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INTRODUCTION
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In everyday interaction, human beings express their ideas not only through spoken
language but also through written language. Writing, which is the written language, is an
language process. Writing is physical and mental act (Nunan, 2003). It is about discovering
ideas, thinking about how to communicate and develop them into statements and paragraphs
feelings, arguments, explanations, theories, and so forth. Through writing, we can share our
communication not only with our contemporaries, but also with future generations. Besides,
we can communicate with people from the near and far-distant through writing.
In spite of its importance, among the other skills, writing is viewed as the most
difficult skill to learn (Richard and Renandya, 2002:303). Writing is a complex process
which is about expressing knowledge. Students express their knowledge as much as they can
during writing. It is a complex skill that requires an ability to translate ideas into text that
Furthermore, this paper presents several reasons why writing is difficult from expert
perspectives. It also reveals problems faced by students gained from several studies. Finally,
it offers certain solutions that may be used by students to cope with students’ writing
difficulties.
TEACHING WRITING
1. The nature of writing
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According to Nunan (2003), writing is physical and mental act. It’s about discovering
ideas, thinking about how to communicate and develop them into statements and paragraphs
that will be comprehensible to reader. Writing is also a process and a product. The writer
creates plans, writes various drafts, revises, edits, and publishes the final writing (product-
which then read by publics. According to Harmer (as cited in Faisal and Suwandita, 2013),
writing is one skill that should be taught for every level which can be improved by practicing
a lot because writing has many contributions for our life. It means that, writing can contribute
or give positive outcomes to our life.
Furthermore, Tarigan (as cited in Utami, 2012) states that writing is one of the
language skills which is used to communicate indirectly, without having face to face with
other people. It means that, students can convey ideas, thoughts or feelings indirectly.
Moreover, Brown (as cited in Onozawa, 2010) claims that writing is a thinking process in
which it can be planned and given revisions before its release. It means that, writers can edit
or modify the texts anytime as they want. It differs from speaking, because in speaking,
speaker cannot edit or modify what he/she has said.
Based on theories above, it can be concluded that writing is a skill that is very
beneficial for our life in which to delivering ideas, thoughts, or feelings indirectly through
written form. Besides, writing differs from speaking. Even though they are categorized as
productive skill, but in writing, writers can modify as what writers want before its release.
The students should learn to improve their writing because it will help them to face the
challenges of life when they grow up, especially for academic purposes.
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3) Learning style: some students are fantastically quick at picking up language just by
looking and listening. For the rest of us, it may take a little longer. For many learners,
the time to think things through, to produce language in a slower way, is invaluable.
Writing is appropriate for such learners.
4) Writing as a skill: by far the most important reason for teaching writing, of course,
is that it is a basic language skill, just as important as speaking, listening, and
reading. Students need to know how to write letters, how to put written reports
together, how to reply to advertisements – and increasingly, how to write using
electronic media. They need to know some of writing’s special conventions
(punctuation, paragraph construction etc.) just as they need to know how to
pronounce spoken English appropriately.
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with knowledge of writing task. As writers, students should consider this knowledge in
producing a piece of writing.
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the objectives of this study, the researcher collected the data through a writing test. The
participants were the First Senior High school students in SMA1 and SMA3.
The results revealed that the researcher found the challenge in teaching writing as
the students’ mother tongue has influenced a lot in the production of the students’ writing.
In this case, the students tend to use their first language to write in English, and as a
consequence, they mostly face problems on grammar such as spelling, prepositions,
verbs, tenses, singular and plural, and articles. In addition, the students also face
difficulties in terms of punctuation and capitalization. Through the research, Megaiab
realizes that the problems faced by the students are because writing was not taught in an
effective way by the teacher and was not learned maximally by the students because of its
lack of portion rather than other aspects in English.
Rahmatunisa (2014) conducted a research entitled “Problems Faced by Indonesia
EFL Learners in Writing Argumentative Essay”. The purpose of the study was to reveal
problems in writing argumentative essay faced by Indonesian EFL learners. It is carried
out in a qualitative research design as it attempted to describe the problems and their
ways out. The data were taken from university students’ writing task and interview. The
participants are the second year of university Indonesia students who enroll their study in
English Department.
Results of the data indicated that Indonesian EFL learners faced the problems in
three categories, those are linguistics problems, cognitive problems, and psychological
problems. Mostly, students faced problems in linguistics related to the grammatical
structure (23.2%), formatting words (30.2%), words classes (16.3%), error in using words
(9.3%), and the use of article (21%). Second, cognitive problems are related to organizing
paragraph, difficulties in remaining word classes, getting lost the generic structure,
making a conclusion, and putting punctuation. Last, psychological problems which
included laziness, egoism, bad mood, and difficulties to start writing also faced by
Indonesian EFL learners. Data analysis also indicated the problem solving which
hopefully will be beneficial for EFL teachers in writing class. It is strongly recommended
that the EFL class should strengthen all the language skills in general and writing in
particular, motivate the students to use English with the teachers, introduce pair work,
peer-correction, and use dictionaries frequently etc.
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face when they write in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). It also aimed at proposing
solutions to help EFL learners overcome writing difficulties. The sample of the study
comprised 82 English majors from the World Islamic Sciences and Education University
in Jordan. Instruments of the study included a questionnaire on difficulties that may face
English major while they write in English. The questionnaire also included an open-ended
question on suggestions and solutions that can help the students overcome writing
difficulties.
