Learner Autonomy Emergent Themes

However, facing those barriers did not hinder them in gaining their effort to write academic papers. Therefore, the participants’ willingness and awareness in writing academic papers could be seen also from how they managed and solved barriers they had in writing academic papers. Critical thinking refers to abilities or skills: selection, evaluation, analysis, reflection, questioning, inference and judgment. In other words, when critical thinking is applied to writing the above abilities are expressed through the process of argumentation, producing an argument i.e. the essay, the dissertation. In sum, the participants showed their efforts in exploring and developing their critical thinking while experiencing struggles in writing academic papers. Not only that, 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. The third pre-figured theme is writing expectation. All the participants expected that by having more experience in writing academic papers enabled them to integrate between critical thinking and language competence that they had during the process. Not only that, those struggles led them to experience transferring ideas, thoughts, and meaning involving many aspects to consider. Furthermore, the participants tended to push themselves further from his comfort zone. As a result, they gained a sense of control in their writing and feel an ownership of the language which ultimately will lead to a true sense of enjoying the art of writing. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI Based on the discussion under description and interpretation of the text, there were four emergent themes emerged in this study: motivation, struggle, satisfaction, and learner autonomy. Having a positive attitude toward writing academic papers led Asti into a strong motivation in gaining more experience in writing academic papers. Therefore, she was highly motivated to write academic papers for seminar. In contrast, Cahyo and Jaya had no other choices. They just wrote their academic papers in order to meet the deadline and fulfill the requirements paper. Based on the participants’ experience, they shared various challenges in writing their academic papers from the beginning until the end of the process in writing their academic papers. Most of the participants tried to limit themselves in writing their academic papers. However, based on the participants’ respond, feedback was the major factor which influenced their academic paper quality. Despite the fact that the participants faced various challenges and problems in writing academic papers, they wanted to improve their writing. The participants’ responds indicated that they were dissatisfied with their academic papers due to several reasons. Thus, an issue raised based on the participants experiences: communication between supervisors and students. Inadequate communication through feedback and guidelines were the problems they faced in improving their writing quality in academic papers. In brief, students face several problems during the process of writing. It includes organization of ideas, grammar, and lack of feedback. In similar, limited feedback given by the lecturers and difficulties in balancing the requirements are the urgent which should be paid more attention. In the meantime, they tried to identify and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI overcome with their own perspective which could be very subjective. On the other hand, it indicates that they aware of their responsibility for their academic writing. It is should be taken into account that actually their expectation related to the lecturers about feedback seems to be positive. It encourages them to be a highly autonomous learner. Thus, a positive respond should be given to the participants’ expectations.

B. Implication

The participants’ lived-experience in writing academic papers has led to several important theoretical and practical implications from the findings. First, the fact that students need more feedback for their writing indicates that they had inadequate feedback from the lecturers. They expected to have more explanation and example in order to improve their academic writing. It includes how to paraphrase, quote others’ in order to improve their academic writing. They should understand about the originality of thoughts, the most important issue in academic writing, and also to avoid plagiarism. Second, another implication concerns with guideline in writing academic papers. Without any adequate guideline given students tend to look at other people work and manipulate the written assignments so that at least they have something to submit. Thus, lecturers and policy makers need to support students in writing academic papers by giving adequate standards and feedbacks. Giving adequate guideline and standards help the students in the process of writing academic papers. It includes what to make, how to make and which way to go first. In similar, giving adequate feedback would be very beneficial for the students. They could measure their strengths and weaknesses in writing academic paper which help them in improving their academic writing quality.

C. Recommendation

There are several recommendations which are suggested in order to improve better academic writing of the English Language Studies students. First of all, writing academic papers are not as simple as it looks. A more detail explanation and examples as a guideline in writing academic papers are needed, considering that each student has different language competence level. Therefore, it would be very beneficial to the students for having guidelines in order to make a proper academic writing as expected by the lecturers. Secondly in terms of feedback, lecturers are expected to pay more attention to the students. Lack of feedback hindered the students to see the result or the quality of their academic writing. By having adequate feedback, all the students could measure their academic writing quality and also their strengths and weaknesses in writing academic papers. Finally, the conclusion of this research is subject to limitations and weaknesses. The time constraint may strongly affect the findings. The in-depth interviews that I conducted may lead into a poor meaning investigation due to inadequate experience as a novice researcher. Despite all constraints, better research could be further conducted as a follow-up to this study. Deeper investigation of student’s process of writing might result in much better discussion and findings. Furthermore, investigating how the students start and end writing in a deeper study may also lead to a better description and interpretation.