Students' Ability In Composing English Essay At Al-Muslim University, Bireun

The present research was conducted to analyse students’ ability in paragraph writing at Al-Muslim University. Hence, this research was led to analyze how the students developed ideas in their writing and to explore their capability in academically sound paragraph writing. This research was conducted to one class of the students in academic year 2015 with 22 student-participants. To fulfil the purpose of the research, the researcher employed mix-method. The data were obtained through writing test and questionnaire. The result in this research revealed that the students developed their ideas in different ways. Most of students preferred to develop their ideas by directly elaborate in their paragraph, and the rest preferred to include introductory and closing paragraphs in their writing. The result of the writing test led to the fact that students needed to practice more on exploring their styles and contents of their paragraph writing towards an academically sound paragraph writing. Guided and template that the writing lecturers provide would help the students’ paragraph writing more in the future. Furthermore, the result of questionnaire showed that the majority of the students gave positive responses toward their tasks on the paragraph writing. In spite of their awareness on their lack of practices, they felt it important to be able to have a good ability in paragraph writing.