<![CDATA[Writing observation reports requires students to transform field data into coherent, objective, and genre-appropriate text. This study maps the difficulties experienced by culinary vocational students, current learning conditions, multimodal preferences, and interest in gastronomy as a contextual theme to develop observation report writing materials. A cross-sectional descriptive survey was conducted with 211 10th-grade students from two schools (SMKN A and SMKN B) in Indramayu Regency, Indonesia. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire with ten items was administered online, and responses were summarized using category frequencies and percentages. The findings indicate that the most prominent difficulties relate to organizing observational data (60.2% positive agreement) and developing ideas into a complete report (62.5%), rather than simply recognizing the genre as difficult. Students strongly preferred visual and multimodal support: 87.2% reported greater motivation when texts included images, graphs, or tables, and 89.1% considered visual media to aid understanding. Although 92.0% indicated that teachers clearly explained the writing steps, 69.6% also reported that instruction remained dominated by lectures, suggesting a gap between explanation and practice. Gastronomy offers strong contextual relevance, with 85.7% expressing interest in local food production processes and 90.1% in the cultural significance of traditional foods. This study proposes a framework that needs to be designed, combining explicit genre modeling, the organization of visual data, observations of local cuisine, guided collaborative construction, and formative feedback. This framework is a design proposal rather than a tested intervention and must be validated through further development and studies of its effectiveness in the classroom.]]>
