This stuThis study aims to investigate the problems faced by the students of the English Department of FKIP ULM in writing Sarjana’s thesis proposal chapters. The focus of the problems focused on the content related problems that the students encountered during their process of developing the information and ideas within each of their thesis proposal chapters.

It employed a descriptive qualitative design to describe the real experiences and difficulties that the subjects faced in the natural academic settings. The participants were the students who had already written their thesis proposal from batch 2021 and 2022. The instruments were questionnaires to select the participants, semi-structured interviews to collect primary data, and documentation. The data was analysed using deductive thematic analysis.

The findings revealed that students encountered problems in writing each chapter. In the introduction, students faced problems in organising ideas for the overall research background, involving narrowing down the variables, writing the argumentative paragraph, explaining the research gap and novelty, and stating the research questions. In the review of literature, they struggled in the process of locating and understanding the body of literature and grand theories due to limited access and the unavailability of the theories and their limited understanding of paraphrasing the information. In the methodology, students faced problems due to the misalignment between the series of research designs, treatment of the variables, research objectives, and incorrect blueprints of the research instruments due to their confusion in understanding the concepts of research methods in ELT.

The present study answered that the problems within the proposal reflect the complexity and limitation of students’ writing ability when fulfilling the ideal requirement to write a chapter based on its distinguished content for the information and ideas of the introduction, review of literature, and the methodology, emphasizing the depth and influencing factors that causing their failed attempt in writing each of the stage development within the chapters. Therefore, it is suggested that students always refer to the concepts of research methods in books and other academic references to minimise their problems in writing the content of their Sarjana’s thesis proposal chapters. It is also suggested that the lecturers facilitate the students with relevant journal articles and other reading sources to help students with limited access enrich their knowledge in review of the literature and research writing. Finally, future researchers are suggested to extend the study exploring the unreached scope within the topic of thesis writing amongst the undergraduate students.