The Teaching of EFL Writing in Indonesia

Writing is one of the most important aspects in English language acquisition. Teaching writing has its own challenges since there are some steps and requirements that teachers should prepare to undertake in the classroom. This article is aimed to discuss teaching and learning writing in the classroom based on theoretical conceptualisation. In addition, curriculum of teaching writing will be another important factor to consider as well as research and practice in teaching writing. Based on comparison to many theoretical concepts from various researchers, it shows that most of Indonesian students still struggle to figure out their problems of grammatical area. The biggest challenge is derived from the difference in cultural backgrounds between the students’ mother tongue and English, so it is possible to know the production of their writing does not ‘sound’ well in appropriate culture of English. Several problems also occur when the teachers have big classes to teach and the result of teaching writing to the students may be defeated. In this case, time also being a big challenge for the teachers to have the students’ writing improve because to accomplish a good composition in English, it needs complex steps such as brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, and editing. However, new techniques in teaching writing are needed to develop the students’ writing outcomes.


A. Introduction
Before mastering English writing skill, it is necessary to understand the goal of writing, especially writing instructions given in the classrooms by teachers.Bartholomae (1996) says that, "…the goal of writing instruction might be to teach an act of criticism that would enable a writer to interrogate his or her own text in relationship to the problem of writing and the problem of disciplinary knowledge".In this case, by paying attention to the connection between two key terms proposed by Bartholomae (1996) which are "writing" and "disciplinary knowledge", Sukandi holds that it could be a method to design writing assignment for students.Moreover, he also adds that it is like teaching Cross Culture Understanding that the students should learn how to write well by using another's point of view so that they can express and expand their own thought by relying on things they have learned.
Moreover, even though writing is an essential skill to acquire by students, they still have difficulties in mastering it.In this case, it is quite difficult to master writing, especially for EFL students in Indonesia, since there are some differences between Bahasa and English such as structural and grammatical terms and styles.In addition, the students need an ability to translate or transform the meaning from Bahasa to English context in order not to make the result of the writing awkward, and to enable the text make sense when it is read by people especially native speakers.
In addition to the above fact about English writing mastery, it is quite interesting to discuss other facts that can influence the students' writing, one of them is getting from the result of ignoring the seriousness of teaching writing proficiency in the early age.In this case, White & Hall (2014) point out in their research that "writing is often neglected in the early grades, even though data consistently show that many students struggle in this area".As a concequence, writing becomes a complex task for the students to complete, even for college students.This is because writing involves great integrated activities and processes such as cognitive effort, attentional control, and self-regulation to make it become coherent and meaningful (Graham & Harris, 2003).
In teaching writing to EFL students, we as teachers cannot always use the writing instruction such as asking the students to write one or two paragraphs regarding a certain topic.Lestari (2008) says that "The stereotype pattern of teaching writing is that the teacher gives a topic and the students write a paper on it".Teaching writing is more than that traditional activity.The teacher cannot just collect the students' writing and give a mark on it; in so doing, he neglects the most important aspect, which is the process.In responding to the students' writing, the teacher tends to correct the grammatical structures and tries to minimize mistakes in terms of forms of language (Leki, 1994).That is why the teacher nowadays often finds in students' writing that they cannot understand what is the message that the students are trying to convey is.This phenomenon seemingly happens because the students write unnaturally and merely to avoid grammatical mistakes.
In this case, the teacher should understand that writing includes the activities of practicing, having guidance and also feedback from the teacher.What happens in the world of teaching writing is that the teacher asks the students to complete the writing in one meeting.That reason can be another factor that influences the result of the students' writing because the students have to finish their task in a short period of time.Moreover, the same case happens in midterm and final tests where the students sit in the classrooms to do these tests since they are sort of formal examinations held by the faculty (Leki, 1994).Again, this kind of fact has its role in determining the students' writing production.This is what is called "the traditional one-off writing task"; that is a kind of test which requires the students to do an exam in a short time without considering the process of writing such as searching a topic, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading (Gibbons, 2002).Gibbons also adds that those kinds of activities included in the process can shape the students critical thinking towards the topic and the content.
