Identifying Problems Of Undergraduate Students In Producing Thesis Statement In Final Project

Thesis statement is an important substance in the introduction chapter because it must provide a clear, brief and specific argument as guidance for the readers so that they will certainly know what they can expect from the thesis paper. Therefore, this study focused to discover problems of undergraduate students’ thesis statement by identifying the most common mistakes that often appears in the final project which is in their research paper. The participants were six students of English language education who have been doing seminar proposal and completing their introduction chapter. They were selected using purposive sampling with a consideration above. The qualitative research was conducted using semi-structured interview with recorder as the instrument and document analysis with soft copy of introduction chapter in obtaining the valid data. Based on the research findings pointed out that undergraduate students’ have some problems in producing thesis statement such as lack of prior knowledge on thesis statement, difficult in making claim, and lack of writing knowledge. Meanwhile, the undergraduate students have effective strategies to tackle those problems such as doing pre-writing, reading many references and asking friends for suggestions and opinions.