EFL STUDENTS’ CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES IN WRITING RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Abstract

Abstract : This study aimed to investigate EFL students’ challenges in writing the research proposal and how they deal with their challenges. This study used a qualitative approach with a case study design. The participants were from the 8th semester, and they are majoring in English education at a private university in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. The participants were six students (three with the highest score, three with the lowest score) selected through quota sampling. For the research instrument, this study used unstructured interviews and research proposal documentation to collect the data. In analyzing the data, the researcher used six procedures of thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006) including familiarization, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and composing the report. The result found that there are some internal and external challenges faced by EFL students in writing their research proposals. The internal challenges are related to self-confidence, lack of knowledge, selfmotivation, and feeling under pressure. Meanwhile, the external challenges are related to lecturers’ feedback, lack of materials, and lack of family and friend support. There were also found that EFL students used grammar-checking tools, translation tools, tricks to find journals and a technique for finding ideas to deal with the challenges. From the results, it found that more internal challenges were faced by EFL students for a total of nine challenges in students with the highest scores, and a total of 16 challenges in students with the lowest scores. While in the external challenges, there are four challenges in students with the highest scores and five in students with the lowest scores. It also shows that students with the lowest scores faced more challenges than students with the highest scores.

Keywords: academic writing, students’ challenges, students’ strategies, research proposal