In line with Gibbons, Wang (2015) also mentions the importance of paying attention to the process of writing that the students should continuously rewrite, revise, and edit their writing in order to improve it.. Unfortunately those necessary activities are very hard to do by the teachers, especially in big classes because the teacher should check and assess the students' work individually.Furthermore, this factor means that the teacher cannot hold a kind of essay consultation regarding the notes written by him, so probably the students do not have enough time to ask for clarification from the revision made by the teacher in their writing.

B. Theoretical Outlook of Teaching and Learning of Writing
Language can be divided into two skills; receptive and productive.In receptive skills which are listening and reading, the students do not have to deal with the production of the language itself, especially in terms of oral.On the contrary, in productive skills, which are speaking and writing, the students should produce the language in terms of spoken and written to communicate (Ozdemir & Aydin, 2015).
Writing is not merely intended to describe any topic without purposes.In this case, writing is a progressive activity.Oshima & Hogue (1997) explain that progressiveness in writing is when we want to start the first step to write about a certain topic, actually we have already known what we are going to write and how we explore it.After that, we read over our writing, then we will do some corrections and changes.In short, in order to have better writing, we should never stop only in one step.This is what the most college students face in their writing tasks such as essays and final projects which become the requirement for them to finish their study in a university.
We know that English is taught in Indonesia from Elementary to University level.There are four basic language skills: writing, speaking, listening, and reading.In this case, writing becomes one of the most important aspects of the language skills because the students are helped to expand the other language skills through the teaching of writing skill by the teacher (Dantes, 2013).In line with above theory, Sattayatham & Ratanapinyowong (2008) explain in more detail that there are several ways which students can learn from writing, such as the learning of idioms, grammatical structures, and vocabulary.To do the process of writing, the students have to struggle in terms of how to put idea or argument on a paper, so they will find their needs of using the correct and appropriate words which are relevant to the context.
Hence, it is important to look at the process of writing.As Mason & Washington (1992) state that "to write is to do many things at once".It is because the process of writing has correlation between writing activity and other aspects of language.In the process of writing, usually the students need to explore ideas by reading articles or books and having a discussion with a friend as they practice their speaking and reading at the same time.In other words, reading is closely related to the process of writing (Adams, 1990).
To the next perspective of the process in teaching and learning writing, the progress of the students should be highlighted.Grave (1983) and NAEP (1999) point out that there is a sequence of teaching letters, words, grammar, paragraph types, and extended genres.Those writing forms are very essential that the teacher should pay attention to them when he/she wants to teach the students, especially as it is an important concern by the students to seriously learn.In addition, the elements above are quite relevant to writing skills that the students need to master such as the ability of forming letters, writing sentences grammatically, and organizing arguments (Grave, 1983).
Furthermore, the teacher should understand that the process of teaching and learning process in writing needs to be assessed individually among students so that the teacher will be able to know the students learning development in writing.In this case, Weigle (2002) the individual parts of writing that engage interactions among four components: working memory, motivation and affect, cognitive processes and longterm memory.In addition, Strömquist (2007) has different ideas that the students must pass the different phases in writing such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising.In process-oriented writing, it is considered to be an effective way for the students to have better mastery of writing by using several writing and revising activities or what some call 'drafting in multiple times' before going through the final product of their writing.That is why the process of teaching and learning writing needs much time for the teacher to make the students understand regarding the theory of writing and also a lot of time for students to practice writing.Sukandi (2013) tries to stress out what the teacher must do if he or she wants to have the students' writing developed.First of all, the students must pay attention on the topic given in writing.In this part, the students need to free their idea or argument in writing, so it will make the writing belong to them.Usually, we are as the teacher feel that it is our responsibility to criticize the inapropriate content of our students' writing, but sometimes we are not aware of checking too much on grammatical aspect.
Above all, the most important aspect among those various theories of teaching and learning process of writing is the existence of feedback.It needs a good cooperation from both sides, the teacher and the student, where the student need to ask questions for things they are confused about and do what the teacher asks them to do.In line with what the students should do, the teacher also has to make sure that he or she gives a precious feedback to the students' compositions (Graham, 2003).In addition to the importance of giving feedback in teaching, Kroll (2001) explains that there are two aspects which are the most central in writing.The first is writing assignments that the students are asked to do by the teacher.The writing assignment is aimed to make the ability of the students' writing improve.The second is feedback provided by the teacher to the students to make sure they develop.Without feedback in any writing course, the classroom is of no reasonlae use fo the students.Finally, Yusof (2012) also supports that in the process of writing, there are four main stages which are pre-writing (planning), drafting, feedback and revising (editing).
In the middle of 1960s, when writing instructors still used which was called "Traditional Paradigm" to teach the high school and college students, they mostly focused on the essay writing evaluation of the students which included the following steps: 1. Share rules of writing which are the principles of rhetoric and organization 2. Provide a text for discussion and analysis 3. Ask the students to do writing assignment following by an outline 4. Read and give comment on the students' papers.Again, regarding the process of teaching writing in the classroom, there are other activities that the teacher can do to guide the students' writing such as the following (Finocciaro & Bonomo, 1973): 1. Copy model sentences or dialogues which have been read or spoken.2. Write sentences they have practiced orally 3. Write several sentence patterns 4. Change sentences into a simple dialogue or short paragraph 5. Write a dialogue by including newly learned structures and vocabulary 6. Answer a series of specific questions from a reading passage.7. Complete a series of sentences 8. Write a summary from a reading passage they have read 9. Write an outline from the material they have read 10.Write a letter 11.Write a short paragraph 12. Write an original ending to a story which they have read 13.Write an ending to a story they have not completed reading 14.Write a simple dialogue using know structures 15.Complete a dialogue when the first few lines have been given 16.Prepare a narrative paragraph from a dialogue 17.Prepare a dialogue from a narrative paragraph 18. Reconstruct a dialogue from one or two words given in each utterance In short, the process of writing by the students is a big deal where the task might not be completed in a short time or in face to face meeting in the classroom.The students need to use the cognitive activity as they should think hardly for the topic and form a title as well as accomplish well-written texts.Moreover, they also should integrate the connection between the language form and its appropriateness to the meaning and cultural context in order to make their writing acceptable and easy to read.Next to the process of writing, it needs help and cooperation from the teacher since he or she is a guide for the students to do the activities of writing.In this case, the teacher should understand that the production of the students' writing needs a quite long time to finish, so he or she will not push the students to complete their writing task in only one meeting without the process of drafting and revising before giving the final markson their papers.

C. The Curriculum of EFL Writing in Indonesia
Many years ago, curriculum of teaching writing did not provide any formal instructions on how to teach writing to the students.In so many cases, the teacher would just provide a topic for students to write such as "My Holiday", "Best Experience in My Life", etc, without giving any guidance on paragraph organization or style of writing.There were no drafting activities for the writing, so the teacher would directly give score to the students' writing without revision.
Moreover, the teaching of writing was more likely on memorizing without applying to practical communication.Kuntjara (2004) says that English tended to be taught mostly on grammar and reading, so that is why Indonesian students who study abroad face difficulties in terms of writing and oral communication.
Curriculum has an important role in teaching and learning practice in the classroom.It usually contains the objective, content, evaluation, media, sources and method of learning where the teacher should prepare before implementing the teaching instructions to the students.It is School-Based Curriculum (SBC) released in 2006 as the regulation from Ministry of National Education in Indonesia No.22 and 23, which required students to be able to write in various kinds of texts.Moreover, the students are not only provided with the activities of writing as exercise but also writing for communication directly which push the teacher to help the students expand their writing ability and integrate it to other language skills such as speaking.
