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This research aims at exploring English students’ needs in making use of both offline and online resources to help them cope with difficulties in writing an expository essay. Third-year students of English Department of Universitas Islam Malang who have taken essay writing class (expository and argumentative essays) will be involved as the participants. They will be assigned to respond to both close-ended and open-ended questionnaires about their needs in using offline and online resources in writing expository texts. The close-ended questionnaire is adopted from Sumarsono, Bagis, and Arrafii (2017), while the open-ended questions will be self-developed. To elicit more comprehensive information, focus group discussion (FGD) will be conducted with selected student participants (on the basis of convenient sampling). In addition, some writing teachers will be invited to share their ideas regarding appropriate and effective offline and online resources. The quantitative data will be analyzed based on the percentage score, while content analysis will be applied to analyze the qualitative data. The findings of the research will provide valuable information as the consideration to develop writing material for the expository essay which combines offline and online resources.
Keywords: need analysis, expository essay, offline and online resources