scholarly journals Investigating writing difficulties in essay writing: Tertiary students’ perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Suhaimah Bulqiyah ◽  
Moh. Arif Mahbub ◽  
Dyah Ayu Nugraheni
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Writing Difficulties ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Language And Education ◽  
Cognitive Problems

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students’ perspectives on the writing difficulties of essays. This study was conducted in explanatory research in which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. 21 undergraduate students have enrolled in the survey and 6 of them were invited to the interview section. This research reveals tertiary students' problems in essay writing course are categorized into: affective problems which raise from students’ and lecturers’ attitude while teaching and learning Essay Writing Course, cognitive problems that considered as the difficulties in the areas of writing viewpoint, transferring language, and the process of writing, and linguistic problems in the area of lexico-grammar, vocabulary, and the structure of the essay. Due to the findings, those aspects of academic writing should be serious attention for both EFL students and teachers to overcome the problems. The findings of this study have implications for EFL writing course designers as basic data of material improvement and for researchers particularly in the realms of language and education.

scholarly journals Indonesian EFL Students’ Proficiency in Writing and Ability in Speaking across Personality Learning Styles

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Bambang Yudi Cahyono ◽  
Ira Mutiaraningrum
Keyword(s):  
Learning Styles ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Scoring Rubrics ◽  
Efl Students

<p><em>This research aimed at examining Indonesian EFL </em><em>students</em><em>’ proficiency in writing and ability in public speaking across</em><em> personality</em><em> learning styles</em><em>: extroversion and introversion</em><em>. It involved 7</em><em>4</em><em> undergraduate students who </em><em>took </em><em>an Essay Writing course in the English Department of </em><em>Universitas Negeri</em><em> Malang, one of the leading universities in Indonesia. The students were distributed into three classes</em><em>.</em><em> The</em><em>y </em><em>were taught how to write essays. Then, the students were made aware that they had to complete two tasks: writing </em><em>and presenting </em><em>a cause and effect essay on topics related to English language teaching. The students’ cause and effect essays were scored to know their proficiency in writing and their presentation was assessed to know their ability in speaking. Two scoring rubrics were used and two raters were involved in the scoring process for interrater reliability. The results of the research showed that the Indonesian EFL </em><em>student</em><em>s’ proficiency in writing is </em><em>strongly </em><em>related to their ability in speaking</em><em> for both groups of students</em><em>. In addition, </em><em>the Indonesian extrovert EFL students’ proficiency in writing is strongly related to their ability in speaking. The Indonesian introvert EFL students’ proficiency in writing is also strongly related to their ability in speaking. However, there is no significant difference of the proficiency in writing and ability speaking between the extrovert and introvert students.</em></p>

scholarly journals Voices from EFL Thai learners towards English writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 1495-1507
Author(s):  
Chutamas Sundrarajun
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Educational Organizations ◽  
Business English ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Language Writing ◽  
Written Assignments

English language writing is seen as one of the most difficult skills for undergraduate students. When composing a piece of writing, students usually face various problems ranging from grammatical aspects to expressing ideas and opinions. To answer the research questions, this study employed a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify the students’ perceptions towards Business Article Writing Course, as well as to pinpoint their challenges when working on the written assignments. The intensive data were collected from 20 fourth year students majoring in Business English via the use of questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The findings give teachers, course designers, and educational organizations an insight into students’ problems in learning English language writing. It also highlights the need to integrate different genres of writing to enhance students’ writing skills so that they can use such techniques to overcome any struggles when composing a piece of writing.   Keywords:  Academic Writing, EFL, Writing Strategies, Peer Feedback

scholarly journals Detection of Common Errors in Turkish EFL Students’ Writing through a Corpus Analytic Approach

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Tokdemir Demirel
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
First Year ◽  
Plagiarism Detection ◽  
Writing Difficulties ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Concordance Program

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students’ major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The essays were written on assigned topics as take home exam papers or assignments in the context of a first year academic writing course. The corpus consisted of essays of various lengths ranging from 500 word essays to 1500 word essays. The essays were compiled into a corpus and analyzed by using a concordance program. The essays were also checked for plagiarism using the online plagiarism detection software and plagiarized essays were excluded from the analysis. Errors were classified by using an error classification system which was organized according to lexico-grammatical categories. The resulting categories consisted of mostly syntactic and lexical categories of error but academic style errors were considered as well. As a result of the analysis, in terms of error categories, the most frequent errors were observed in the verb related error categories. When considered individually, the most frequent errors were observed in noun modification and were mostly interference related.

