The Importance Of Argumentative Writing

Writing is an important productive skill for learning English at school as foreign language. One type of writing is persuasive writing which mostly forms in a number of paragraphs and becomes a text called argumentative writing or essay. Argumentative writing or essay is encompassed to an academic writing. Thus, argumentative writing is studied by EFL learners. However, EFL learners have to deal with some difficulties in writing and delivering their point of view within an argumentative essay. Not only students who opposed to difficulty but also teachers or lecturers. Therefore, those difficulties are investigated by some research in some articles. Several studies have tried to overcome the problems which orientate in the argumentative essays

For example, the process in using teaching strategies which gets teachers or lecturers oppose to some difficulties. According to Maleerat Ka-kan-deea, Sarjit Kaur (2015) in their study which investigate and develop effective teaching strategies to develop students’ writing competence, there are two lecturers has been interviewed and found that they used the following strategies to teach argumentative writing to their students: (1) using different inputs and activities in class in order to motivate students to become active learners, including pair work, group discussion, explanation, illustration and debate in class; (2) analysing sample texts and presenting their understanding in class; and (3) understanding their students’ learning styles and providing what they need to develop their writing skills. It is seen that the effective teaching strategies are not always based on the theoretical approach, yet it could found by teachers or lecturers them self. This implication is referring to how EFL lecturers improved their instructions in teaching argumentative writing. This research proved that EFL learners and lecturers need effective teaching strategies in the learning

Conjunctions are defined as written device to join together with sentences, clauses and phrases. Conjunctions are needed as cohesive devices which use to avoid ambiguity and unclear meaning between sentences within the writing. Conjunctions are typically divided into four different types, namely, additive, contrastive, causal, and temporal (Halliday & Hasan 1976). EFL learners still feel difficulties in the usage of conjunction for many reasons. It may occur because of difficulties in making complex and cohesive sentences. For example, the difficulties faced by some EFL learners. According to Muftah Hamed (2014), Libyan Tertiary as EFL learners still used conjunctions inappropriately and face some difficulties in adversative, casual, and additive conjunctions. The result of this study also identified the reasons of difficulties which participants found in using four conjunctions in terms of semantic function. The first reason is their first language (Arabic) negative transfer; second reason is over generalisation in the second language (English) and the last reason is the presentation of conjunctions in lists in ESL/EFL textbooks without showing the subtle difference between them in terms of semantic function. Based on these results, the researcher gained implications for teaching the conjunctions toward Libyan EFL