STUDENTS' ATTITUDE AND DIFFICULTIES ON ONLINE ESSAY LEARNING

Online essay writing has become a convenient alternative for teacher to teach academic writing to students ever since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in the beginning of 2020. Even so, online essay writing can differ from the conventional essay writing in many aspects. Regardless, writing is still considered as one of the most difficult skill to master for students. This study aimed to describe students’ attitude towards online essay writing, especially for academic purpose, and to describe the difficulty the students faced in online essay writing. The study used qualitative method as the research design and interview as the instrument in collecting the data. The participants in this study included three different students in the fourth semester English Education Program in Muhammadiyah University of Jember. The data was analyzed descriptively according to analysis technique by Miles and Huberman and validated through data source triangulation. The result of the study showed that all students demonstrated positive attitude towards online essay writing. Regarding the difficulty, similar pattern of challenge in writing shared among three participants including but are not limited to grammatical rules, vocabulary, technical problems, and linguistic problems, such as delivering meanings and text structure. It is suggested for lecturers to facilitate better support for the students to create learning situations where they presented flexible, effective, and interactive learning so they can produce better writing and to be more thorough in minimalize students’ challenge and limitation in writing.