Having observed the writing class and EFL students" essays in previous semester, the researchers found that their essay were in poor quality. This situation portrays the fact that writing is a complex skill to learn in English language acquisition. This study is aimed to investigate the difficulties faced by EFL students in essay writing as well as exploring their learning needs to have better quality of English composition. Examining essays and administering open-ended questionnaires were done to 33 students of English Department at Widya Gama Mahakam University, Indonesia, to find students" difficulties in broad-spectrum. In addition, semi-structured interview to the writing lecturer was also conducted to dig his perception related to challenging matters about teaching essay writing. The findings showed that students have major difficulties in grammatical, cohesion and coherence terms. Moreover, minor aspects also had been revealed regarding to students" writing, namely paragraph organization, dictions, and vocabulary misspelling. Considering its complexity in accomplishing essay writing task, the students expected more intense guidance from the lecturer, such as continuous consultation regarding to the lecturer"s feedback in their essay draft. The interview result confirmed this issue. The lecturer admitted that limited time and big number of students in one class became his great barriers to improve the quality of the students" essay. These facts drive new challenges for the writing lecturer in two ways; 1) the lecturer should guide students properly by using step-by-step procedures so that the students feel comfortable in writing the essay, and 2) explicit explanation related to the revision given is needed. It is important to note that this issue demands a new and effective teaching essay writing strategy to achieve fruitful outcomes of teaching and learning process especially in essay writing context.

<p> This study purposed to gain the difference between students’ academic performance in writing skills who are taught by using indirect written correction and those do not. The research design used quasi-experimental design because this study did not do randomization. In this experimental design, the researcher used two classes to become the subject. One class was experimental class which treated by using indirect correction technique while the other class was control class which was not treated by using indirect correction technique. The subject of this study was seven grade in MTs Pontren Surya Buana Malang.; 7C became control group and 7D was became experimental group. Both of groups consisted 24 students. Both of groups consisted 35 students. This data used t-test to find the significant difference of both groups.           The result was difference between two groups 17, 16 and the std. deviation difference is 0, 92.  T-test count =18, 591 &gt; t- table =1, 679 and p-value 0.000&lt; α (0, 05). It applied that the technique was effective. The conclusion is indirect correction technique is effective to teach writing skills. Then, it is suggested to the teacher to apply or implement a different writing technique to practice and improve the students’ writing, especially by using corrective feedback that have been practiced before. The next researchers can use another technique in their research such as direct corrective feedback because this research uses indirect corrective feedback to improve writing skills</p>