The Difficulties Encountered and Strategies Used by the Students in Writing Descriptive Text

Abstract

Descriptive text is a text that can be called not too difficult, but it is still found some problems that encountered by the students when writing this text. This is the researcher’s background for doing this research. The aim of this study is (1) to find out the English students’ difficulties in writing descriptive text (2) to know the English students’ strategies to overcome their difficulties in writing descriptive text. To approach the aim of this study, the researcher used the qualitative design. The data were collected by using questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of two parts related to the students’ difficulties and strategies in writing descriptive text. The data analyzed by using descriptive qualitative The respondents of this research were 34 second semester English students of University of Islam Malang in the academic year 2020/2021. The finding of this research shows that the students have problems in getting and generating ideas, developing the ideas, and organizing ideas. It is because the students did not have much idea and constructed the sentences. Besides that, grammar, lack of vocabulary, generic structure, and spelling, punctuation and capitalization (mechanic), the use of simple present tense, and finding new ideas, and describing an object/noun in detail are also the students’ problems in writing descriptive text. The majority students have difficulties because the students are lack of practice. To overcome these difficulties, there are some strategies used by the students when writing descriptive text. The result of findings shows that the strategies used by the students to overcome the difficulties are deciding a topic before writing, making an outline, using dictionary to check vocabulary, strategy to ask a friend to check descriptive text, strategy to apply writing process, making the ideas clearer, strategy to check grammatical error, revising sentences, and the last is sharing writing with friend. Based on the result of the research above, it can be concluded that descriptive text is difficult text for English students at the second semester of University of Islam Malang. Therefore, the English teacher is advised to pay more attention to the teaching of descriptive text structure in getting and generating idea, developing idea, grammar and mechanic, etc. English teacher is expected to provide many examples and exercises regarding descriptive text to the students so that educational goals are achieved well, especially English subject. The English students are also accustomed in writing and need to practice more writing so that the students don’t feel difficult in writing, especially writing descriptive text.