Nur HASANAH Pengarang Dr. Umar Fauzan, M.Pd. Dosen Pembimbing 1 Dra. Sitti Hadijah, M.Pd. Dosen Pembimbing 2 Dr. Umar Fauzan, M.Pd. Penguji 1 Dra. Sitti Hadijah, M.Pd. Penguji 2 Rostanti Toba, M.Pd. Ketua Penguji

Nur Hasanah, 2021. “An Analysis of Students’ Difficulties in Writing Undergraduate Thesis Proposal of English Education Department of UINSI Samarinda in Academic Year 2020/2021.” Undergraduate thesis. English Education Department Teacher Training and Education Faculty State Islamic University Sultan Aji Muhammad Idris Samarinda. This research is under the guidance of Dr. Umar Fauzan, M. Pd as the first advisor, and Dra. Sitti Hadijah, M. Pd as the second advisor. Writing an undergraduate thesis proposal is one of the students’ obligations before writing an undergraduate thesis. UINSI Samarinda is one of the Islamic universities in Samarinda that requires the students to write an undergraduate thesis proposal before conducting an undergraduate thesis. However, in the process of writing, the students cannot avoid the difficulties. The research data of eighth-semester students that the researcher observed showed that they faced several difficulties in developing a paragraph and in implementing writing elements in the process of writing their undergraduate thesis proposals. The purposes of this research were to find out the students’ difficulties in developing a paragraph and to understand the students’ difficulties in implementing the writing elements in the process of writing their undergraduate thesis proposals. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The instrument used in this research were interviews, documentation, and Oshima & Hogue’s Paragraph Rubric. The research subject was 7 eighth-semester students of UINSI Samarinda in Academic Year 2020/2021. The data were collected from the background of the study of the students’ undergraduate thesis proposals and analyzed with Miles and Huberman Model. The result showed that the difficulties in developing a paragraph experienced by the students were related to too specific and too general topic sentence, poor supporting sentences, the absence of concluding sentence, inconsistent topic discussion, and inharmonic sentences. While the students’ difficulties shown in implementing the writing elements were found in the organization (the failure running the sentences smoothly), vocabulary (informal phrases, redundancy, unclear word), grammar (singular and plural error, wrong word choice error, missing word error, article error, subject-verb agreement error, fragment error, conjunction error, wrong word form error, wrong word order error, and preposition error), and mechanics (capitalization error, punctuation error, and spelling error). The causes of these problems were the interfere of students’ native language and the lack of students’ knowledge about the rules of the development of paragraph and writing elements.