Undergraduate Students’ Difficulties in Writing their Literature Review

Abstract

Scientific writing is an essential skill to be mastered by students at a higher education level. Most universities always provide students with scientific writing as a mandatory subject to be delivered in class especially in late semester students such as thesis writing seminars and undergraduate theses. This subject is obligatory for students to write scientific texts such as articles, reports and theses as final assignments as the requirement to finish education at universities. Scientific writing is about writing the writer's ideas, arguments or research in a systematic order to reach the conclusion. According to Leite (2019) , academic writing is a social interaction between writers and readers in functional deliberative goals, resolutions, and socialization developments on the fundamental genre analysis. The research was conducted on 5 students undergoing English thesis writing as participants from the English education department, faculty of teacher training and education at the University of Islam Malang. The research conducted using semi-structured interviews based on their experience regarding difficulties, factors of difficulties and solutions encountered in the writing literature review. The result concluded that the students write literature review by selecting suitable material from various sources, writing in complete and sequential way following the template of another research despite of having undergraduate thesis guidelines and supervision with the lecturers. There are eight sites where students find their sources, like Google, Google Scholar, Academia, Eric.gov, Tandfonline, Sinta, ResearchGate and Repository from any university. In terms of preference, students tend to choose undergraduate thesis as a reference, finding random material containing one of the topics and choosing main theory and newer sources. However, there were only three students who considered finding a similar research method to the previous research. Kata Kunci : Academic Writing, Difficulties, Undergraduate Thesis.