Difficulties in Writing Argumentative Articles (abstract only)  

Oleh:

Inggrida, Judith Lola ; Kaur, Kumari Nihal

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: The International Symposium on Social Sciences (TISSS) and Hong Kong International Conference on Education, Psychology and Society (HKICEPS) at Hongkong, December 2013, page 316.
Topik: argumentative articles; critical thinking; writing difficulties
Fulltext: Hong Kong-Conference 42.pdf (211.26KB)

Isi artikel

This study aims to find out about the difficulties the undergraduate psychology students at Universitas Indonesia have in writing argumentative articles and to identify ways to help them. All students take Academic Writing unit as required in semester One and one of the assignments is writing an argumentative article. However, this does not necessarily mean that each student has acquired this type of writing skillfully. A total of 16 participants from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 year intake responded to an invitation to participate in this study, announced on campus information board, and each of them has Indonesian language as the mother tongue. For data collection technique, each participant was given an argumentative article which he or she needed to criticize. In addition to that, the participants were also interviewed individually to give them a chance to express their difficulties in writing argumentative articles and to over their suggestions to overcome these difficulties. The results show that compared to newer students, those who have studied longer were able to identify the flaws in the argumentative article and this better ability was attributed to having more experiences in working on course assignments. Unfortunately, since not every lecturer provided feedback to the students’ writing, they were still not sure whether or not their argumentative writing have met the courses and lecturers’ expectation. Moreover, it was also found that the difficulties in writing argumentation were somehow related to the students feeling insecure to think critically, meaning to go against other people’s opinion. The implications of these findings are important not only to improve the quality of the Academic Writing course and other courses in the Faculty of Psychology Universitas Indonesia, but also to find other ways to help the students exercising their critical thinking skills.

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