Language Competence Pre-Figured Themes

Elder 2007 states that critical thinking is a self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking which requires effective communication and problem solving abilities. Therefore, Asti’s statement above can be inferred that she directed herself in writing her academic papers, not only directed herself in the process of writing but also in term of formulating and composing her writing content. However, Asti explained that finding appropriate sources for her academic papers was another problem she faced. “Well, I think finding sources was another barrier too. I know the expert for the topic but I could not find the related articles, journals, or even book. That was another obstacle which impeded our writing progress. However, I needed it as the evidence of our statement.” 5-AI2-73-PROB Asti tended to be selective. This indicates that she realize that not all sources could be used in supporting her paper. She used relevant sources and theories for supporting her paper. Jaya had similar struggle with Asti in writing his academic paper. He had struggle in composing argument and description in order to connect ideas better. For him, how to understand and link among concepts was challenging part in writing his academic paper. “I had to write the assignments, I had to use my cognitive, ability as well. Have to be able to argue, and describe really well and have to think things over and try to connect ideas. Things like that.” 9-JA2-11-EXP “To me, the most challenging is how to understand something and try to link it with other concepts to come up with another idea.” 9-JA2-12-EXP The statement above shows Jaya’s efforts, how he pushed himself in order to argue and describe things really well. As he stated previously that in order to gain his critical thinking, he had to think things over again. He monitored and directed himself in to be more critical in writing his paper. In contrast with Asti and Jaya, Cahyo had a disappointing experience when he took comparative theory PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI class. “The lecture did not show us how to compare. Just respond. Again, we students were not being taught how to compare at all.” 7-CO2-84-EXP Then, he had to browse the example of comparative article and follow the structure and style of writing from it. He preferred to analyze and write his paper as best as he could, even it was far from the lecturer expectation. Being asked the reason why he did so, Cahyo just simply answered “well, just submitted to fulfill the course requirement. Getting a score.” 7-CO2-99-ATT Compare with Asti and Jaya, Cahyo tended not to push himself harder when writing his paper. He argued that it was just because he had inadequate examples, guidelines and feedback from the lecturer. Actually, these issues also had been sated by Asti and Jaya. They were not satisfied with their writing after that they were lack of feedback. They believed that by having enough feedback they could measure their writing skill and led them into appropriate and a good argument. Elder 2007 states that graduate students are moving beyond being simply consumers of knowledge to learning how to make meaningful contributions to that knowledge. In other words, without any adequate guidelines and feedback, the students could not learn how to make a meaningful contribution to the knowledge. However, they determined to have a self-correction. Asti believed that having a self-correction was a good way to revise and check her writing quality, even if there were no feedback from lecturers. He adds that Tittle 2011 argues that critical thinking is not a negative process, even though many link critical thinking with criticism. Moreover, it is beneficial to link critical thinking with criteria or standards against which the information is compared. In sum, by experiencing struggles in writing academic papers, the participants showed their efforts in exploring and developing their critical thinking. They pushed their self as close as the expectation. However, it should be noted that most of the participants had a big expectation on the guidelines and feedback. Those two elements were needed in order to improve their writing quality and developed their critical thinking awareness.

c. Writing Expectation

As the last pre-figured theme, writing expectation refers to the graduate students’ expectation towards writing academic papers. It is expected that writing academic papers graduate students creates opportunities in practicing how to compose, develope, and analyze ideas. Thus, it enhances the graduate students in improving their academic writing skills, language competence and critical thinking. Critical thinking is a process that is fundamental to all disciplines. The application of critical thinking skills leads to clear and flexible thinking and a better understanding of the subject at hand. Thus, having clear and flexible thinking and a better understanding of the subject at hand lead should be followed with a better language competence. Therefore, the students could state their arguments clearly, briefly and concisely. As stated by Moore 2004 that to think critically involves integral to engaging with the world as a reflective and active citizen. The requirement of writing academic papers for graduate students has enabled them to experience transferring ideas, thoughts, and meaning involving many aspects to consider, containing many skills to acquire, needing a long process and great efforts to complete. It has certain convention and regularities that all writers PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI should understand for their writing to be well accepted by the discourse community. In brief, the students gain a sense of control in their writing and feel an ownership of the language. This ultimately leads to a true sense of enjoying the art of writing. Medina 2009 claims that confidence breeds the likelihood of experimenting and risk-taking. Moreover, the confidence students’ gain in the writing classroom will motivate them in exploring the language, take risks, and play with the language. Furthermore, once they have control of any skills, he or she begins to truly understand its purpose and have fun with it Eagleman, 2011. Based on his experiences in writing academic papers, two participants, Cahyo and Jaya told me a similar experience. At first, Cahyo told me what happened in the 2 nd semester. In that time, he had a problem with the sentence structure which made him confused. He stated that his lecturers asked him to improve his writing, especially using complex sentence and technical terms in the context. “Next, in the 2 nd semester the students were required to use the more academic terms.” 7- CO2-161-EDI-PCS It can be inferred from his statement that in the previous semester he only used a simple sentence and common terms to express his ideas. Cahyo realized the importance of using such technical terms in improving his writing. Therefore, he used dictionary to check a particular academic term in his paper. “I used dictionary which installed in my laptop. I found several new terms that I did not know before.” Similarly, Jaya had to push himself in adjusting the style. “It was strange to me because, you know, I mostly taught in the non-formal sector of English Teaching. That was challenging. I had to adjust my English style from social English and moved them to academic English.” 9-JA2-11-EXP Thus, in this point I inferred that Cahyo and Jaya challenged themselves for PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI