Hendrawan, Wahyu Stefanus. 2026. Linguistic Problems in Writing Academic Essays in the Academic Reading and Writing Course. Sarjana’s Thesis. English Language Education Department, Faculty of Teachers’ Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor: Dr. Jumariati, M.Pd., the second advisor: Raisa Fadilla, M.Pd.

Keywords: academic essay, linguistic problems, writing

            Writing is often regarded as one of demanding productive skills, because it requires learners to control several linguistic components at once. This study describes the linguistic problems found in EFL students' academic essays, with 20 students enrolled in Academic Reading and Writing Course A2 at the English Language Education Department of FKIP Lambung Mangkurat University as subjects. A descriptive quantitative design was applied, using documentation to identify linguistic problems in the students' essays and a close-ended questionnaire to gather their perspectives on the problems they encountered.

The document analysis revealed six aspects of linguistic problems: morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, discourse, and mechanical. Syntactic problems were the most frequent, accounting for 224 errors (54.5%), mostly involving subject-verb agreement, article/determiner use, preposition structure, and sentence fragments. However, the questionnaire results showed that students considered lexical aspects more difficult than syntactic ones, indicating that their perceptions did not always match their actual writing performance and that they are not fully aware of their own errors. These findings suggest that lecturers need to provide additional instruction, such as error feedback, peer review, and guided grammar exercises, to raise students' awareness of their grammatical weaknesses and improve the accuracy of their academic writing.