<![CDATA[Essay writing is an important skill, but it remains a challenge for vocational EFL learners whose curriculum prioritizes occupational competencies over academic literacy. The study was conducted to identify the problems in essay writing faced by 30 tenth-grade students of Hospitality at SMK Negeri 3 Malang, Indonesia, in the four stages of writing process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing. A quantitative descriptive design was used with a validated 32-item 4-point Likert-scale questionnaire adapted from Suprapto et al. (2022). Cronbach’s alpha (overall α =.81; pre-writing α =.74, drafting α =.78, revising α =.76, editing α =.71) verified internal consistency, and descriptive statistics (e.g., mean (M) and standard deviation (SD)) were calculated for each item and for each stage. Difficulty means were computed by recoding positively keyed items so that higher scores uniformly indicate higher difficulty. The findings suggest that the drafting phase is the most difficult phase, but only marginally more difficult than the revising phase (M = 2.41, SD = 0.91), with the chief source of difficulty being the problem in idea generation and not linguistic interference. The second ranked stage was revising (M = 2.40, SD = 0.95) characterized by low levels of iterative revising and unproductive engagement with peer feedback. Third is pre-writing (M=2.35, SD=0.91). The main problem for pre-writing is idea organization, not ideation per se. The editing stage results in the lowest challenge mean (M = 2.06, SD = 0.82), although systematic editing habits are still inconsistently practiced. These findings imply that the most challenging instructional needs in this context are metacognitive and strategic rather than purely linguistic, highlighting the need for stage-specific scaffolding in vocational EFL writing classrooms.]]>
