Indonesian EFL Students’ Perspective on Writing Process: A Pilot Study

Abstract

The study was aimed at understanding the EFL Indonesian students' perspective on the writing process. The pilot study involved two male Indonesian postgraduate students in Universiti Utara Malaysia. The Indonesian students were selected based on the following criteria: (1) had enough knowledge in English writing, indicated by the completion of Academic Writing and Research Methodology courses taken in UUM; (2) had written an unpublished thesis during their undergraduate studies in Indonesia and they are writing their master or doctoral thesis in English; (3) used English extensively in writing their assignments, and in daily activities. Pseudonyms were used to refer to the participants as Sukarno and Suharto. The data were collected through in-depth interviews with the participants. The interview sessions took approximately 15-20 minutes for each participant and were videotaped and audiotaped. Semi-structured interview with 15 questions and probes were used. The results showed that the two participants had positive feelings and attitudes towards writing in English. Although they had a hard time in English writing during their undergraduate in Indonesia, they become fond of writing in English in their postgraduate time due to the exposure to English extensively. In composing, they used brainstorming, drafting, pausing, revising and editing in a recursive manner.

Investigating writing difficulties in essay writing: Tertiary students’ perspectives

“…This finding is somewhat different from previous studies (e.g. Abas & Aziz, 2016;Ceylan, 2019), in which one of the writing problems is students have low interest in writing activities. This may due to the other factors that made the students interest in Essay Writing Course.…”

“…Furher discussion, some of the interviewees also postulated that they did not always do the writing task according to the process of writing, because of the complicated ways in writing. Supporting to the results, Sadik in Abas & Aziz (2016) and Ceylan (2019) echoed the same statement that students experienced difficulty with the writing process in general, and skip the process in particular.…”

“…The student's excerpt also revealed the same answer that the fewer students practice writing the more difficulties student faced in writing. Similarly, Abas & Aziz (2016); Hasan & Marzuki (2017) stated that students experienced several difficulties in writing due to their less of practicing writing in English. Item 7 provides the students' perceptions about teacher instruction in writing courses which has only 14.3% (n=3) participants agreed the statement and 57.1% (n=12) disagreed.…”

The Implementation of Research-Based Teaching Method in the English for Academic Writing Course

“…The condition as found by Abas and Aziz (2016) that Indonesian students faced difficulty in writing during the undergraduate study suggested the students to have a certain course that might help them to produce academic writing papers. Preparing the students for writing the final paper or Skripsi, Bina Nusantara (BINUS) University set a course that might help the students to write an academic research paper -English for Academic Writing course.…”

The Use of Digital Storytelling (DST) to Help Students in Learning Multimodal Writing

“…In many classes, writing comes in the form of copying and answering teacher"s instruction. In some cases of Universities in Indonesia, writing at times appears in mono mode system where students transform ideas based on certain topic given by teachers and it is emphasized more in the arrangement of vocabulary and structure hence they find writing in English to be difficult because they have to use the correct English grammar and vocabulary, apply the writing skills they have learnt, and incorporate these knowledge with their previous experience on the topic given when writing (Abas & Aziz, 2016). Yet, writing has "shifted from a relatively static and rigid approach to the teaching of writing (as a single lesson exercise) to consider writing as "a process" with a widening focus on the stages of writing" (Groves, 2010) that it is must not always be presented in the form of single mode as it can be in the form of multi modal by using images along with words (Bezemer & Kress, 2010;Lemke, 1998;Saidy, 2018).…”