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This study concerns the perceptions of non-English major students on the use of TOEFL Prediction test scores as a requirement prior to their graduation. The study used a survey disseminated to the students of several public and private universities in the province of Aceh, Indonesia. Data were provided by 197 respondents of diverse undergraduate majors. The findings revealed that most students had positive opinions regarding the graduation policy with the TOEFL Prediction test. However, their views differed when asked if taking the test would improve their language proficiency. Implications include improvement in EFL curriculum, preparation for the TOEFL test, and future research focusing on the impact of TOEFL on graduates and stakeholders.

This case study investigates variability in the use of inflectional markings by two Indonesian L2 learners of English. It aims to see whether the verbal omission of particular morphemes was related to the absence of specific morphemes in the learners' first language or whether they already have morphosyntactic knowledge but fail to overtly mark morphological inflections. Spontaneous production data were collected longitudinally from two subjects through audio-taping them in naturalistic conversations with both native and non-native English-speaking interlocutors. Audio data were transcribed to analyze morphological development. The findings of the study indicate that the subjects frequently omit inflections for agreement marking and copula/auxiliary verbs. It has also been found that they over-generate be forms in utterances where progressive forms do not exist.

The aim of the study is to investigate the obstacles English Education students of Universitas Syiah Kuala face when doing their microteaching practice. A descriptive qualitative study was undertaken by observing and interviewing students in order to acquire the needed data in this study. The results of the study showed that there were six obstacles that English student teachers were faced with in doing microteaching from the opening to the closing section: (1) conveying succinct learning objectives, (2) using spoken language fluently, (3) using written language obviously, (4) assessing student competency, (5) asking several questions before closing the lesson, and (6) conducting what has been learned. Furthermore, the results also showed that two out of ten students in this study were conveying succinct learning objectives, which means this aspect is still one of the problems faced by the EFL students in the course of microteaching. The study also showed that nine of the ten participating students started their lessons by attracting students’ attention; it is concluded that EFL students do not have problems with starting their teaching activities in the course of microteaching.

This study set out to investigate the influence of the direct instruction of strategies on students’ attitudes toward learning reading. While all students in the 2nd semester were trained with the metacognitive strategies, only seventeen students participated in the study and the survey. The attitude survey was administered to the 17 students before the training to establish a baseline for student’s attitudes toward learning reading, as well as after the training to examine whether the strategies had an impact on students’ attitudes toward learning reading. The findings showed that most students had a more positive attitude concerning reading ability after they were trained with direct strategies. The results also revealed that the strategies made them better readers.

This is a study of the grammatical morphology of English, with the research focus on the problems of the past -ed 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 past -ed 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.

To communicate fluently and effortlessly in English is not an easy task for every EFL student. Like many others, Islamic boarding school students tend to experience difficulty in finding the right words and constructing clear sentences to convey their thoughts. As an alternative, Communication Strategies (CSs) can be applied in the classroom to overcome this communication problem. This descriptive qualitative research intended to analyze the types of CSs used by the Islamic boarding school EFL students in small group discussion as well as their reasons for using the dominant type of CSs. The participants were eleventh-grade students at Ruhul Islam Anak Bangsa Islamic Boarding School. 10 students (N=10) were purposively chosen. The data were collected through observation and interview and then qualitatively analyzed based on Dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy of CSs. The results show that the students employed all 12 types of the CSs. However, the most frequent strategy was the use of fillers and hesitation devices. Inadequate vocabulary knowledge was the main reason why students used fillers. Nervousness and content difficulty also motivated CS use.

This research aims to seek cultural elements portrayed in one of the prominent Indonesian textbooks used at junior high school levels. An Indonesian textbook named Pathway to English (ELT textbook expanding circle countries) was selected and analyzed. The analysis was based on Chao (2011). The results showed the representation of all types of cultural elements in the text book; source culture, target culture, international culture, intercultural interaction, and universality across cultures were all present in this textbook. Also, the source culture was the most dominant cultural element; it implies that Indonesian culture plays a big part in the cultural content of English text books. Java and Bali provinces were dominant Indonesian cultures in the textbook. The limitation of this study is that the textbook is for first-graders of junior high school (i.e., seventh grade), thus the exposure to the target and international cultures is limited.

This paper aimed at investigating teachers’ efforts in building EFL students’ motivation in learning English at one of the junior high schools in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. This study employed descriptive qualitative research, where data were collected from two English teachers by conducting a semi-structured detailed interview, and from 10 students who excel in English through open-ended questionnaires. The second language teaching practice motivational framework proposed by Dörnyei (2001) was used in analyzing the data. These strategies include creating the basic motivational conditions, generating initial motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation, and encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. The results indicated that teachers were among the sources of the students’ motivation for learning English. As a facilitator in teaching, the teacher’s efforts had opened the students’ mindset about the importance of English for their studies and future. The teachers’ efforts in motivating the students were related to the construct of encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. Among the motivation strategies which attracted the students most was when senior students who succeeded in English were invited to class to encourage and learn with them. Based on the students’ responses, this further boosted their efforts to learn in class so that they, too, could become successful.