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

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1433
Author(s):  
Bambang Yudi Cahyono

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.

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 518
Author(s):  
Tzu-Shan Chang

<p><em>This paper demonstrates the systemic functional approach (SFL) with the L1 rhetorical structure in a genre-based writing class and then examines the effectiveness of this study’s approach in developing Chinese EFL writers’ competence in writing argumentative essays. This EFL writing course follows the SFL approach, the genre-based cycle of teaching and learning, to provide students with repeated opportunities to practice literacy skills gained in previous cycles until they master different genres. The genre-based cycle formed the writing instruction along with the L1 rhetorical structure as a strategy; Chinese EFL sophomores (n = 44) were instructed in this writing class. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected: </em><em>I</em><em>nterviews and ratings of students’ writing from two raters before and after the instruction. The results presented that most participants had made statistically significant progress in their writing competence, particularly in structuring paper. The incorporation of L1 rhetorical structure into the genre-based cycle offered participants a framework to organize their arguments in L2 writing. When EFL students’ home languages/cultures are treated as the resources within the context of a genre-based cycle, their prior knowledge of L1 rhetorical structure transits to more accurate construction of L2 essays.</em></p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Suhaimah Bulqiyah ◽  
Moh. Arif Mahbub ◽  
Dyah Ayu Nugraheni

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.


AL-TA LIM ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Syayid Sandi Sukandi ◽  
Riny Dwitya Sani

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


Author(s):  
Dewi Nopita

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-111
Author(s):  
Salih Muhammad Jumah-Alaso ◽  
Abdullahi Shehu Onisabi

This study examines ways of improving Arabic's teaching and learning process by applying YouTube video clips as audio-visual aids. Eighteen Arabic students in Kaduna State College of Education and Kwara State University constituted the study sample. A descriptive method with Pre-test and Post-test was conducted. Data were collected through the essay writing, translation, and structure test. The data were analyzed through the descriptive statistics of frequency (f) and percentage (%). The study findings revealed that the subjects performed better and demonstrated linguistic communicative competence in Arabic. Finally, the study recommends that YouTube videos should be integrated into the Arabic teaching-learning process.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Bambang Yudi Cahyono ◽  
Ira Mutiaraningrum

<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>


Author(s):  
Viorica Condrat

Academic writing is a particular type of scholarly interaction which signals the writer’s affiliation to a specific discourse community. Developing academic writing skills should become a priority for higher education. This paper describes a small-scale study which investigates the role of blogging in developing academic writing skills in undergraduate students. Blogging is viewed as a platform where the scholarly interaction between members of the same discourse community can take place. The paper is based on the survey data and observation during the experiment conducted at Alecu Russo Balti State University of Moldova. It reports on how EFL students reacted to the use of blogs for academic writing tasks. The findings suggest that students seem to have a positive attitude to blogging pointing out to such benefits as: enhanced self-efficacy, awareness of the writing process, development of reader awareness, increased responsibility for the quality of the writing. We argue that blogging can yield significant improvement in undergraduate students’ academic writing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (02) ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Umar Al Faruq A. Hasyim ◽  
Nurul Puspita

Abstract Local wisdom values mean society awareness about their ability in recognizing the surrounding condition.  In this context, the values refer to the Lampungnese custom in planting crop. Unfortunately, many EFL learners were not familiar with their surroundings.  Furthermore, this research describes the used of environmental issue topic in learning Essay writing. The teaching and learning process was done by EFL students by using online platform. It was suggested during the pandemic situation. However, the aim of this research is describing EFL students’ activities in emerging environmental topic toward their essay. This research was done on second semester of essay writing students. It was about 27 students. In conducting the teaching and learning process the lecturers choose any pictures that deal with the local culture of Lampungnese in planting crop as a topic. Then, the students would be more familiar with the values of the culture and elaborate the values in term of essay writing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-313
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Khonamari ◽  
Ehsan Hashemi ◽  
Martina Pavlikova ◽  
Bozena Petrasova

Aim. In academic writing, lack of coherence is thought to occur mostly due to the lack of necessary linguistic skills and knowledge in L2. Thus, the analysis of a written text is concerned with understanding the local relations among the ideas conveyed in a text. Concept. As is usually the case, students writing in a second language generally produce texts that contain varying degrees of grammatical and rhetorical errors. Most of the studies have been conducted with only one criterion for the analysis of coherence and they reported different results. Also, most of them have been conducted on a small scale in terms of the number of participants, and writing samples collected. Therefore, this study tries to investigate the coherence problems/errors of university students in their writing, if any, on a fairly large scale in light of the Cooperative principle and its maxims. Results and conclusion. The study revealed that the basic problem of the students in their essay writing was the way the text should be structured with reference to how cohesion and coherence are established. In the analysis of maxim violations, the violation of the Quality maxim was identified as making overgeneralisations or giving inadequate or no evidence/support for the claims/ideas. The violation of the Quality maxim indicates that students tend to do it due to their linguistic inadequacies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-41
Author(s):  
Roslaini Roslaini ◽  
Cahya Komara

Pronunciation is often viewed as difficult English sub-skill for EFL students in Indonesia. Many of students did not know how to respond the problem of pronunciation they have in class. Moreover, many teachers or lecturers also did not support the students’ pronunciation teaching and learning with a proper media. This situation happened in second semester students of English Department, FKIP UHAMKA Jakarta 2018/2019 Academic Year. In fact, there are plenty of technology applications that can support or assist them to practice pronunciation by their own. One of it is Text aloud Software. Thus, in this small-scale study, the researchers aim to reveal the use of Text Aloud Software as one of technology application that can help English as Foreign Language (EFL) students to mastery English pronunciation in the classroom. This study applies quantitative method with the use of quasi-experimental design and also added by close-ended questioners. The question of this research is; does Text Aloud Software help EFL students to master English pronunciation? To be able to answer the research question, this study involved 20 respondents who were selected purposively. The results showed that both data of pre-test and post-test in control class and experiment class was normally distributed and homogeny. The statistical test or t-test also showed that t observed (to = 1.68) was smaller than t table (tt = 2.02) which was 1.68 < 2.02. It can be concluded that Ho is rejected and Hi is accepted. Therefore, Text-Aloud Software is effective in helping students to master pronunciation.


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