Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Difficulties in Writing a Descriptive Text

Abstract

Writing is an ability to compose or communicate intended implications, ideas, and purposes to the reader by using a clear, coherent, and well-organized paper through the process of thinking, studying, developing organizing, producing, revising, and editing the product. One of the types of writing is descriptive text. Then, students frequently faced difficulties in writing a descriptive text. Therefore, this research aimed to know the students’ best and worse aspect, the students’ difficulties in writing a descriptive text and the factors that caused the difficulties. This research applied descriptive qualitative research design. The participants were 26 English students of class IIC of the English Education Department. However, only five students represented the participants to be interviewed. The instrument were students’ writing product and interview. Researcher analyzed students’ writing product. After that, students were interviewed with seven interview questions. Then, the results of interview were interpreted. The results showed that students performed better in organization aspect. Then, mechanic aspect was the worse aspect that students had based on the result of analyzing students text. Students did not found big difficulties in content and organization aspect. Most students encountered difficulties in grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics aspects. Whereas, the causes of students’ difficulties were students’ background and teaching technique. Students were lack of motivation, were less interested, and did not understand the descriptive text well. Then, students revealed that the teaching and learning process was boring since the teacher did not provide the material creatively. In conclusion, undergraduate students still had the difficulties and it was caused by some factors. Some suggestions were provided for students to improve their knowledge and motivation in learning, especially in writing descriptive text. For teachers, they should create more interactive media for learning. Furthermore, for the next researchers, they should analyze the strategies to overcome the students’ difficulties in writing a descriptive text, and then they should conduct the research with a larger number of participants. Key Words: Students’ Difficulties, Descriptive Text, Cause