STUDENTS’ CHALLENGES ON DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH WRITING AT A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN INDONESIA

This study aimed to investigate students’ challenges on descriptive paragraph writing at a private university in Indonesia. This study applied qualitative research methods especially case study design. The data were collected from documentation and semi-structured interviews. The participants of this study were students of university in the third semester. The interview and documentation data were analyzed using the data analysis procedure proposed by Miles, Huberman and Saldana (2018). The aspects related to students’ challenges on descriptive paragraph writing at a private university were linguistic competencies and discourse competencies. Based on the findings of this study, students' challenges on descriptive paragraphs were particularly caused by the difficulty of linguistic
challenges, especially in terms of grammar proficiency and the least were insufficient in understanding of vocabulary and mechanics writing. Meanwhile, the result of discourse competence analysis showed that students’ unable to write
coherent and cohesive descriptive paragraph. Therefore, understanding the challenges experienced by the students in writings descriptive paragraphs is the essential way to avoid writing issues and advance the students ability in writing descriptive paragraphs.