JOALL (Journal of Applied Linguistics and Literature)

Ecolinguistic study of the IKN discourse in global and national news media

2025-12-08T00:25:56+00:00

This study aims to examine how news outlets construct discourse about Indonesia’s new capital (IKN) in North Penajam Paser, East Kalimantan. The researchers employed Stibbe's (2015) ecolinguistic framework. The problem lies in the contrasting views between stakeholders and indigenous communities of East Kalimantan toward such development. Therefore, this study bridges the gap by discovering how both parties defend their stances: “Is IKN an ideal project or not?” This study adopted a textual analysis technique, with relevant data collected from Al Jazeera, CNN, and Tempo.co between January 18, 2022, and March 19, 2025. The researchers used a note-taking technique and mapped each text onto Stibbe's (2015) ecolinguistic stories of ideology, framing, evaluation, and identity. Furthermore, the researchers classified each text based on modal verbs such as “should,” “must,” and “will,” adjectives such as “good” or “bad,” and phrasal nouns such as “environmental activists.” The results show that the story of evaluation appears more frequently, accentuating people’s negative responses, evidenced by terms such as “haunting,” “miserable lives,” and “shrinking.” The researchers affirm that the news media tend to report narratives of a conflict between neoliberal agendas (the government) and ecological sustainability (indigenous tribes of East Kalimantan).

EFL First-Year Students’ Writing Challenges and Strategies in the Transition from High School to University Writing

2025-10-07T07:39:43+00:00

Writing at the university level presents significant challenges for EFL students. Although many studies have investigated EFL students’ academic writing challenges, few have focused specifically on paragraph writing, the foundational stage of academic writing development among first-year university students, particularly those transitioning from high school to university writing. Addressing this gap, this present study investigates students’ writing challenges, strategies, and their perceptions of differences and feedback. A total of 315 first-year Indonesian EFL students enrolled in the English study programs were selected through convenience sampling to complete a Likert-scale questionnaire adapted from the ESLP 82 Questionnaire. The findings reveal idea organization as the most prominent difficulty (M = 4.4; 83.5% agree), followed by issues of grammar and sentence structures (M = 4.3; 78.9% agree). Whereas, 85,7% students answered that university writing is more complex than high school writing activities, because it is needed a higher level of critical thinking, as 88,2% students acknowledged. As many as 80.8% students like to discuss with their teachers about their writing difficulties, and 89.5% prefer to use digital tools such as Grammarly and ChatGPT. At about 89,4% students stated that teacher feedback on grammar was considered helpful, but students rarely got peer feedback. These findings emphasize the urgent need for structured writing support that focuses on idea organization, grammar, vocabulary enhancement, and opportunities for peer interaction. To explore effective pedagogical interventions and the evolving role of digital tools in supporting academic writing development, further studies are highly recommended.

Counter-claiming and indicating gaps in English RAIs in the Indonesian context

2025-12-15T13:50:47+00:00

Genre of research article introductions (RAIs) have received increasing numbers of scholarly research worldwide, including in the Indonesian context, and establishing a niche has been previously addressed in the literature. However, studies to justify current research in Indonesian contexts are still limited, particularly those published in accredited Sinta journals, while understanding how to establish a niche is pivotal to provide understanding and awareness to students and novice authors. This study aims to address this need by analyzing counter-claiming and indicating a gap to establish a niche in 100 English RAIs written by Indonesian authors in the discipline of language education published in Sinta 2-accredited journals, and how authors linguistically realize these two communicative steps. It used genre-based analysis, more specifically, the Move 2 Establishing a niche of create research space (CARS) model as an analytical framework. The results revealed that an evolving genre has occurred in this study. Indonesian authors employed counter-claiming and indicated a gap for establishing a niche. However, while counter-claiming is optional, indicating a gap is conventional in this study. To realize these two steps, the authors employed linguistic strategies to justify their current research areas. These results imply that genre in English RAIs in the present study may become future examples and as a starting point for evolving genre. The reason behind these findings are discussed further in the discussion section.

