Efl Students’ Perceptions On The Use Of Mind Mapping In Doing Writing Tasks

This study investigates how EFL students perceive the use of mind mapping in doing writing tasks, focusing on the advantages they experienced and the difficulties they encountered. The participants consisted of ten undergraduate students from the Department of English Language Education at UIN Ar-Raniry, batch 2022. Using a qualitative approach, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews to elicit students’ in-depth personal views and experiences. The findings demonstrate that mind mapping offers five benefits in the writing process, including helping students improve their writing more systematically, generating and organizing ideas effectively, increasing creativity, reducing confusion in developing paragraphs, and supporting concentration and memory retention through visual representation. However, this study also identifies three challenges including the time-consuming nature of creating detailed mind maps, excessive focus on visual design rather than content development, and difficulty in identifying main ideas and selecting appropriate keywords. Overall, the results of this study indicate that mind mapping is a useful pre-writing strategy for EFL students, but its effective implementation requires proper guidance, consistent practice, a balance of visual elements and content, and good time management skills. This study reinforces the need to integrate creative exploration with structured planning in pre-writing activities to help students produce clearer and more coherent academic writing.