In order to assess the quality of teaching writing in the classroom, the School-Based Curriculum uses a set of evaluation which is stated in the figure below (adapted from Stufflebeam (1983) CIPP Evaluation Model): Above CIPP Model points out four major components including context, input, process, and product where the objectives of the evaluation is to prove as well as improve the program.It is indicated by the description of Stufflebeam (1983) that from the term of "context", there is an occurence of innovation, inputs of innovation, the formative process, and the summative products or what is called the outcomes.
To the more specific explanation about the above four kinds of evaluation, Stufflebeam (1993) describes that on the first evaluation which is context evaluation, its objective is to examine the weakknesses and strengths towards a program, an institution, a person, target population, and direction for improvement.In addition, besides its usage to assess the strengths and weaknesses, it is also useful to examine major problems as well as needs and opportunities in curriculum.The second kind of evaluation is input evaluation which is useful to help a program regarding needed changes.It requires the consideration of challenges or barriers as well as available resources which need to be taken in the program.In other words, this evaluation helps users to find their needs and avoid wasting their time by running the program which is predicted to be failed.The third is process evaluation which is used to give feedback to activities and resources planned in the program.Moreover, the evaluation reviews that planning can be modified and this evaluation provides a record about the implementation of the program as well as the comparison towards previous program.The last is product evaluation which is useful to "measure, interpret, and judge the attainments of a program".This kind of evaluation also should look at the intended and unintended effects as well as positive and negative production of the program.To judge whether the outcomes of the program is success, this evaluation should analyze and gather complete information from many people who are integrated in the program which also compares to the previous program.
Looking back to the previous curriculum in 2004 which is called Competency Based Curriculum (CBC), we can see that EFL teaching writing practice focuses on two terms: process-oriented and product-oriented.Those two points are what CBC proposed that the content of teaching and learning writing activities are "mostly on arranging, or fitting, sentences and paragraphs into prescribed patterns, and later empowered students as the teaching put more emphasis on writing as a communicative ability" (Kurosaki, 2012).In short, this English curriculum points out how important to develop the students' writing skill in secondary level is.
To the next curriculum which is called by School Level Curriculum (KTSP) which was launced in 2006, which is the modification of the CBC where it refers to the design of school curricula which is more authentic and relevant for students as well as fulfilling demands, challenges and needs in every context.The CBC and School Level Curriculum are designed on the regulation of Indonesian government where in the level of achievement is stated in the competence terms.Moreover, the learning process is built by expanding reading and writing activities in more communicative ways.
Focusing to the School Level Curriculum itself, the government had introduced what is called Genre-Based Approach where the types of test (genres) developed into transactional conversations (to get something done), interpersonal conversations (to establish and maintain social relations), short functional texts (announcements, greetings, etc), monologues and essays of certain genres (Budairi, 2015).In line with Budairi, Wells (1987) mentions that junior and high school level are expected to use English for survival purposes by carrying out transactional exchange activities such as reading for fun and dealing with various kinds of texts to get ready for university level.
Unlike the previous curriculum, the latest curriculum which is Kurikulum 2013 has shown its existence eventhough there are so many schools which still use the School Level Curriculum.In Kurikulum 2013, grammar is not emphasized too much but tends to be more focused on the spontaneity of communication in the classroom.In short, the students are required to be accustomed to use language spontaneously (Kemendikbud, 2014).In addition to this curriculum, the students have to be active in participating in the classroom activities while the teacher should act as a facilitator who is given a discretion to involve cultural environment related to any field such as culture, sport, etc to the school syllabus (Ayuningtyas, 2015).
At the present time, the teacher is encouraged to use various models of teaching writing methods to enable the students to improve their writing skill.In this case, the teacher must be active to develop his writing materials and how to deliver them to the students.Regarding this reason, Chase (2002) mentions that collaborating with other teachers can be a good way to improve the curriculum.Through this method, the teacher can consult as well as share his difficulties or other experiences in applying the curriculum to other teachers to complete the shortage of the curriculum each other.
