154 IJAL 4 (2) (2019) International Journal of Active Learning Terakreditasi SINTA 4 http://journal.unnes.ac.id/nju/index.php/ijal English Academic Writing for The Students of Widya Dharma University of Klaten Ike Anisa, Sukasih Ratna Widayanti Universitas Widya Dharma Klaten, Indonesia Info Articles ___________________________ History Articles: Received 8 January 2019 Approved 11 July 2019 Published 1 October 2019 ___________________________ Keywords: academic writing; vocabulary, grammar __________________________________ Abstract _________________________________________________________________________________ English is an important that must be learn by the students in this time. Learning English in every skill is basic for the students to be mastery. Here, Writing is one of the main skill in learning English which is conclude on productive skill in the ability of producing language. In the university, writing has the important role in mastering the complete skill of learning English especially in academic writing level. It has an aim that the students could write at least the paper in English. In the process of teaching and learning, it is found that the writing skill of the students was not satisfying. This research is described the problems faced by the students in mastering academic English writing in English education program of Widya Dharma University of Klaten. In this research, the problems faced by the students is on the English vocabulary and the grammatical used in the sentences.  Address correspondence: Email: ikeanisa@unwidha.ac.id p-ISSN 2528-505X e-ISSN 2615-6377 Ike Anisa et al. / International Journal of Active Learning 4 (2) (2019) 155 INTRODUCTION English is the compulsory that must be mastery for the students. In communications English placed in the important thing to be mastered. Here, not also mastered in communication but also it is important thing in education. In university, English is the main subject to be learned by the students. And it has an aim to preparing the students to be able to understand the references and literature which most of them are in English. Besides, in this global era the students are hoping could be well compete with others. In English there are four skills which should be mastered by the learners such as; listening, reading, speaking, and writing. And here, writing is the most difficult for the students to express their ideas and thinks. Writing is an essential skill that becomes a complex skill to master for the learners because writing is a productive skill that deals with the way to generate and organize the ideas. According to Nunan (Nunan, 2003: 88) writing is the mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statement and paragraphs that will be cleared. Writing becomes an important language skill because it is productive skill that shows how skillful the students is in writing and discovers the talented students in this field (Harsyaf et al, 2009: 4). Here, writing is the difficult one for the student. It is not easy for the students to write the text or article in English properly. It is proved from the students work, which found that the problems were related about vocabulary, grammar, and topic. Vocabulary is all about words in a language or a special set of words which are trying to learn. Furthermore, the students got difficulty in arranging the words into correct sentence, let alone making the sentences to be logical and systematic paragraphs. Based on the finding above, it can conclude that the students in in Widya Dharma University of Klaten have difficulties in Academic Writing. Concerning with the importance of the Academic Writing for the students, the writer interested to analyze the difficulties faced by the English Education students in writing using English. LITERATURE REVIEW A Brief View of Writing According to Harsyaf, Nurmaini and Zakhwan (2009: 3), writing is transforming thoughts into language; it means that writing that the learners have to think the main idea of the topic and the learners arrange the idea into a written text. It is also stated by Nunan (2002: 88) that writing is the activity of organizing the ideas or message, inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them and write into statements and paragraph. Furthermore, Harmer (2004: 4) states that writing is used for a wide variety of purpose it is produced in many different forms. Writing can help the students to build the critical mind. By writing the students learn how to arrange their experience in words. Students usually have more time to think in writing than they do in oral activities. Moreover, in writing could encourage students to focus on language use and accurate, because they thing as they write. It may stimulate language development as they resolve the problem which the writing put into their mind. A Brief View of Academic Writing Academic writing is the important think from writing which is needed to focus in the university. There are many names for academic writing such as; essay, paper, research paper, etc. Even though, those names has the same principal and goals (Whitaker, 2009: 2). Thais and Zawacki (2006) gave definition that academic writing is as a writing which fulfill the goal in every part of education, whether in school or university. Then it can be conclude that academic writing has an aim to increase the skill and education in writing, especially English writing. Principles of Teaching Writing According to Nunan (2003: 92-94), there are four principles for teaching writing, those are: Ike Anisa et al. / International Journal of Active Learning 4 (2) (2019) 156 1. Understand your students’ reason for writing The biggest dissatisfaction with writing is when the lecturers’ goals do not match with the students’ goal. It is important to understand both and convey goals to students in ways that make sense to them. 2. Provide many opportunities for students to write Practice writing should provide students with different types of writing well. Short responses to reading, journal entries, or any type of writing. 3. Make feedback helpful and meaningful Students crave feedback on their writing, yet it does not always have intended effect. When writing comments on students’ paper, make sure to understand the vocabulary symbols that you use. 4. Clarify for yourself, for your students, how their writing will be evaluated Students often feel that evaluation of their writing is completely subjective. One way to solve that feeling is to develop a statement for our self about what is valued in student writing, either in the classroom or in the institution as a whole. METHODS Research Design The type of this research is qualitative research in the form of case study. According to Berg (2001) said that quality refers to the what, how, when and where of thing, its essence and ambience. Qualitative research, thus, refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions of things. And here, the research is qualitative because it describes further about the students academic writing of Widya Dharma University. In this research, the researcher put her position as the observers and examined what happens. In other words, the researcher studied the people’s behavior naturally. In this case, the researcher concerned on how is the English academic writing of the students of Widya Dharma University of Klaten. Research Setting and Subject This research was conducted at English Education Study Program of Widya Dharma University of Klaten. It is the place where the researcher works as an English lecturer. Therefore, this research was conducted at the fourth semester students of English education Study Program of Widya Dharma University of Klaten in the Academic Year of 2017/2018 which consisted of one class. Data and Source of Data The data in this research were in form of detailed information collected from variety of data collecting procedures over a sustained period of time (Stake, 2010). The qualitative data was obtained directly from; 1. Participants As Creswell (2009: 54) defines that population as people who can answer the problem statements of the research. In this research, the participants were selected from fourth semester students of English Education Study program. 