Indonesian Tertiary Education Students’ Academic Writing Setbacks and Solutions

Abstract

Writing is a crucial skill and tertiary education students face difficulties in academic writing.  This paper aimed to identify the setbacks or difficulties and the solutions to the setbacks experienced by the Indonesian tertiary education students in academic writing. A survey was used as the method of this study. The data were collected through a questionnaire using a Google form distributed to 26 fifth-semester students taking the Academic Writing course in the English Language Education Study Program of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for the academic year 2019/2020. The survey results showed that, in general, the students faced setbacks in, for example, parts of speech, tenses, spelling, prepositions, vocabulary, punctuation, cohesion, discourse markers, writing paragraphs with a clear focus, constructing clear and coherent academic essays, paraphrasing, in-text referencing, and compiling a correct reference list. Concerning academic writing solutions, the results showed that lecturers should be trained and equipped with various writing strategies, feedback on the strengths and weaknesses was vital, and the students needed to improve their organization of ideas, for example. Other solutions were better language skills, language elements, critical thinking skills, paraphrasing, and referencing. Implications of the findings are that students and lecturers would understand and identify common setbacks in academic writing and have opportunities to adopt the suggested solutions to academic writing difficulties.