THE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN WRITING FUNCTIONAL TEXT

Writing is a skill that requires thinking, constructing, and revising text. However, many students find writing to be a challenging skill to learn. This perception can greatly impact their enthusiasm for and involvement in the writing process. The teaching of writing in middle school also gets obstacles such as unsuccessful classroom learning, lacking practice, and limited time for writing practice.
This research attempted to answer the problem what factor which cause i students’ difficulties on writing Functional Text. The data collection instrument in this research used a writing test which was then followed up with an interview based on the students' writing test results. In this research, class VIII/C was used which consisted of 8 female students and 16 male students.
The research result showed that their difficulties are in understanding, organizing, and producing functional texts. Some of these errors include misspellings that cause misunderstandings and students' lack of creative thinking in creating functional text, as seen in similar sentence texts and identical in students writing text.
Based on the findings from data analysis and discussions, it can be inferred that internal factors have a notable impact on students' struggles with writing functional texts. The results of the factor analysis were presented during the final interviews. Several factors contribute to these difficulties, including the challenge of generating creative ideas for embellishing invitation cards and greetings, as well as difficulties in constructing coherent sentences. Many students resort to plagiarism, manipulating literature and online sources, which suggests that their potential writing abilities could be higher if they were more motivated by themselves or their teachers. Limited proficiency in language and vocabulary also significantly influences students' difficulties in composing functional texts.