Exploring EFL Undergraduate Student’s Experience on Thesis Writing: A Biographical Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Writing is one of the productive English skills that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Indonesia must acquire for written communication and academic writing. The use of suitable language learning strategies becomes an important consideration to overcome the challenges faced by students. Thesis writing, as one part of academic writing, does not only result in a written product but also contributes to the students’ new knowledge. Under the theory of socio-cultural in cognitive development, this research is aimed at exploring EFL undergraduate students’ experiences with the process of thesis writing and discovering how EFL undergraduate students construct new understandings about the research topic and the process of thesis writing. This research employed biographical narrative inquiry. Interview transcripts and multimodal text are the data in this study that are analyzed using thematic analysis. The result shows that the participant used four types of language learning strategies, namely cognitive, social, metacognitive, and affective, to solve the writing challenges that consist of difficulties in writing aspects, choosing appropriate theories, and presenting data. In terms of new knowledge construction, the participant finally performed the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) autonomously and resulted in development of new understandings in academic writing, politeness strategy, critical thinking, and self-correction skills.