Challenges, Strategies, and Digital Media Use in Writing Research Articles: A Study of EFL Postgraduate Students

Abstract

Many universities in Indonesia require their students to conduct research article writing and publish it in reputable journal. Although, writing a research article in English is challenging, however, students must have an effective strategy to solve those challenges. In addition, the appearance of digital media might be very useful for students to conduct writing scientific research. This study aims to identify the challenges faced by four EFL postgraduate students while writing the research article and to explore the strategies and digital media used by them. An in-depth interview through narrative inquiry approach was employed to collect the data from the participants’ experiences. The findings of this study show that the participants find some challenges in writing a research article, there is the lack of language proficiency, the difficulty in finding the relevant respondents and references, and time management. However, it can be solved by strategies, such as, cognitive strategy, metacognitive strategy, social strategy, and affective strategy, and digital media used by them. This study might be used to provide additional information relating to the strategy and digital media to support research.