Somehow, there is a new discipline in English Department curriculum learned by Indonesian students namely Composition.It might be a new dynamic concentration in teaching English as well as in teaching writing.In this case, what to be familiar studies in Indonesia is the field of linguistics which developed into courses such as TESOL (Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages) and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language).There are three reasons why Composition programs are important even though they seem to be unavailable in Indonesian Universities, as pointed out by Gilles (2002), they are service mission, literal arts mission, and working collaboratively.Those reasons make the composition programs well deserved to exist in English Department in Indonesia.

D. Research and Practice on EFL Teaching of Writing in Indonesia and its Pedagogical Implications
Teaching writing applied nowadays tends to be more concerned with how to provide the students with explanation of paragraph organization and its definition.The teacher becomes the centre of students' attention in the classroom where the teacher is the one who speaks too much or more active than the students.That condition makes the students less developed and more passive in writing such an issue or topic.That is why Hatmanto ( 2012) conducted a research on the use of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in writing class in Indonesia.In his research, he wanted to describe the process where the Problem-Based Learning was being applied in the class as well as the challenges faced by lecturers in using the PBL Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta especially in English Department.In brief, he found that the students tend to use their first language in groups rather than English.In order to maximize the use of PBL in teaching writing to be more effective, a specific training was suggested to be held.
In line with Hatmanto, Megaiab (2014) also found the challenge in teaching writing as the students' mother tongue has influenced a lot in the production of the students' writing.In this case, the students tend to use their first language to write in English, and as a consequence, they mostly face problems on grammar such as spelling, prepositions, verbs, tenses, singular and plural, and articles.In addition, the students also face difficulties in terms of punctuation and capitalization.Through the research, Megaiab realizes that the problems faced by the students are because writing was not taught in an effective way by the teacher and was not learned maximally by the students because of its lack of portion rather than other aspects in English.
In addition, another researcher who got a challenge in terms of the influence of the students' first language in English composition is Sukandi (2013).Specifically, the teacher who teaches writing to EFL students must face various challenges such as unnatural product of writing by EFL students.In this case, Sukandi tried to investigate "voice" and "style" of EFL students' writing in West Sumatra.Those two terms refer to the uniqueness of the structure of students' writing which is linguistically deeper than "vocabulary", "grammar", and "syntax".As a result, even though the result of the students' writing is correct grammatically, unfortunately the style and voice of their writing are still typically odd and absurd for native speakers.
Referring to Sukandi's research, it is true that there must be challenges in teaching writing like what Hsien (2009) research result showed.In this case, what was the most challenging for him was a big class writing that made the ability of the students' writing not be improved much better since it was very hard to assess the writing of the students individually.Hence, he focused on a research on students' experience and perception on three kinds of feedback which are self-directed, peer, and teacher feedback or what is called multiple interaction activities by interviewing the students, observing activities in classroom, as well as examining the students' writing draft and feedback sheets.In this research, he wanted to know the changes made on the students' writing quality after the multiple interaction activities held in the classroom.Based on the students' experiences during the activities, they ranked the kind of feedback which was the highest intensity than two others.It was teacher feedback that was most highlighted by the students because they received more constructive comment.In conclusion, the more beneficial suggestion they got, the more positive opinion they gave to each kind of feedback.
However, it is not fair if the students' writing is the point to be assessed in a research, but it is also important to focus on the quality of the teachers in teaching writing.Dantes (2013) in his research focused on the investigation of teachers' quality in teaching writing at SMAN 1 AIKMEL in East Lombok.The context variable of his research was educational policy of writing, purpose of learning, as well as vision and mission in teaching writing.In addition, they also pointed out several items of input such as teachers' qualification, students' prior knowledge, learning facilities, learning resources, curriculum, and teachers' administration.The process variable was the teaching and learning process while the writing product limited to the elements of students' writing competency and students' perception about the teaching and learning process.The result showed that context variable was positive while input, process and product variables were negative.
