Teaching writing to junior high school students: A focus on challenges and solutions

Writing has been considered as a highly demanding skill and a complex recursive process involving multifaceted knowledge (e.g. grammar, genre, vocabulary and metacognitive competencies). Hence, it has been documented in miscellaneous studies in the past few decades. However, the issue of challenges and solutions to teaching English writing to junior high school students remains under-researched. Therefore, this study addressed this issue, notably in Indonesian EFL context. Three English teachers from a junior high school in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia were recruited as the participants. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed with Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). On the one hand, the findings reported that there were seven challenges encountered by teachers when teaching English writing, namely (1) students' poor English grammatical competence, (2) students' incapability of developing ideas for English writing, (3) students' inadequate English vocabulary knowledge, (4) students' demotivation to learn English writing, (5) insufficient time management to teach English writing, (6) limited sources of English writing materials and (7) limited facilities to teach English writing. On the other hand, teachers promoted several solutions to cope with such challenges, namely (1) explicit teaching English vocabulary, (2) collaborative English writing activities, and (3) exercises of English writing. Pedagogically speaking, this study offers practical contributions for the TESOL practitioners to teach English writing effectively to junior high school students, particularly in the Indonesian EFL landscape.