scholarly journals Exploring Academic Writing Needs of Indonesian EFL Undergraduate Students

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ratnawati ◽  
Didih Faridah ◽  
Syafiul Anam ◽  
Pratiwi Retnaningdyah
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Private University ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Need Analysis ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
General Skills ◽  
Students Attitudes ◽  
The University

Academic writing is noteworthy competence to be accomplished for English as a foreign language (EFL) students to fulfill their academic needs at the university. To do so, Indonesian tertiary universities accommodate and foster this competence using academic writing course. The study, therefore, sought to look into: 1. what undergraduate EFL students’ perceptions of the importance of academic writing to their current study and future career, 2. what the students’ perceptions of the difficulties of academic writing, 3. what the students’ attitudes towards their previous and future academic writing courses. The present study investigates students’ needs emerging in academic writing during classroom practices to gain insightful and profound perspectives for forthcoming needs of the course. Data were collected through a five scaled questionnaire of need analysis distributed to thirty-four EFL students from a private university, and a focus group interview involving nine participants. Results indicate 61% (Mdifficulties=3.05) of students faced difficulties in both general skills and language problems of academic writing and a new course was expected to provide moves/steps for writing the sections in a research article. The present study then suggests that e-database resources are needed for academic papers models and references hence its efficiency and flexibility in prospective academic writing.

scholarly journals Culture and Innovation in Essay Writing Project: EFL Students’ Perceptions

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1433
Author(s):  
Bambang Yudi Cahyono
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
State University ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Writing Project ◽  
Innovation Culture ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Creative Products ◽  
Writing Competence

Two important concepts in education nowadays are “culture” and “innovation.” Culture is important as it goes along with the way people think, feel, and do and their phases of life, while innovation is important as it suggests development. In the context of education in the globalization, culture reflects identity, while innovation reflects creative products beyond conventional practices. This small-scale study examined EFL students’ perceptions on the essay writing project incorporating both culture and innovation. It involved 25 students attending an essay writing course in the English Department of a state university in Indonesia, Following the completion of the teaching and learning actvites: the students’ perceptions were elicited on the basis of three criteria: development of idea for writing, meaningfulness of the writing project, and writing competence of the students. The results showed that the EFL students perceived combination of local culture and innovation in the form of video making helped them developing essays. They also thought that the essay writing project was meaningful and they felt that their writing competence improved after following the writing project.

scholarly journals EFL Students’ Responses on Learning Academic Essays in Indonesian Higher Education

AL-TA LIM ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Syayid Sandi Sukandi ◽  
Riny Dwitya Sani
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Thesis Statement ◽  
Writing Instructors

This article provides investigation on EFL students’ responses related to learning writing academic essays in the context of higher education in one of private universities in Indonesia. The gap that is studied in this research is related to rarity of English writing instructors in identifying what their students’ responses towards their learning process after completing an essay writing course and how the responses present significant ideas on improving writing instructors’ pedagogical practices in writing classrooms. Scope of this research is teaching and learning English writing within the context of English as a foreign language. Field of this research is English composition studies. This research applies a quantitative non-experiment design, with descriptive as its method and questionnaire as its instruments. Findings show that students view English writing in neutral attitude; meanwhile, writing thesis statement in an academic essay is the most difficult part to write (40.59% of all respondents), and grammar and punctuation in writing essay is the most difficult aspect of essay writing (51.96% of all respondents). In brief, this research shows that recognising which aspect of the academic essay that is difficult for the students and which element is hard for them is crucial for adjusting pedagogical practices for English writing instructors and improving quality of their teaching gradually in Indonesia

scholarly journals Longitudinal Study of EFL Students Using the Systemic Functional Linguistics Method

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akiko Nagao
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
First Year ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Functional Linguistics ◽  
Genre Awareness ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Study Participants