If the previous researchers cited above only faced one or two facts regarding the challenges in teaching and learning writing, Mukminin (2015) found more specific barriers when they investigated the experiences of students and teachers in English academic writing socialization at a university teacher training program in Jambi, Indonesia.In their research, they found five kinds of problems of students and teachers in English academic writing, they are that: (1) the participants face difficulties in exploring ideas in writing because of their lack of cultural backgrounds in English academic writing, (2) the participants face difficulties in arranging good sentences and paragraphs in English where the style is quite different from their mother tongue, (3) the participants feel that in socialization, they were not given a strong foundation of well-organized teaching methods and materials, (4) the participants feel that even though their institution of department's curriculum required them to have good capability in writing research paper in English, there is no support for them so they tend to use technology and friend's help to solve their problems, and (5) the participants doubt and are afraid to confront the challenges they face in English academic writing.
Investigating the challenges faced by students in English writing, it is true that having mistakes in terms of grammar must be faced by Indonesian students since English is still regarded as a foreign language in Indonesia.Siahaan (2013) tried to investigate what challenges students face in writing a descriptive text.As a result, she found that the students make a lot of grammatical errors so that they struggle so hard to write paragraphs.In addition, not only grammatical mistakes, the students also fail to differentiate the schematic structure of descriptive text which is indicated by information that is related to description in the identification part.
Referring to the above studies concerning challenges in teaching and learning writing in Indonesian context, later on we have to find new methods to figure them out.Those facts imply that an experiment of using a certain technique is suggested in order to face those challenges.For example, one way to improve the students' quality of writing is by having feedback from the teacher and making drafts before the teacher gives the final mark on the students' works.As many studies have done research on the effectiveness of giving feedback and error corrections to the students' writing, and many researchers have realized the importance of doing this kind of activity, there are still many educational stake holders who do not want to use this method to fix the problems faced by the students in writing (Halimi, 2008).For future implication, the teachers must do the steps of giving feedback including error corrections from the first until the final draft where the teacher can see the progress of the students' improvement in writing.
In the practice of teaching writing in Indonesia, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is commonly used media by the teachers.However, the use of ICT itself has not been applied frequently in teaching English writing even though ICT, especially internet, has been influenced by the way of life of many people including the students.For instance, there are so many students who are familiar with internet-based facilities or media such as facebook, e-book, email, websites, and webblogs (Cahyono & Mutiaraningrum, 2016).Through their research, most of the teachers regard the use of ICT as an effective method to improve the students' writing quality and quantity.In addition, the production of the students' writing will be more flexible and make the students more confident because of the beneficial sources they can get from the use of ICT such as internet.
Internet can give more benefits not only for searching information to the students to enrich their sources to be used for their topic in writing, it is possible to have dialogue between student and teacher or student and student through dialogue journals by using social media such as facebook (Rodliyah, 2016).The reason is because facebook is the very familiar media for students nowadays which it is expected to minimize the possibility of technical difficulties.In addition, using social media to support the students' learning in writing is beneficial because it is more interactive and they can share information one to another such as videos, links, files, texts, and photos.These facts imply that by the usage of ICT, the Indonesian students are expected to have a great improvement in English writing.
Without leaving aside the future implication of ICT in teaching writing in Indonesia, the use of Systemic Functional Linguistic Genre Pedagogy (SFL GP) can be a new hope for the teachers in getting new concepts in teaching English writing to the students.Basically, SFL is the theory of language in context where Pedagogy can make the teachers teach English including the written form such as how language works to produce meaning, text organization, linguistic form, etc.The The users of language can build appropriate meanings related to social context by choosing language system resources Text as the basic unit of meaning Text acts as the basic unit of meaning in language.The study of language should pay attention to the language structure and organization Systematic relationship between text and context SFL provides a detail explanation of relationship between text and context.It is because social context influences the choices of linguistic system Functional Labels SFL indicates aspects of text based on how language produces meaning Furthermore, regarding the usefulness of SFL GP for teaching writing, it is better to highlight the model of SFL GP which consists of five steps, they are: (1) building topic knowledge, (2) building text knowledge, (3) guided activities to develop vocabulary and text knowledge, (4) creating a text independently, and (5) reflecting on language choices (Derewianka, 1998).These steps are considered to be important procedures since the process of producting a good written text is not easy and needs a long step in order to make the content and the organization appropriate with the topic.
