers’ Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor: Dr. Jumariati, M.Pd., the second advisor: Elvina Arapah, M.Pd.

Keywords: writing, essay, difficulties, argumentative essay

Writing becomes one of the most important competencies to be mastered by the students. It helps the students express their ideas, thoughts, and critiques in written forms. On the other hand, most of the students find that writing a foreign language is difficult, so they make mistake when writing. There are many types of essays. One of them is an argumentative essay. This study is to find out the students' difficulties in writing an argumentative essay.

The researcher used descriptive qualitative for this research. The data needed in this research are students’ argumentative essay writing. The researcher analysed the data to know students’ difficulties by analysing the errors that the students made. Then, questionnaire and interview were to find out which aspect that the students get difficulties in writing argumentative essay and the reason why they have the difficulties. This research was conducted at English Language Education Study Program FKIP ULM Banjarmasin. The participants were 56 students of English Language Education Study Program batch 2020.

             The findingsof this research showed that students have difficulties in writing argumentative essays, those are difficulties in grammar because of lack of knowledge in grammar and difficulty constructing sentences. Then, the students also have difficulties in vocabulary because of lack of vocabulary and difficulties in finding appropriate words for a certain topic. Furthermore, the students have difficulties in spelling because English is not their first language or they use English words infrequently. The students also make errors in using punctuation correctly such as comma, full stops and semicolon. It was because they did not really understand when to use a comma, period and semicolon. The last one is the students also have difficulty in capitalization. The student stated that they didn’t know whether the word represent in institution, place, name and etc. Because of that, it is suggested to the students to increase their writing practice in order to decrease their difficulties in writing argumentative essays. Also, the lecturers may identify the most effective method to reduce students’ difficulties in writing argumentative essays.