The results revealed that “lack of ideas” topped difficulties faced by Jordanian EFL
students in writing class, followed by “the incorrect use of mechanics of writing”. The
study also revealed that “lack of clear assessment instruments and marking schemes”
occupied the third rank, while “time restriction” ranked fourth. “The unsuitable methods
of teaching writing” and “vocabulary restriction” occupied the fifth and sixth ranks
respectively, while “topic inappropriateness” occupied the seventh rank. Finally,
“grammar difficulties” and “lack of teacher’s help” ranked eighth and ninth respectively.
6.2. Solutions to the problems
1) Problem 1: lack of ideas. To solve this problem, teachers should place more
emphasis on the pre-writing stage so as to help learners generate ideas through
brainstorming sessions, reading about the topic, watching a film, listening to a text
related to the topic or even describing a picture about the topic.
2) Problem 2: the incorrect use of mechanics of writing. To resolve this problem,
students should be trained on how to appropriately use and implement mechanics of
writing (spelling, punctuation, quotation, and capitalization).
3) Problem 3: lack of clear assessment instruments and marking schemes. Teachers
should help students be aware of the assessment instruments and marking schemes
upon which they will be marked. Teachers are also suggested to create rubrics. A
detailed scoring guide or performance rubric helps students to recognize the
component parts of a writing task and understand how their competence will be
assessed in each of these areas. A good rubric helps students to see what comprises
high quality writing and to identify the skills they will need to perform well.
Teachers might want to provide the rubric to students along with the assignment so
they know what the criteria are in advance and can plan appropriately.
4) Problem 4: time restriction. To deal with this problem, students should be given
enough time to gather ideas, link them together and get involved with the different
stages of the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and
publishing).
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5) Problem 5: The unsuitable methods of teaching writing. To solve this problem,
teachers are recommended to frame the techniques in terms of prewriting, drafting,
and revising stages. There are certain method that can applied by teachers in
teaching writing:
a. Process approach
Hyland (2002) in Nyasimi (2009), indicates that the process approach
focuses on how a text is written in-stead of the final outcome. He adds that the
process approach has a major influence on understanding the nature of writing
and the way writing is taught. Therefore, the process approach emphasizes on the
importance of certain procedures such as pre-writing, drafting, evaluating and
revising. He points out that the process approach involves introducing techniques
that help the students identify and engage in a topic. Students are required to
produce multiple drafts of a work. After discussion and feedback from
evaluators, the students would revise the drafts. Rewriting, revision and editing
are essential parts to writing in this approach. The drafting and revising stages
are the core of process writing. Several strategies and skills apply to the
drafting/revising process in writing such as getting started (adapting and
freewriting techniques, peer-reviewing for content (accepting/using classmates’
comments), using the instructor feedback, editing for grammatical errors, and so
on (Brown, 2001).
b. The genre approach
According to Badger and White (2000) in Nyasimi (2009), the genre or
eclectic approach is considered as the most effective and successive in the
teaching of writing skills. The genre approach combines process theories with
genre knowledge and also emphasizes on the social con-text in which writing is
produced. In other words, this approach provides the learner with opportunities
for developing their individual creativity as well as helping them fully
understand the features of the target genres. Giving the knowledge of form and
language at the same time, helps the student to understand how a particular form
functions in a specific context; in this way, learners’ writing proficiency can be
enhanced.
6) Problem 6: vocabulary restriction. To solve this problem, we suggest teachers to
connect reading and writing. By reading, students will be exposure to various
English words. Students will learn (conscious or unconsciously) English
vocabularies that they may use when they write. Furthermore, Students learn to
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write in part by carefully observing what is already written. That is, they learn by
observing, or reading, the written word. By reading and studying a variety of
relevant types of text, students can gain important insights, both about how they
should write and about subject matter that may become the topic of their writing.
7) Problem 7: topic inappropriateness. To cope with this problem, students should be
given enough opportunities to choose topic to write about. If it is possible, students
are free to choose topics they are about to write. Besides that, students are provided
as much authentic writing as possible. Sharing writing with other students in the
class is one way to add authenticity. Publishing a class newsletter, writing letters to
people outside of class, writing a script for a kit or dramatic presentation, writing a
resume, writing advertisements – all these can be seen as authentic writing.
8) Problem 8: lack of teacher’s help. Teachers play important role in the classroom to
assist students with their writing task. One of the roles that teachers can do in
writing activities is to give feedback to students’ writing. Students need feedback
from their teachers related to content as well as English conventions and mechanics
of writing. In addition, students are needed to be motivated. It is teachers’ role to
motivate students to write. Teachers need to inform students about the benefits of
writing in their lives, especially for their academic purposes.
CONSLUSION
In teaching English as a foreign language context, writing is one of the four language
skills that should be learned by students and the most complicated skill to achieve. It has
been discussed in this paper reasons why writing should be taught, why it is difficult, as well
as some strategies on how to teach writing. This paper has also explored issues related to
problems faced by students in writing. Solutions offered to solve the problems are also
discussed. Having this knowledge in mind may help English teachers to deal with students’
problems in writing. Besides that, such knowledge may assist English teachers in facilitating
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Ariyanti. (2016). The Teaching of EFL Writing in Indonesia. Dinamika Ilmu, Vol. 16 No. 2,
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Brown, H. D. (2000). Teaching by Principles An Interactive Approach to Language
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Faisal, F., & Suwandita, K. (2013). The Effectiveness of FRESH Technique to Teach
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Faroog, M. S., & Hassan, M. U. (2012). Opinion of Second Language Learners about Writing
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