PROBLEMS FACED BY STUDENTS OF WRITING WHILE COMPOSING ARGUMENTATIVE TEXT IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG

Writing is one of the English skills besides reading, speaking, and listening. It is considered as the most difficult skill that students have to learn because it takes a long process and it cannot directly finish. The reason why the researcher chooses argumentative text is because it is important in the academic writing. In academic writing, argumentative text used to express new and original ideas. Therefore, it needs strong arguments and supports. In Writing IV class, students of English Language Education Department of University of Muhammadiyah Malang were taught of writing argumentative essay. Because writing takes a long process, there is a high possibility that the students make mistakes in their essay writing. Hence, this present study aimed to discover what are the problems faced by Writing IV Class students and the suggestions proposed by the teacher to overcome the students’ problems. Qualitative research was used in this resent study. The research subjects are students who were taken Writing IVA Class in the academic year 2017/2018 and have score between 75-79.4. Hence, the researcher chose five students who has lowest performance in the class. Then, the teacher is also taken from Writing IVA Class who teach those students. In line with that, interview and document analysis was used to reach the aim of the study. The result showed that the students have difficulties in linguistics, cognitive, and psychological. The linguistics problems were punctuation, grammar, subject-verb agreement, run-on sentence, fragment sentence, Indonesian-like sentence, and referencing. Then, in the cognitive aspect, the result of the interview showed that the students have difficulties in jumping sentence, organizing paragraph, choosing the topic, writer’s block or blank and hard to find references. In the psychological problems, they faced laziness and bad mood. After that, there are suggestions proposed by the teacher to overcome those problems. The suggestions for linguistics are the students should write more, do peer feedback, use Grammarly, and use Mendeley. Then, the suggestions for cognitive problems are the students should read more, search more sources, and make an outline. In addition, for the psychological problems, the teacher suggested that the students should break and push themselves