However, the teachers will often face many kinds of challenges in teaching writing where English is still regarded as a foreign language both for the teachers and also the students.The above points of explanation are expected to be alternatives or even as major references to use in teaching writing in order to have a better improvement of the students' English writing production in the future.

E. Discussion
Knowing the facts and challenges faced by Indonesian students in English writing, it is obvious that grammar becomes one of the biggest problems for them (Megaiab, 2014) and (Siahaan, 2013).As Aziz (2003) mentions that Indonesian students tend to simplify the use of tenses in English such as not really focusing on the form of verb in simple present tense to simple past tense.For example: I study English last night, We go to Surabaya last week.In this case, Aziz adds that why this phenomenon happens is that Indonesian students need the language to be understood in terms of communication rather than to be precise on grammatical terms.Secondly, the tense usage in English is kind of complex, so it makes Indonesian students pay less attention to the area of writing.In other words, Indonesian students try to find their own way to express English sentences in the same meaning.
Next, the way people communicate in expressing sentences in written form reflects the uniqueness of the use of language which is originated from a certain area.In this part, cultural background plays important role in the production of a language including English (Aziz, 2003).Specifically, that is why the production of English writing by Indonesian students is still awkward in terms of voices and sounds even though the sentences they make correct grammatically.This is what previous researchers Hatmanto (2012); Megaiab (2014); Sukandi (2013); and Mukminin (2015) found in their research that many students' writing is still not acceptable in terms of voices and styles because of the influence of their mother tongue.
With regard to cultural background, it is true that languages can be classified into their cultures.It means to teach writing to the students, the teacher is expected to deliver what kind of rhetorical convention that a certain language brings.In other words, if the students would like to write in English, it means that the students need to recognize the rhetorical convention required in English so the students can transfer ideas or linguistic patterns from their mother tongue to English through sentences.In short, the students' understanding needs to be shaped that the rhetorical convention is not universal, so it makes every language different.
Another challenge implied in this study is teaching writing in big classes (Hsien, 2009).It is obvious that having a big class to teach is a barrier that teachers often face.In this case, Hayes (1997) mentions that there are five most problems that will occur, they are: (1) physical constraint which makes the teacher and students feel inconvenient, (2) difficult to control the students, (3) cannot pay enough attention to the students individually, (4) difficult to assess the students' works, and (5) difficult to reach learning effectiveness.In addition, Harmer (2000) explains that the teacher will possibly face a difficulty in watching the students who sit on the back and there is no guarantee that all students can understand the materials given as a whole.However, this kind of challenge can bring many technical barriers in the process of teaching and learning writing in the classroom.

F. Conclusion
Based on broad explanation on the theoretical concepts above as well as the comparison among them, most Indonesian students face challenges regarding the complex grammatical structures in English.Not only challenges in terms of grammar, the students also often face difficulties in delivering the content of their composition which is caused by the different cultural backgrounds between their mother tongue and English.The students will transfer the ideas in writing by using the grammatical structure of their mother tongue.As the consequence, the content of their writing is not appropriate with English rhetorical convention.On the other side, in teaching writing, the teachers find the challenge in terms of having a big class where this fact brings them into ineffectiveness of the teaching and learning production.Moreover, time is also considered to be a big challenge for teachers to make the students understand the materials given as a whole.That is why further research is suggested to find new techniques so that the teaching and learning writing to EFL students in Indonesia can be more effective and will reach the intended outcomes.

Table 1 :
table below table shows what key elements of SFL are adapted from Feez (2002): Key Elements of SFL Language as a resource of meaning