This study intends to explore students and lecturer perspective of academic writing subject, specifically to find the causal effects between the improper materials or approaches done in the classroom and the poor essays phenomena in the academic writing subject. The data were gathered by conducting interview to all the students and the lecturer as well as distributing the questionnaire to the students. The questions in interview and questionnaire are related to the implementation of teaching methods, teaching materials, problems faced by most of students, willingness and engagement toward the subject, significance of the feedback, and among others. After conducting the interview and distributing the questionnaire, it was found that students faced immense problems in developing and organizing their research paper. In addition, there was improper focus of the material that impede students’ writing skill acquisition, and students’ engagement in the subject is still low which has a major impact on their writing development.
From this study, it is concluded that, lecturer less accommodated the materials that suit to students’ need in improving their writing skills and there are some improper methods and approaches that impede students’ development in writing. From the student perspective, it is concluded that the material should focus more on the content development and organization; focus to the format such as citations and quotations should be reduced. Also, there should be more effective mechanism of feedback that can help students’ improvements.
Some suggestions for changing and fixing the focus of the materials, approaches and methods are offered to anticipate and avoid the poor essays phenomena in the future specially in the academic writing subjects. This study intends to give possible input for further improvements of the academic writing subjects. |