The impacts of graphic organizers on management students' expository writing performance

University students are profoundly required to be able to write not only for the academic purpose but also for their future careers to support their professionalism at work, especially in this globalization era. However, there are two common obstacles encountered by the students in the process of writing that may affect their writing performance. The first problem isgenerating ideas for many of them still feel that they are lack of ideas. The second one is organizing their ideas. There are a big number of students who still do not know how to organize their ideas properly in their essays. It could be also undergone by those who have brilliant ideas to share. One of the techniques that has been believed and utilized by many teachers worldwide to overcome the problems is using various graphic organizers. For this reason, this study was aimed at improving the Management students’ expository writing performance on the traits of content and organization. The subjects were the students of Business Faculty of Widya Mandala Catholic University who were taking Business English course in the second semester. An action research was carried out since this research focused on the process of learning that enabled the writer to monitor the progress made by the students more deeply. The quantitative data was also utilized to reinforce the qualitative data.Therefore, the students were given pre-test and post-test as well. For triangulation, the pre-test and post-test were assessed by two raters by using ESL rubric and semi-structured interview was conducted. The results showed that the use of graphic organizers profoundly affected the process and the products of the students’ writing. They showed significant improvement in the process of learning. The students were able to generate more ideas with the assistance of the graphic organizers for brainstorming. Interestingly,the students also learnt a lot of new terms and vocabulary in the process of developing ideas.The other finding showed that the use graphic organizers also enabled them to organize their ideas more and properly in the process of writing. Further, the findings also revealed that the use of graphic organizers could arouse students’ interest, motivation, and confidence in writing. As a result, the students’ writing achievement also improved significantly for the students’ post-test scores on traits of content and organization were higher than their pre-test scores on the same criteria. Therefore, graphic organizers can be versatile tools to enhance the EFL freshmen’ expository writing performance on the traits of content and organization. Since there are a number of benefits that graphic organizers may offer, further research concerning the use of graphic organizers for other types of writing at any levels can be conducted