Original Research
Toward Reflective Authorship in Publication-Oriented EFL Writing: A Longitudinal Study of Indonesian Undergraduates’ Reflective Journals
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Writing an article for publication requires students to deal with both writing and research decisions. The study followed 35 Indonesian EFL undergraduates during 16 meetings of a Research Method in ELT course and examined how their reflective attention and writer positioning changed. After every meeting, the students wrote a reflective journal, resulting in 560 entries and 3,920 responses to the recurring prompts. The analysis generated six interrelated themes and showed changes across three project phases. Early reflections focused mainly on research purpose, topic feasibility, models and writing criteria. During article development, students gave more attention to literature synthesis, methodological alignment, data work, and relationships among article sections. In the final phase, some students showed greater attention to manuscript integration, revision, evaluative judgment, and future academic writing. However, workload, anxiety, methodological difficulties, and the need for guidance remained. Reflective authorial positioning became more visible, but guided participation also increased. These findings suggest that reflective authorship developed through responsible interdependence, as students took greater responsibility for writing decisions while continuing to use academic, social, and technological support.
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Keywords
EFL Academic Writing; Learner Feedback Literacy; English For Research Publication Purposes (ERPP); Student Reflective Journals; Reflective Authorship
Author(s) Information
Publisher’s Note
The claims, arguments, and counter-arguments made in this article are exclusively those of the contributing authors. Hence, they do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the authors’ affiliated institutions, or EUROKD as the publisher, the editors and the reviewers of the article.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the participating students for allowing their reflective learning records to be analyzed and reported anonymously. Appreciation is also extended to the academic colleagues who reviewed the reflective-journal instrument and the evolving qualitative framework.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT Authorship Contribution Statement
Nina Sofiana: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Visualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review and Editing.
Sri Wuli Fitriati: Conceptualization, Supervision, Validation, Writing - Review and Editing.
Seful Bahri: Supervision, Validation, Writing - Review and Editing.
Generative AI Use Disclosure Statement
ChatGPT (OpenAI) was used to assist with literature-search scoping, the organization of de-identified response-level data using researcher-defined keywords and rules, descriptive calculations, structural organization, and language editing. All AI-assisted outputs were checked against the original data by the authors. The authors made the final decisions regarding the codebook, themes, representative extracts, disconfirming cases, descriptive results, longitudinal interpretation, and scholarly claims. ChatGPT did not generate or alter student responses or quotations and did not independently determine the codes, themes, findings, or interpretations. All references were independently verified by the authors, who retain full responsibility for the manuscript.
Ethics Declarations
Formal institutional permission and written informed consent were obtained before the research use of reflective-journal data. Participation was voluntary, students could decline or withdraw without academic penalty, and all reported data were anonymized. The study followed the ethical principles of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.
Consent for Publication
Written informed consent was obtained from all participants for the anonymized use and publication of excerpts from their reflective journals.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Data Availability
The complete reflective-journal dataset is not publicly available because it contains student narratives protected by confidentiality commitments. De-identified excerpts and analytic summaries supporting the findings may be requested from the corresponding author, subject to institutional and ethical restrictions.