Verbal-visual evaluation in disaster reporting: Attitudinal analyses of hard news in The Jakarta Post

2025-12-25T01:24:21+00:00

Disaster news helps the public understand crisis events and is often presented as factual and objective because it is classified as hard news. However, disaster reports still contain evaluative elements that shape how events and social actors are perceived. These evaluations are expressed through both language and news photographs. This study examines how such evaluations are constructed in disaster reports from The Jakarta Post through the interaction between written texts and accompanying news photographs. The study draws on Appraisal Theory, as proposed by White and Martin within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It analyses attitude resources in hard news reporting, realised through verbal and visual modes, and their intersemiotic relations. The data consist of eleven hard news articles, purposively selected 2024 that meet specific inclusion criteria. Both verbal and visual elements were analysed qualitatively, supported by simple frequency counts to identify dominant patterns. The findings show 185 attitude instances distributed across three types. Negative appreciation is the most common (47%), followed by negative affect (24%). These are mainly used to show physical damage, loss, and human suffering. In contrast, positive judgment makes up 29% of the data and is used to present institutions, such as government agencies and rescue teams, as responsible and effective. News photographs support these meanings by showing destruction, danger, and humanitarian action. Across text and images, repetition and extension strengthen evaluative meanings and create a consistent viewpoint. The study shows that disaster reporting is evaluative and multimodal. Therefore, it highlights the need for critical multimodal literacy to understand how meaning is constructed through language and images.

Fostering Self-Regulated Learning (SRL): Higher education students’ insights on formative online reflective journals

2025-10-08T09:43:10+00:00

Journaling serves as a documented account of the thoughts and emotions experienced in daily life. This term has also been analyzed in the educational context, especially in language learning. In addition, online reflective journals have been the subject of multiple studies, but these studies have all involved teachers rather than students. Thus, the effect of formative online reflective journals on SRL among college students is investigated in this research. The data was evaluated using central tendency measurement after fifty-two students were asked to provide quantitative data on their perspectives on using reflective journals. Subsequently, five students were interviewed using a semi-structured interview to gather additional qualitative data. Additionally, document analysis was used in this investigation. The results show that students' SRL abilities may be significantly improved by using online reflective journals, which contribute to students' motivation, self-awareness, and metacognition. During this research process, educator administration, an appropriate method and the empowering of student learning environment are elements that affects reflective journals being active properly. The results of this study are anticipated to offer important insights on the use and efficacy formative online reflective journals, as one intervention tool for SRL among higher education students in a well-established university setting. More precisely, the outcomes guide us on responding to this research question: What are the key components of formative online reflective journals that support the development of self-regulated learning (SRL) among higher education students?

The Relationship between ChatGPT reliance, critical use, and critical reading skills among Indonesian undergraduate students

2026-01-11T15:17:50+00:00

The increasingly frequent use of ChatGPT in higher education raises questions about its impact on how students critically read a range of academic texts. However, empirical evidence examining the relationship between the dependence and critical use of ChatGPT and college students' critical reading ability is limited. Three aspects were investigated in this study: students' dependence on ChatGPT, their critical use of ChatGPT, and how these relate to students' critical reading skills. This study aimed to examine university students, specifically 79 students at a public university in Indonesia. Students were given a critical reading test, which was in the form of an essay, and there was also a questionnaire to measure students' dependency and critical use of ChatGPT. The results were descriptive, showing that the students' level of ChatGPT dependency was moderate (mean = 3.10) and their level of critical use was quite good (mean = 3.87). For critical reading scores, results ranged from 31.25 to 92.19, with an average in the moderate category. The results of multiple linear regression show that neither critical use nor dependence on ChatGPT has a statistically significant relationship with students’ critical reading skills (β = 0.164, p = 0.151; β = −0.071, p = 0.530). Overall, these results indicate that students' engagement with ChatGPT has not had a clear or significant effect on their critical reading performance. Further research is needed to confirm these findings. These findings indicate that reliance on AI and critical use of ChatGPT alone may not be sufficient to influence students' critical reading abilities, suggesting that other factors may also play a role. Therefore, future research should involve a more diverse population and develop more specific, contextually relevant instruments, particularly those linking ChatGPT use to critical reading skills, while also considering other mediating variables.