Along with the growing practice of teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in non-English departments of tertiary education, it is essential to investigate the challenges faced by ESP teachers. It can be a basis for proposing policies for the improvement of ESP practice. This study was driven by the fact that ESP classes in non-English departments are allocated limited credit hours, and the teachers are generally General English teachers with no experience and training in teaching ESP. Thus, this study attempted to investigate the fundamental challenges faced by ESP teachers in one state and four private higher education institutions. The data of this qualitative study were obtained through interviews with five ESP teachers. The interview questions were mainly concerned with the knowledgeability and competence in teaching related to subject-specific contexts, adequacy of ESP training, needs analysis, and classroom condition. The findings reveal that the evident challenges encountered by ESP teachers were: lacking knowledge on students’ field of study, lacking of ESP training, lacking of proper needs analysis, large classes, and various learners’ English competencies. The findings of this study suggest that policymakers (stakeholders) should pay more attention to the practice of ESP teaching, especially in non-English departments, by reforming policy in order to minimize the problems faced by ESP teachers and to improve the practice of ESP teaching.

Research articles have been considered as the primary media of knowledge production. Nevertheless, for some undergraduate students, writing a research article can be a challenging task since they need to be aware of its rhetorical styles. Even though previous studies have been conducted to reveal the rhetorical styles of scientific papers, yet tend to focus more on research articles obtained from well-established journals. Hence, this study aims to reveal the rhetorical styles and draw the rhetoric pattern from the introduction section of 73 research articles written by the undergraduate students of English Language Education (ELE) at a state university in Yogyakarta. This is a qualitative investigation whose data were collected by random sampling technique and went through Safnil’s (2013) four analysis stages. As the primary framework for analysis, the modified CARS (Create a Research Space) model (Swales Feak, 2004) was adopted. The results show that Step 2: Making topic generalization in Move 1 and Step 1B: Indicating a gap in Move 2 are the obligatory steps in writing the introduction section. Nevertheless, the results reveal that mostly undergraduate research papers lack 1 step in Move 1, 2 steps in Move 2, and 3 steps in Move 3. The omission of steps in the CARS model by these student-authors seems to happen due to two major factors, namely the scarcity of control over the writing process and linguistic resources, hence suggesting pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.

Frequent changes of Indonesian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) national curriculum have transformed EFL teachers’ role from that of serving merely as curriculum transmitters into curriculum adapters. Accordingly, this study intended to explore how a group of Indonesian EFL teachers conceptualize content and course organization as guided by the Indonesian national EFL curriculum. A qualitative multiple-case study (Miles, Huberman, Saldana, 2014; Stake, 2006; Yin, 2014) was employed to collect and analyze data. Purposive within- and cross-case sampling techniques were used to select six EFL teachers; three experienced and three inexperienced teachers of public junior high schools in the Special Territory of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Sources of data included instructional curriculum design assessments and pre-lesson semi-structured interviews. Analysis of the data revealed these teachers’ content conceptualization focuses on blending texts and English language skills that characterize the implementation of text-based teaching in the Indonesian EFL context. Results of the data analysis for course organization showed teachers’ insufficient understanding on the selected organizing principles for teaching texts. Such understanding led to inconsistency between theory and practice. The findings of the study shed light on a misconception about implementing text-based teaching. Implications of the study address the need to equip Indonesian EFL teachers with both the conceptual and practical knowledge of implementing the methodology of text-based teaching.

This study aimed to assess pre-service teachers’ knowledge base of teaching and the extent they perceive and reflect its implementation in a microteaching course. Employing mixed-methods design, the study involved pre-service teachers in a state university in Special Territory of Yogyakarta. The quantitative data were collected from a test on the pre-service teachers’ understanding of teacher knowledge base of teaching and a survey of their perceptions towards the implementation of teacher knowledge base of teaching in their microteaching practices. The qualitative data were gathered from the pre-service teachers’ reflections. The findings showed that despite the overall good test score average of the pre-service teachers’ knowledge base of teaching and the generally positive self-rating perceptions, the pre-service teachers’ limited and descriptive reflections did not sufficiently depict their actual implementation of teacher knowledge base of teaching in their microteaching practices.

This study aimed to construct a genre-based teaching (GBT) model for accommodating the Indonesian EFL curriculum. Anchored in two current GBT cycles developed by Derewianka and Jones (2016) and Chappell (in preparation), a modified GBT cycle and the following instructional design model were constructed. This design-based study conducted its first two stages: the analysis of practical problems and the development of solutions based on the existing knowledge. The practical problem analysis was executed through four exploratory studies of the analyses of instructional documents, open-ended reflective questions, English textbooks, and literature. The exploratory studies reveal context-specific problems of GBT implementation which suggest the need for the provision of a GBT model to guide the enactment of teachers’ GBT practices. The development of solutions was achieved by carefully modifying a GBT cycle informed by principled eclecticism and designing a series of instructional steps which offer three strands for teaching texts and systematic ways for integrating the mandated contents of the Indonesian EFL curriculum. The constructed GBT model is to provide a systematic instructional organization for teaching texts, developing English language skills, and incorporating varied mandated instructional contents of the Indonesian EFL curriculum and to illustrate a construction process of a GBT model to accommodate varied contents of EFL curriculum.