Descriptive Writing Proficiency Among Vocational Students: A Qualitative Case Study
Keywords: descriptive text, english proficiency, genre-based approach, vocational students
Abstract
This study examined the English proficiency of vocational students in Computer and Network Engineering in understanding and delivering information via descriptive texts using a genre-based approach. Qualitative research was conducted through a case study in eleventh graders at SMK Bina Karya Utama to investigate the English proficiency of vocational students of Computer and Network Engineering. The main findings in this study, that while vocational students possess foundational genre knowledge, they experience severe procedural bottlenecks in autonomous text organization due to an absence of rhetorical planning routines and heightened cognitive load from unfamiliar visual stimuli. Furthermore, observed linguistic deviations, transcend basic grammatical deficiencies, operating instead as adaptive cognitive strategies to manage real-time vocabulary retrieval constraints, and performance-induced affective anxiety. This study. This study offers significant theoretical and empirical novelty by transcending traditional product-based evaluations to expose the underlying cognitive, perceptual, and affective mechanisms governing vocational students' writing processes. Uniquely, it serves as an inaugural investigation into how prior topical familiarity directly mitigates cognitive load during visual translation, while delineating how static visual input semiotically induces cognitive tense shifts and how real-time vocabulary retrieval bottlenecks, rather than vocabulary size alone or trigger a feedback loop of syntactic simplification.
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