Scrutinizing Mentor Text in Virtual EFL Writing Course: A Text Modeling Approach during ERT in Indonesia

Abstract

Writing English argumentative essays has brought suffering and constraints for EFL university students since it requires relevant argumentativeness and knowledge of text genre knowledge and grammar and vocabulary mastery. Mentor text can be an effective scaffold for them to understand the essay. Little is known about university students' perspectives on writing an argumentative essay and the mentor texts given to them. To fill the void, this present study was carried out in a qualitative framework. Twenty-nine university students who attended and were exposed to four selected mentor texts during the virtual writing course voluntarily took part in this study by filling out the online questionnaire. The findings show that the students experienced and felt various positive and negative emotional expressions, such as challenge, difficulty, and enjoyment. The students perceived that the selected mentor texts were beneficial and very helpful for learning, understanding, and producing argumentative essays. Those mentor texts contain clear structure, effective thesis, and good writer's delivery so that the students can easily emulate and adapt them into their writing.