Exploring University Students’ Difficulties in Writing English Academic Essay

Abstract

Academic wiring is one of the essential skills in academic writing, and it is vital to support students' self-development through opinion writing, grant essay writing and others. This study explores students' difficulties in writing English academic essays and the dominant challenges by using a mix-method approach. The qualitative is used to collect data, while the quantitative is used to find the difficulty percentage—the data analysis uses indicators from Brown (1999). The sample of this study was 30 students in the fifth semester of the English Education Study Program at Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana. The results showed that students still experienced serious difficulties in four aspects of academic writing; content, organization, discourse and mechanics. The most dominant difficulties (97%) were found in; 1) thesis statement; 2) related ideas; 3) development of ideas; and 4) use of description/cause and effect, comparison/contrast; 5) effective introduction; 6) topic sentence and 7) reference. Writing essays are challenging for students in the English Education Study program. Further research is recommended to investigate the causal factors and find practical strategies for teaching academic writing courses.

Common Errors in Composing An Academic Writing: A Descriptive Qualitative Study in Higher Education Setting

“…The findings of the study had revealed that the errors found in student papers were related to writing structure and content components. This is in line with the finding of study of Nenotek et al (2022) showing that students still experienced severe difficulties in four aspects of academic writing, namely content, organization, discourse, and mechanics. The errors in writing structure found in this study included the use and selection of connectors and prepositions, mechanical errors, redundance, incorrect complext sentence, and sentence structure (subject and predicate agreement).…”

“…To improve the accuracy, we should firstly identify the aspects that needs improvement and evaluate the common challenges and mistakes found in the product of the student works as well as in the process. For this reason, acknowledging the factors causing academic writing difficult for university students need to be considered (Nenotek et al, 2022). A number of research had conducted a study on error analysis.…”

Higher Institution Students’ Challenges in Writing Journal Articles: Characteristics and Proposed Solutions

“…Previous studies have also highlighted disputes in the content of journal articles. For instance, some studies have reported that students' journal articles lacked references and theory (Budhyani, n.d.), were difficult to write an informative, effective, concise, and clear abstract, to find a suitable publisher and to evaluate their writing (Khikmah & Kurniawan, 2020), and had content, organization, and mechanical difficulties (Nenotek et al, 2022). The problems were due to poor writing skills, flaws in study designs, and a lack of skills and interests (Hussain et al, 2020).…”

The Portrait of Challenges in Teaching English to Young Learners: A Case Study in an Indonesian Islamic School

“…Other research by Mohammad (2021) examined the difficulties in the reading of young second language learners in terms of accuracy, comprehension, and rate using the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability test. Another work by Nenotek (2022) discussed students' difficulties in writing English academic essays and the dominant challenges using a mixed-method approach. Research on teachers' perceptions seems to be under-explored recently.…”