New Students’ Skills in Essay Writing on Productive Written Language Skills Course at English Education Study Program

This research is based on the need to measure the skills of new students in writing essays. This is needed to analyze teaching materials for the Productive Written Language Skills course. This study aims to analyze students' skills in writing essays. The research method used is a quantitative method with a quantitative descriptive research design. The sample of this research is the new semester 1 students of class A in the English Education Study Program, Faculty of Language and Arts, Academic Year 2022/2023, totaling 23 people. The instruments used to collect data were essay writing tests and interviews. After the data was collected, the researcher analyzed the test results using an assessment rubric and a table of value categories. Then, the researcher explained the data obtained from the interviews descriptively. After the data was collected, it was found that the students' ability in writing essays in the Productive Written Language Skills course was categorized into low with an average score of 65. Then, from the interviews, information was found that students did not understand and master writing skills. This is because students have not gone through writing courses before. Students think that they have not been able to present a thesis statement, have not mastered the concepts of unity, coherence, cohesion, and logical order in essay writing. In addition, students also have limited vocabulary to develop ideas or inspiration into an essay. In conclusion, the ability of new students to write essays in the Productive Written Language Skills course is still low.