ANALYSIS ON PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE SECOND SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF UNIVERSITY OF KUTAI KARTANEGARA

Abstract

This research is aimed at describing the types of paragraph writing made by the undergraduate students at University of Kutai Kartanegara. This study used content analysis as the design, focusing on the structural parts and the unity of paragraph
writing in developing English academic essays written in English language. The study assigned 9 students as a subject of the study. Data of this study included English essays using different topics. This study revealed that not all students understand how to write
a good and unified paragraph. The fact is that some students tend to having problem in writing structural parts of paragraph such as topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence. In this case, appropriate structural parts of a paragraph leads
to the unity of the paragraph. Furthermore, failures of the students in producing unified paragraph dominantly caused inappropriate supporting sentences. The mistake done by the students in developing supporting idea of a paragraph is caused by
their lack knowledge of the function of topic sentence.

Keywords: paragraph writing, topic sentence, unity, academic writing.