INVESTIGATING THE CHALLENGES ENCOUNTERED BY NON-ENGLISH STUDENTS IN THE STRUCTURE AND WRITTEN EXPRESSION SECTION OF TOEFL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20414/jtq.v23i1.14749Keywords:
English Proficiency Test, Challenges, Non-English Students, SWE Section, TOEFLAbstract
TOEFL has become a mandatory test for the graduation requirement for Indonesians students in higher learning institutions, it is a language proficiency test aiming to measure English Language proficiency of the test takers. Hence, this study aimed to navigate the non-English students’ ability in dealing with SWE Section of TOEFL; types of items in SWE section that cause the difficulties; as well as the factors that cause the difficulties faced by non-English students. Utilising a survey study, 21 students were chosen through cluster random sampling technique. The data were collected using testing and questionnaire. The test result was converted into the TOEFL conversion table meanwhile the questionnaire was analyzed manually. The findings revealed that the ability of the non-English students were in lower-intermediate with limited user with 386 as their overall scores in the SWE section of TOEFL; there were 18 types of items in SWE Section of TOEFL contributing to the difficulties for the non-English students related to the use of nouns, pronouns, tenses, adjectives, adverbs, comparatives, conditional sentence, S-V agreement, adjective clause, conjunctions, noun phrase, causative, prepositions, word choices, compound sentences, embedded question, parallel structure and direct object; and the factors contributing to the difficulties were pertaining to the internal and the external factors, such as the difficulties occur because of the low confidence level of the non-English students in using Grammar and their lack of educational background about Grammar, as well as their perspective about SWE Section of TOEFL, e.g. the time allocated to SWE TOEFL test is not sufficient for them, their perspective about SWE Section of TOEFL is more difficult than other sections, and Written Expression items are more difficult to answer.
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