JOALL (Journal of Applied Linguistics and Literature)

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

Kurniawan Agus Fiqih Budiman Budiman — 2026-01-08

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

Ana Ahsana El Sulukiyyah — 2026-01-15

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

Warsidi Warsidi — 2026-01-17

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.