This descriptive qualitative study was aimed at discovering English language teachers’ challenges in teaching TOEFL preparation for senior high school students. The data were collected by using an in-depth interview with six experienced and qualified English language teachers teaching TOEFL in the three-state and private senior high schools in Aceh province, Indonesia. Open, axial, and selective coding techniques were used to analyze the data from in-depth interviews. The results show that teachers faced some challenges during teaching TOEFL preparation for senior high school students including students’ different language proficiency, their lack of vocabulary mastery, their fatigue, their passive attitude, class size, and time limitation. The findings recommend the further idea to organize a more organized preparation TOEFL program for high school students that can be integrated into the existing curriculum, and thus it will no longer be viewed merely as an extracurricular program.

In this study, we analyzed the effects of speaking anxiety of Acehnese students in English learning classroom by looking at the causes of students’ speaking anxiety and their strategies in coping with it. The researchers used purposive sampling to select the participants of this research. Ten respondents from sophomore students of Department of the English Education at Teacher Training Faculty of Ar-Raniry State Islamic University in Aceh, Indonesia were selected by identifying their answers of Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety questionnaires developed by Horwitz et al. (1986). To have in-depth information on the subject matter, a semi-structured interview was employed. The results of this research showed that speaking anxiety caused some negative effects to Acehnese students’ speaking ability, which could be observed through the difficulties in constructing sentences and expressing the idea when they spoke in the target language. Low self-confidence, lack of competency, and being afraid of making mistakes were some of the factors considered as the major causes of speaking anxiety that could debilitate students’ classroom participation.

This study reports the thematic progression of the EFL learner- produced texts in Acehnese context. The study employed qualitative method focusing on the content analysis. The content analysis technique was incorporated to analyse the corpora of 40 learner-produced texts. The findings of the study highlight both prevalent and problematic thematic progression patterns in the students’ texts. The EFL learners are inclined to use the constant theme pattern with less consistency of accuracy in longer paragraphs. With regard to the problematic patterns, the students tend to find difficulties in developing the ideas throughout the texts. This is shown through the emergence of many brand new themes and empty rhemes which result in incohesive and incoherent texts. The overall findings suggest that introducing the theme- rheme pattern concept to the students in English writing classes can be useful for improving the cohesion of the EFL students’ writings.

This research was conducted to analyze the student’s critical thinking in writing responses on Nicenet Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA) based on Anderson and Krathwohl theory. It is a qualitative research with content analysis method. The subject of this research was the document of students’ responses in online class Nicenet ICA in Communication Management subject that was conducted in semester seven in 2014, batch 2010 and 2011 in the Department of English Language Education of UIN Ar-Raniry Banda Aceh. The result of this study suggested that participating in Nicenet ICA gave positive effects on students in increasing their critical thinking skill in writing. This can be seen through the final result that 92.30% of those documents represent the critical thinking ability in the highest level while the rest were in the medium. It can be inferred from this study that the use of Nicenet as a media of learning can promote and develop the students’ critical thinking skill.

This study explores and compares the portrayal of women in the news reporting of crimes of sexual violence against women between two newspapers from different cultures, the Jakarta Post and the Guardian. The Jakarta Post is an English quality newspaper published in Indonesia, and the Guardian is a quality broadsheet from Great Britain. To explore the representation of women, this study accounts the portrayal of men as well since the two entities are strongly inter-related. The analytical tool used in this study is naming analysis of social actors, which is a part of critical discourse analysis. This analysis is aimed at probing the representation through the choice of lexical items in representing the main news actors. The findings of the analysis indicate that the choices of the naming categories used by both newspapers are different. The Jakarta Post mostly functionalises both the victims and the perpetrators in terms of their legal status in the criminal cases. This suggests that the broadsheet tends to view them as part of the legal processes instead of as people. The Guardian typically classifies the victims in terms of their age and gender and refers to the perpetrators with their surnames instead of as parts of the criminal cases. The Guardian’s tendency to represent both perpetrators and victims as people instead of parts of legal processes indicates that the paper is attempting to focus the reports more on the crimes themselves rather than the participants involved in the cases.

This study aims at finding empirical evidence of the most common types of grammatical errors and sources of errors in recount texts written by the first-year students of SMAS Babul Maghfirah, Aceh Besar. The subject of the study was a collection of students’ personal writing documents of recount texts about their lives experience. The students’ recount texts were analyzed by referring to Betty S. Azar classification and Richard’s theory on sources of errors. The findings showed that the total number of error is 436. Two frequent types of grammatical errors were Verb Tense and Word Choice. The major sources of error were Intralingual Error, Interference Error and Developmental Error respectively. Furthermore, the findings suggest that it is necessary for EFL teachers to apply appropriate techniques and strategies in teaching recount texts, which focus on past tense and language features of the text in order to reduce the possible errors to be made by the students.

Learning can take place in school, course, and community. There are some differences of teaching at school and course, such as teaching methods used. It is one of the most important elements in teaching. Teaching method is used to help the learners to gain the knowledge and help them to achieve their learning targets. Therefore, this research focused on teaching methods that were used by English Education Department students in UIN Ar-Raniry in teaching grammar at English courses. The purposes of this research were to identify which methods were used in teaching grammar at courses and to describe the teaching techniques that were applied in classroom. The participants were five English Education students who have been teaching English at English courses. They were selected using purposive sampling with a consideration that they have completed Teaching Method, Micro Teaching, and Teaching Practice (PPL) subjects in their previous semesters. This research was conducted by using qualitative descriptive and two techniques for collecting data namely observation and interview. Based on the research findings, writer found that all of the selected teachers used Grammar Translation Method (GTM) as the main teaching method which was sometimes combined with some techniques of other methods such as Direct Method, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), and Bilingual Method.