Background of the study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This chapter covers the rationale of the research. They are the background of the study, problem formulation, problem limitation, objectives of the study, benefits of the study, and definition of terms.

A. Background of the study

There are so many ways to communicate between human beings. Direct communication is done by having conversation with one another. Thoughts and feelings are described orally and responded directly. Another way of describing thoughts and feelings is by writing. This skill of language learning is known to have a long process from thinking of what to write to finally producing a written work. It is definitely more complex than oral communication since it involves not only technical guidelines of a good writing should be but also organization of ideas so that the ideas to be conveyed is clear for the readers. What also differentiates writing with speaking is how the listeners or the readers are convinced. In a conversation, the listener does not always ask the detailed information from the speaker. While, in a composition, the readers may question the credibility of the author if the author does not provide the supporting evidence clearly. Supporting evidences help the author to convince the readers of the reasons or arguments he has. Supporting evidences can consist of anecdotes, personal experiences, facts, studies, statistics, and the opinions of experts Langan, 2011, p. 5. If a writer wishes to strengthen his arguments with the use of evidence, they must be presented in the paper with complete information about the source. Otherwise, it can be considered as plagiarism. Trimmer 2010, p. 25 defined plagiarism as “using someone else‟s words or ideas without giving proper credit or no credit at all to the writer of the original ”. The credit is given by acknowledging the original author, letting the readers know and later check the source by providing the complete information about the source. Writing complete information about a source is called documentation. Doing documentation in the paper involves two ways. The first one is in- text citation or also known as parenthetical citation. In- text citation is “separate citation of each borrowed fact or opinion. The source author and the page number are enclosed in parentheses following the borrowed material Coyle, 1990, p. 129”. In-text citation is written inside the body of the paper. The second one is references list written in the end of the paper. References list includes the complete information about the source such as the complete name of the author, the date and place of publication and the title of the work. Those two ways should always exist in a documentation as they complement each other. The need to apply the knowledge on citations appears in Academic Essay Writing class. Academic Essay Writing, as a part of academic writing, is a course offered by ELESP for the fifth semester students. The aims of the course are to guide students to learn about the characteristics of academic writing and to write good academic essays PBI Academic Guidelines, 2011. The topics of the essays are argumentative essay, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, and book or article review. In these essays, students are expected to think critically about an issue and pour their opinion in their papers. To support their opinion, students need to provide perspectives from more experienced person or experts. This is where the need of proper citing is crucial. Although it is important, the lots of materials about citing make it difficult for the students to master since the portion of time for learning it in classroom is limited. They have to manage their time and strategies to learn to write good quotations with proper citations at the same time they learn about writing skill itself. Moreover, the ease of accessing information instantly and directly from the internet contributes to the higher tendency for the students to copy and paste which can lead to plagiarism. Thus, this research attempts to seek the potential problems that commonly appear in the process of learning to write quotations in Academic Essay Writing class of ELESP. If the previous study of Prabandari in 1997 about the students‟ problems in writing quotation was held in the eighth semester, this study was held in the fifth semester. The researcher intends to dig more information on the students‟ problems from the beginning so that the problems can be solved earlier to prevent major errors in the more advanced writing class. In this research paper, the problems are in the terms of writing quotations, in-text citations, and references. It is expected that by reading the result of this research, both students and lecturers of ELESP can find better strategies to learn and teach citing in Academic Essay Writing as a preparation for writing more complicated work like thesis.

B. Problem Formulation