Examining on postgraduate students’ writing strategies and it difficulties in writing articles

Abstract

Writing is one of the language skills that must be mastered. Recently, writing articles is a must as a graduation requirement to achieve a Master’s Degree at the Universitas Islam Malang is have to fulfill the graduation requirements. However, writing an article is not easy as we imagine. There are a lot of difficulties that appear in writing an article, such as grammatical errors, coherency, words consistency, and academic language used during the writing process. Therefore, the students need suitable strategies to solve the difficulties they experience in writing. According to the illustration above, the research examines two research objectives: 1) to describe the kinds of writing strategies that the students implement in writing, 2) to describe the difficulties in writing an article. This research was conducted at Universitas Islam Malang, especially in the Postgraduate Programs of the English Department. A descriptive quantitative research method was used in this study. The subjects of this research were the fourth semester of postgraduate students. It consisted of fifteen students. In compiling the data, the researcher used the two types of questionnaires both open type and close type questions, and structured interview. The instrument that used to collect the data was questionnaires template, interview guide and voice recorder. To collect the data, the researcher asked the students to complete the questionnaire templates of the kinds of writing strategies that the students implemented in writing, the difficulties in writing an article, and self-assessment of writing proficiency. Then, the researcher took five students to be interviewed randomly. As a result, the researcher found that many students used various strategies in writing, such as (1) RAP (Read, Ask, and Put) Strategy, (2) Let It Flow Strategy or Freestyle Writing Strategy, (3) Self-regulated Strategy, (4) Peer feedback Strategy, (5) Brainstorming Strategy, (6) Mind Mapping Strategy, (7) Proofreading Strategy, and (8) Paraphrasing Strategy. However, it was found the most predominant strategies that the students used were RAP Strategy and Let It Flow Strategy or Freestyle Writing Strategy. Moreover, it also found that most of the students encountered the same difficulties determining the topic, paraphrasing the sentence, elaborating the gap, and finding the relevant sources. Not only that, but the students also encountered difficulties with the linguistic problems such as, using grammar, coherency, word consistency, and using academic language. In conclusion, it was found that the students used eight strategies in writing articles. Nevertheless, the most predominant strategies that students used were four strategies which means that those strategies were helpful to be implemented during the writing process. It means that those strategies were suitable with their needs. Even though the students encounter the same difficulties on writing articles, they never give up on practicing more, and they are enthusiastic about reading more articles to enrich their knowledge.