Students’ Challenges and Strategies in Writing English Essays at Pekalongan University

Abstract

Writing an English essay is sometimes far from being easy. Many students have to write and revise their essays several times before they finalize them. With this phenomenon, the writers were interested in carrying out a research to find out the challenges faced by English language education students in writing essays and their strategies in writing at Pekalongan University. The research employed a qualitative method in which both questionnaire and interviews were used to collect the data. Thirty one respondents from various levels of English proficiency participated in completing the questionnaire and nine of them joined the interview. The findings show that students faced a number of challenges that affect the quality of their writing even though the majority claimed that their essay writing skills have been at intermediate level. Among the main challenges were difficulties in selecting appropriate vocabulary and in constructing effective sentences. Other challenges come from their difficulties in implementing grammar rules, in finding appropriate ideas and topics, and in translating Indonesian to English properly. In an effort to overcome these challenges, students used various strategies. Most of them chose to do more reading or finding references on essay writing to improve their understanding of how to write well. Modern technology was also utilized by a number of students in which they utilized the internet, apps, and artificial intelligence (AI) to support their writing process. In addition, asking friends or seeking feedback from peers was also a popular strategy.