2. Documents These source provide valuable information in helping researcher understand main phenomena in qualitative studies. The documents used in this study are students test in writing which is collected to the lecturer. Data Collection Technique This research applied methods to collect the data. They were observation, and documentation. By doing the methods, the researcher gained some information needed which deal with the students’ problem in doing English Academic Writing. Here, the researcher conducted direct observation for certain time. In this method, the researcher observed the students writing. Then, the documentation also collected as the data. The researcher collected the students’ worksheets and teaching syllabus to get some information in relevance of students’ problems in writing English. Ike Anisa et al. / International Journal of Active Learning 4 (2) (2019) 157 Data Analysis Technique The technique of data analysis in this research is descriptive analysis. Using this technique, the researcher collected, arranged and presented the data. The qualitative method is a kind of research without using any calculation or statistic procedures. The scheme adopted by the researcher from Miles and Huberman in Sugiyono (2007), from the data collected by the researcher was doing observation and documentation to be presented in field notes and documents. Then, the data reduction is summarizing, choosing the points, to focus on the important matters, in order to find the pattern. Furthermore, the data were organized and managed for they needed to be understood. And here, the researcher presented the data in the form of descriptive qualitative ones. Finally, the conclusion is needed to develop the researcher’s carefulness and even carry out wider on other groups of data. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Writing put the important position in academic literary. Here, academic writing becomes important thing to learn for the English Education Study Program students of Widya Dharma University of Klaten. Even though, it is also become the big problem for them to make writing especially academic writing. During learning writing, it found problems which faced by the students. It found that there are still limited vocabulary they are mastered, difficult to arrange the sentences into good paragraph and difficult to apply English vocabulary in sentences especially in academic writing. It found that the students still difficult to developing the topic. It shows from the writing of the students which is has minimum details about the topic. And from the whole sentences it found that the sentences still not connected between each other. Here, only few students who can write in details and coherence, and the others still got difficulties to made sentences and coherence in writing. It shows from the sample of student’s writing as follow: In the semester I took a lot of sks, because the past year I had to leave the lecture. I often come class grade level down, so do not be surprised so many friends close to me. I never mind the age of to a friends the origin of all just fine. From the writing above, it seems that the student got difficulty to arrange the sentences, make coherence writing, and it’s difficult to find appropriate vocabulary to express their ideas into academic writing. Furthermore, it proved from the interview which said that they got problems in expressing ideas into writing. Here, it found that the students have lack of English vocabulary and they got difficulty in applying tenses into writing. They often used dictionary to translate from Indonesian into English by words. By doing this, it made the students often run out of time, so the writing becomes not coherence. Also they always find the words from dictionary, so that the sentence that they wrote is miserable. It caused they are wrong in choosing the words that will be applied in sentences. The next problem is that the students are difficult to connect the ideas. Their ideas mostly throwing backward so that the paragraph not coherence and not connected between each other. It caused they have problems dealing with the detail information about the topic. The students difficult to explain in details about the topic because lack of knowledge about the topic that they have write. Moreover, dealing with the style of language, it found that the students still used blend tenses and don’t follow the rule of good academic writing. They still confused applying the tenses such as simple present tense, continuous tenses, and simple past tense. It caused that they are not using the tenses in continually, or sometimes they only used one tense to be understand. Then finally on the mechanics which is dealing with the punctuation and spelling, it doesn’t find any significance error. Ike Anisa et al. / International Journal of Active Learning 4 (2) (2019) 158 CONCLUSION Based on the finding, it can be concluded that academic writing is an important skill in English which is really needed to learn in deeply. Unfortunately, it is difficult for the students to do writing in purpose. This research has aims to know the problems occur in learning academic writing. Here, It found that the problems faced by the students are; limited the vocabulary, difficult to arrange the sentences in coherence. Furthermore, this research hopefully can help the lecturers in teaching writing to be more creative and do some better in teaching academic writing. And for the students, it hopes enriched their writing ability in further. REFERENCES Berg, B. L. 2001. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Science. Long Beach: California State University. Brown, H.D. 2001. Teaching Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, second edition. New York: Longman, Inc. Harmer, Jeremy. 2004. How to Teach Writing. Malaysia: Longman. Harsyaf, Nurmaini, M and Zakhawan. 2009. Teaching Writing. Jakarta: Ministry of National Education. Nunan, David. 2003. Practical English Language Teaching. New York: Mc Graw Hill. Stake, R.E. 2010. Qualitaitve Research Studying How Things Work. New York: Acid free paper. Thaiss, C. and Zawacki, T. 2006. Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinnemann. Tutut Nani Prhatmi (2017). English Academic Writing Bagi Mahasiswa di Institut Teknologi Nasional Malang : Hambatan dan Solusi. Seminar Nasional Inovasi dan Aplikasi Teknologi di Industri, ISSN 2085-4218.