Indonesian EFL learners Research Papers (original) (raw)

Teaching writing has been challenging for some teachers particularly in the context of teaching English as a Foreign Language. Learners' problems with regard to vocabulary, grammar, organization, and mechanics are among those which can become the sources of the challenge. For that reason, various teaching strategies have been developed to facilitate learners in improving their writing skills among which include Problem-Based Learning (PBL). This paper investigates the effectiveness of Problem-Based writing instruction on students' argumentative writing skills with regard to content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. It employs a quasi-experimental study by involving the intermediate level students of Lambung Mangkurat University, a state university in Indonesia as the experimental and the control groups. The instrument is a writing test which is statistically proven to be valid and reliable. The findings show that there is a significant difference in the mean scores of argumentative writing skills of students taught using Problem-Based writing instruction compared to those taught using guided-writing instruction in which the obtained p value is .041 which is less than the α .05 significance level. A significant difference is also found in the components of organization, vocabulary, and grammar. The results confirm that Problem-Based writing instruction can be recommended as an alternative teaching strategy particularly in teaching argumentative essay writing. The study also suggests that further research involves larger samples and the skills in listening, speaking, and reading to establish more conclusive findings on the roles of PBL in English Language Teaching contexts.

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- Argumentative Writing, Effect, Indonesian EFL learners, Problem-Based writing instruction

This is a study of the grammatical morphology of English, with the research focus on the problems of the pasted marker (lexical morpheme), the verb phrase marker (intra-phrasal morpheme), and the 3sg-s marker (inter-phrasal morpheme) used by the Indonesian learners of English as a second language. This study involved 40 participants from Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The data collection was carried out at two different points in time with a four-month interval. A corpus tagger software was used to analyze the corpora-a total of 69,575 words-produced by the the participants in two different writing conditions: timed writing and planned writing. Results indicated that the pasted marker is the type of morpheme with the least occurrences of errors, while the 3sg-s marker is the morpheme that appears to be the biggest problem for the L2 learners. The findings also revealed very small progress from Time 1 to Time 2; the relatively short time span appears to have an effect on the insignificant development of the grammatical morphemes. It is concluded that the acquisition of the English grammatical morphemes is not sensitive to the context of different writing tasks.

- by Yunisrina Qismullah Yusuf
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- Second Language Acquisition, English, Writing, Error Analysis