This study examined the progress of English as a foreign language (EFL) writers using the instructional framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the communities of practice (CoPs) model. The study participants comprised 11 first-year undergraduate students in Japan with intermediate-level English proficiency who were exposed to SFL in a single EFL classroom (CoP). The participants’ genre understanding and meaning-making decisions when writing discussion essays were studied over two semester-long courses. To do so, their developmental changes were analyzed using pre- and post-instructional writing tasks. In particular, their ability to convey interpersonal meaning, such as through the use of modal verbs, was examined and compared between the pre- and post-tasks. To triangulate the findings, participants’ genre awareness in relation to discussion essays was also examined using in-depth qualitative analysis of their self-reflective texts and peer assessments, based on a grounded theory approach. In the pre-writing task, it was apparent that the learners lacked understanding of the components of discussion essay writing. However, analysis of their post-instructional tasks revealed that most had begun to apply the language components required to convey interpersonal meaning in their discussion genre texts. These results suggest that the changes in learner’s genre awareness and knowledge affected the lexicogrammatical features they used when writing discussion essays. Thus, this study concludes that applying the SFL framework to writing instruction enhanced EFL learners’ awareness of textual meaning and their understanding of the function of discussion essay texts.

scholarly journals EFL College Students’ Skill in Using Collocations in Writing Essays

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Dewi Nopita
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
English Education ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Training And Education ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students ◽  
Academic Year

Collocation is a natural order of words in which one word should be attached to another in a particular context. For students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL students), using collocations has been recognized to become a problem. This article is going to describe EFL college students’ skill in using collocations in writing essays. 42 students from the same class were selected. They were the 4th semester students of English Education Study Program at Teacher Training and Education Faculty of UMRAH who took Essay Writing course in the academic year 2019/ 2020. The students were given a take-home assignment to write essays. Then, the essays were analyzed to find out the students’ skill in using collocations. It was found that in using collocation in writing essays, 5 students had excellent skill, 14 students had good skill, and 23 students had low skill. The incorrect use of collocations consisted of lexical and grammatical collocations. Finally, it is hoped that these findings could be a useful input for future Essay Writing course.

scholarly journals Toward an Intercultural Rhetoric: Improving Chinese EFL Students’ Essay Writing through Outline Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
Yingqin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Intercultural Rhetoric ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
English Academic Writing ◽  
Chinese And English

This study explores the effects of teaching EFL students to use an outline in their English essays. The researchers maintain that using outlines can raise students’ awareness of different audience expectations embedded in the rhetoric of the target language (English) and culture and can improve their English academic writing. The study was based on a four-week long case study at a university in Xi’an, China, in which 24 Chinese EFL students at the College of Translation Studies participated. A discourse analysis was conducted by comparing the Chinese EFL students’ English essays produced at the beginning of the study with those produced at the end of the study after learning and practicing outlining for writing the English essays. Email inquiries were used for understanding the participants’ viewpoints on learning how to write English essay outlines. The findings reveal that teaching EFL students to use outlining in their English essays is an effective way to help them improve their essay writing. Not only can it enhance the students’ understanding about using the English thesis statements, but it can also help improve the use of related, logical, and specific detailed examples to support the main ideas in their essays. The email inquiries also revealed that the students believe that outline learning helped them to understand the differences between Chinese and English essay writing. The implications of the study for intercultural rhetoric are also discussed.

scholarly journals Investigation of Intercultural Competence: CDA of EFL Students’ Baseline Portfolios

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 458
Author(s):  
Abduljalil Hazaea
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Intercultural Competence ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Qualitative Empirical Research ◽  
Intercultural Skills ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Preparatory Year

In monocultural classes, Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students have to acquire not only linguistic competence but also to develop Intercultural Competence (IC) when they read and write in English. This article investigates IC scattered in EFL students’ baseline portfolios collected in an enrichment critical reading class at the Preparatory Year of Najran University. IC is operationalised as intercultural attitude, intercultural knowledge and intercultural skills evident as discourses in intercultural texts. The data comprises semi-structured interview and intercultural assignment, which is an encounter discourse to intercultural text. A qualitative empirical research design was used to analyze the data through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) techniques. The findings indicate that IC is underdeveloped. Most of the participants represent negative attitude towards intercultural communication. They also lack appropriate intercultural knowledge and effective intercultural skills. The findings suggest that EFL teaching and learning practices need to shift towards a more intercultural perspective.

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