Electronic Theses and Dissertation

Abstract husnul khatimah. 2016. fostering students’ writing autonomy and interest via the use of facebook group. a descriptive study at english education of ar-raniry islamic state university banda aceh. thesis. graduate program in english language education of syiah kuala university. advisors: (1) dr. sofyan a. gani, m.a. (2) dr. zulfadli a. aziz, s.pd., m.a. key words: autonomous learning, learners’ interest, facebook group, descriptive study. this thesis attempts to deeply investigate wether the use of facebook group fosters the learners’ autonomy and writing interest. the participants of this study was ten second year students at english department of ar -raniry islamic state university banda aceh. this qualitative study was conducted in a facebook group named ‘we are popular writer’ for 40 days. besides saving the documents from the group, two types of interviews, pre-activities and post-activities, were done in order to collect the primary data. the pre-activities interview was held before the learning process in the group was started, and the post -activities one was set after the learning process was completed in the group. it took 182 minutes duration of interview video from nine participants. the documents were analyzed through descriptive analysis, the interview result s were analyzed through thematic analysis. the findings reveal that the use of facebook group assissted the participants to develop their learning autonomy as they were actively participating in each stages suggested by reinders (2010) . besides, the researcher also concluded two themes which accentuated this phenomenon. in addition, in fostering the participants’ interest to learn writing, there are four ways provided by the facebook group, as it provided unlimited timing, freedom and creativity, interactive feedback, and provided varieties of ideas. unfortunately, there were three problems faced by the participants during the learning process by the use of facebook group: technical problems, the personal problems, and the distraction from the learners’ activities outside the facebook group.