TOEFL has been used as a requirement for non-native English students to pursue further study overseas, to get an appropriate job and to graduate from university. Students often encounter difficulties completing TOEFL reading test. This quantitative study investigates the undergraduate students' difficulties and their strategies in completing TOEFL reading comprehension test. The data was obtained by collecting students' worksheets of the TOEFL test and distributing questionnaires related to test taking strategies used by the students. Thirty students of English Education Department of Syiah Kuala University were involved as participants. The results indicate five difficult reading aspects encountered by the students. In addition, their strategies to complete the reading comprehension section of the TOEFL test are also found. These findings are further discussed in this paper.

This study investigated the EFL students’ strategies in answering the Listening section of the Paper-based TOEFL test. The samples of this research were purposively selected consisting of 30 English major students at Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The samples were selected based on their recent TOEFL scores. All the selected samples achieved low TOEFL scores, especially for the Listening section. The data were gained by means of closed questionnaire and interviews. The interviews were conducted with three students of the 30 students and they were selected randomly. The results of the questionnaire revealed that the top three strategies the students used when answering the TOEFL questions ranged from the strategies of (1) ‘before listening, I tried to anticipate the topic by looking at the answer in the test book’, (2) ‘while listening, I tried to determine the topic or main idea for each conversation, and (3) ‘before listening, I tried to anticipate what the questions would be and I listened specifically for the answer’. This imply that a majority of students used strategies only to answer part B (dialogues) and part C (monologues) of the TOEFL Listening section. These parts were considered more difficult since many students were not familiar with the topics. Meanwhile, strategies for part A were neglected. These students often forgot to choose answers in this section. Unfortunately, strategies for part A are also important because they can achieve higher scores if the 30 questions in this part are answered correctly.

Podcast is a digital recording which contains a recorded programs from television, radio, and interviews. Many researchers have discussed about the podcast as an alternative teaching media to support students developing their speaking skills. This research article aims at finding out if there is a significant improvement on students' speaking skills by using this Podcast. Class XI IS3 was chosen as the sample of this study with total 30 students. This pre-experimental study employs pre-test and post-test. These tests are provided in the form of oral tests. The data from these tests were then calculated by using statistical formulas. The result showed that the post-test score was higher than the pre-test. The finding showed that there was a significant improvement of the students' speaking skills performance after undertaking treatments. Thus, podcast media can be used as one of the alternative media in teaching English especially speaking skill in EFL classes.

A great deal of research has been conducted on genre based approach, suggesting that it is an important approach. Its importance is also indicated by the fact that it is adopted in the 2004 and 2006 National English Curricula of Indonesian secondary schools. However, the pedagogical benefit of this approach to English language teaching is still controversial. Some research has shown that it is effective to develop language competence, some has not. The fact that since the adoption of this approach in the 2004 Indonesian National Curriculum the quality of Indonesian English language teaching at Indonesian schools has not significantly improved complicates the issue further. The present study was intended to contribute to the debate. It is an experiment to discover whether the approach can help improve the performance of students in university thesis defence examinations. The study was conducted at a university level because of an important practical issue, that is complaints among members of the academic community about the poor performance of undergraduate (UG) students in the thesis defence examination (TDE) event at Indonesian universities especially in Aceh. It was believed that even though students were competent in speaking general English, they were poor in their oral thesis defence performance. This study concludes that, with some conditions, it can help at least in some respects.

Drawing on a multimodality theory, this study attempted to investigate the various semiotic resources utilized by a giant Indonesian cigarette company, Sampoerna, and explore how these resources communicate meanings or messages in its billboard advertisements to persuade its potential customers to buy the product. The data were analyzed using Halliday’s systemic functional grammar focusing on ideational meta-function or also known as a representational function in multimodal discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the billboard advertisements were designed to persuade the audience to buy the advertised products implicitly through representational functions attained using narrative and conceptual processes. Whereas the former was realized by employing its typical sub-processes, actional and reactional processes, the latter employed its sub-processes such as classificational, analytical, and symbolic processes. Implicationally, this study has illuminated the possible application of systemic functional grammar within multimodal discourse analysis domain to investigate implicit message(s) conveyed by an advertisement.

Abstract:This study intends to explore students' difficulties in using critical thinking skills in reading. The subject of this study was second year undergraduate students of Ar-Raniry State Islamic University, Banda Aceh. This qualitative study analysed students' difficulties in using critical thinking skills in term of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation. A personal interview was conducted to find the data from the students. The result indicates that students' lack of practicing let them difficult in using critical thinking skills in reading. The other difficulties found were lack of language mastery, implied meaning, background knowledge, repetition and lack of vocabulary. Among six problems discovered above, lack of practicing, background knowledge and language mastery had made the students felt that critical thinking was difficult to be applied.

Comprehensive teaching-learning about speaking evaluation, especially peer evaluation, is conspicuous by its absence in English Foreign Language (EFL) Speaking classes at all secondary and tertiary levels in Indonesia, especially in Aceh, This comparative research study looks at the various aspects used for evaluation and especially looks at peer evaluation in EFL speaking classes in Aceh. The paper describes twenty three (23) components recommended for evaluation of speaking communications: the seen, the spoken and the script (content) components. The results showed that teachers of EFL speaking are not using and are not even taught such detailed evaluation systems. Moreover the syllabi for speaking English at upper secondary level are severely lacking as are those used in tertiary courses. Educators need to learn from the Toastmasters International systems for evaluation and for making evaluation speeches, in particular the need to prioritise praise in evaluation with only a pointer or two on how to improve the next speech. This paper includes a simplified format for peer evaluations that students can easily be taught to use and also stresses the need for praise, not punishment, for successful evaluation. Teachers of Speaking English EFL, who practice the recommendations from this paper, should get much better results from their students.

During the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, students of all education levels are pushed to study at home via online classes. Schools, universities and other educational institutes have to make sure that their students can keep receiving knowledge and information based on the indicators set by the curriculum. The same thing also occurs at the English Education Department of Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. This article presents the results of a two-cycle action research project conducted in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, through an online learning platform using Zoom meeting. In this study, eight undergraduate students participated in the online intervention class to apply genre-based visualization metacognitive strategy. A total of six academic texts of the explanation genre were taken from TOEFL tests and used in both cycles. In the online intervention class, students generated visual imagery of the academic texts, built up their knowledge of the text genres in the online discussions, and individually drew visual representations of the explanatory texts. The images drawn by the students were taken for the qualitative analysis, and the tests given to the students were analyzed quantitatively. Both data are used to find out their improvement in reading comprehension. The findings of this study revealed a remarkable contribution of genre-based visualization for improving students' comprehension of academic texts of the explanation genre at TOEFL level, particularly through online learning during the pandemic.