The Benefits of Writing

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c. Problem of Writing

According to Elbow 1973, writing is not just putting ideas on a paper; it is also creating new ideas during the process. That what makes writing becomes difficult. The following paragraph will discuss the problems in writing according some experts. Gupta says that writing has long been claimed to be a very difficult skill to acquire and is dreaded by L2 student Gupta, 1998. It is difficult because L2 students are potentially different with L1 students. In Hyland ’s theory of writing problem, 2003 it is distinguished by their bilingual and bicultural backgrounds and particularly their previous experiences as writers and students. It means that their first language and cultural backgrounds are being the factors that should be understood as potential of explanation for writing difference. For instance, Indonesian students will face more difficulties in deciding words to be written or spoken because they learn English as Foreign Language not as their first language. It leads the L2 students to face more problems in writing than L1 students. Furthermore, problems in writing are also caused by the insufficient knowledge and inefficient study. As Musch and Broder claimed that it is a consequence of inefficient study habits or a low ability level Musch and Broder 1999 as cited in Daud, 2005. Students who are lack of grammatical knowledge mostly face problems in writing than students who have sufficient knowledge because they could not use the appropriate grammar for their writing. 16

d. Problems in Paragraph Level

Expressing ideas in a well-organized paragraph is important to student’s study especially for EFL students Muhyidin, 1988. It means that both organization and form of the paragraph are the important parts in writing a paragraph. The students are introduced to the concept of topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence to make a well unity and coherence paragraph. Since in this study is focusing in Paragraph Writing, the problems appeared by the students mostly related to the organization of paragraph. As Muhyidin stated, “…a paragraph must be coherent, it must contain sentences that are logically arranged” 1988, p.12. Each sentence in paragraph should be related to others in order to make a paragraph coherent and unified. Students sometimes find difficulties in relating each sentence and develop the paragraph to be unified. Besides, writing is seen as a product constructed from the writer’s ability of lexical and grammatical Hyland, 2003. Likewise, lexical and grammatical should be understood to produce a good paragraph. Therefore the researcher classified problems in Paragraph level into two: 1. Organization One of the problems in paragraph level is constructing sentences into well- organized paragraph. According to Muhyidin, the important thing in writing is to make the paragraph coherence. It means that a paragraph should contain sentences which are logically arranged. Putting sentences which do not relate to the topic sentence is the example of problem in organization paragraph. If a sentence does 17 not relate to the topic sentence, this sentence is irrelevant and should be omitted because the paragraph becomes unified Muhyidin, 1988. For instance, one student will write about the benefits of freewriting, he or she needs to mention the benefits of freewriting. If the student writes about the other subjects it will make the paragraph incoherent. 2. Forms Since writing is seen as a product constructed from the writer’s ability of lexical and grammatical Hyland, 2003, vocabulary mastery and structure should be well-understood to produce a good paragraph. In fact, EFL students mostly experienced making grammatical errors and minimum requirement errors. According to Msanjila 2005, the highest frequency of writing problem is capitalization problem. Capitalization is related to the use of the first word of sentence, the pronoun “I”, abbreviations and acronyms, and proper nouns.

2. Anxiety

In this section, the researcher provides theories related to anxiety. There are two parts of this section; the nature of anxiety and the types of anxiety.

a. The Nature of Anxiety

There are so many definitions of anxiety but in this chapter, the researcher would provide its definition which exists in learning process especially in language learning. Anxiety is an unpleasant feeling or emotional state that has physiological and behavioral concomitants Dusek, 1980, p. 88. Anxiety itself is said to be one of the factors that could affect the process of learning, and