17 Brown 2000, p. 344 argues that
“guided writing does not depend on the teacher‟s control, but it still needs the teacher‟s role as a stimulator.” The teacher
needs to guide the students by giving series of questions related to the story they hear or watch using media. Those series of questions are expected to help the
students to understand the sequence of the story better. In line with Brown 2000, another expert Reid 1993, p. 25 mentioned
types of guided writing exercises widely used in textbooks. These types are usually used by common teacher. They are namely Model Paragraph,
Comprehension Questions, Language Based Exercises, Oral Composition, and Written Composition.
From those explanations, it can be said that guided writing is an activity of independent writing given by a teacher. This activity uses media in order to help
students to improve their writing skill and understand the sequence of the story better. The types of guided writing are used to help the students to memorize the
sequence of the story from the media given by their teacher.
b. Free Writing
Brown 2000, p. 348 notes that free writing is one of the technics that is applied in term of pre-writing activity. The pre-writing stage encourages the
generation of ideas in writing. As a consequence, many teachers apply free writing in the beginning of the study in order to do warming up activity for the
students. Brown 2000, p. 350 adds that “free writing is designed to generate free
ideas that the students might not realize that they have it.” The students should not PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
18 be worried about their spelling, punctuation and grammar while they are doing
free writing. Even when they run out of things to write, they are allowed to continue writing whatever comes into their minds. Those are allowed to help the
students to focus on generating ideas. In contrary with Brown 2000, another expert Reid 1993, p. 25 argue
that in free writing “free was essentially misnomer, however; in general, the freedom was guided.” The free writing is limited to structuring sentence and the
result of which looked like. Usually , free writing is limited to the teacher‟s topic
then the students may write based on the topic that is given to them. Based on those explanations, free writing is defined as a technic that is
used to help the students to generate their ideas. It is usually applied in the beginning of the study. Since its name is free, the teacher cannot limit the
students‟ work because it inhibits the free flow of their ideas. Besides, the theme or topic of the writing is decided by the teacher.
4. The Reasons of Teaching Writing
As it is mentioned in “How to Teach English” by Harmer 1998, p. 79, there are four reasons of teaching writing to students, namely:
a. Reinforcement
Some students usually think that the most important way of learning language is by learning orally, but Harmer 1998, p. 79 states that people will get
more benefit by seeing the language written down. It is proven by the usefulness of learning new language in written form by the students who have studied it.
