Analysis of Students’ Cause and Effect Essay Writings at STAIN Batusangkar

Many students of English Department of STAIN Batusangkar who study writing at Writing Class were still unable to write in English well focused on academic writing. It was assumed as in the syllabus, there were many writing materials that they learned while the time to practice writing was limited. One of the materials was about writing texts. This research focused on cause and effect essay writing. The objective of this research was to analyze the students’ cause and effect essay writing at STAIN Batusangkar. This research was classified into descriptive one. The data were collected through writing tests. There were 30 students’ essays. They were analyzed by using analytical scoring rubrics adopted from some experts. Then, the researcher and the two scorers scored the students’ essays by considering the scoring rubrics. The scoring rubrics adopted from Brown, Oshima, Hughes, and Reid. Based on the data analyzed, the finding of the research was 16.67% the students’ writings were excellent, 40%students’ writings were good, 33.33% students’ writings were satisfactory, 10%students’ writings were weak, and 0% students’ writing was poor. The test result showed that English Department students were able enough to write an essay. Some of them still had problems in writing. The problems were in organizing the idea in a good way, the using correct grammar and sentence structure, and using appropriate mechanics in their writing. These problems happened because of some factors. One of them is the students were lack of writing practice. Thus, there were still need improvements in teaching writing strategy and practicing writing a lot.