An Analysis of the Third Year Students’ Difficulties in Writing Argumentative Essay at English Department of FKIP Bung Hatta University

Retno Yulansari (Universitas Negeri Padang)

VIVID Journal of Language and Literature
Vol 8, No 2 (2019)

This research aimed to find out students' difficulties in writing an argumentative essay. The research used descriptive method; the population was the third year students of the English department, FKIP Bung Hatta University Padang. They were divided into four classes, A, B, C and D. Sample of this research was class B, and the size of the sample was 35 students.  The writer used the cluster random sampling technique to get a representative sample. The research result showed that that is 21(60%) students have difficulties in writing an argumentative essay and the result of the writing test. Specifically, from data analysis of writing task showed that 21(60%) students had difficulties in organization of idea, 22(62.85%) students in grammar, 20 (57.14%) students vocabulary, 21 (60%) students in using transition signal, and 21(60%) students in mechanics.