Problem Identification The contribution of web based grammar practice to students` grammatical competence and writing skill

B. Problem Identification

The relation between grammar and writing has been a wide belief in English education. Teaching grammar and writing should be integrated in order to optimize the learning process. It is strongly suggested that the most beneficial way in assisting students to improve their grammatical competence as well as writing skill is by integrating grammar and writing in a communicative approach. Since the early 1960s, research shows that grammar teaching that is separate from writing instruction does not show improvement on students‟ grammatical competence and writing skill Braddock et al . 1963, Hillocks 1986. The use of students‟ writings as teaching materials to teach grammar in writing is believed to be the most effective way. Editing and revising are the possible ways in developing stu dents‟ grammatical competence and writing skill at the same time. Integrating grammar instruction into editing and revising processes facilitate the students to make immediate applications that allow them to really pay attention to the relation between grammar and writing. In order to be able to conduct editing and revising process, students need to be exposed to some major grammar topics first. These topics are the minimum requirements of grammar that students need to acquire, so that they are able to edit and revise their work optimally. Weaver 1998 proposes five grammatical concepts that enable students to show improvement in sentence revision and editing: 1 teaching concepts on subject, verb, sentence, clause, phrase; 2 teaching style through sentence combining and sentence generating; 3 teaching sentence through the manipulation of syntactic elements; 4 teaching both the power of dialects and the dialects of power; and 5 teaching punctuation and mechanics for convention, clarity, and style. As the rise of technology application in educational field, ELTGallery is implementing web-based grammar practice as one way in improving students‟ grammatical competence and writing skill. Web-based grammar practice allows the students to conduct editing and revising process for their writings. Web-based grammar practice offers 12 topics including sentence agreement, tense, article and determiner, personal pronoun, question, noun modifier, auxiliary verb, perfect and continuous, compound and complex sentence, relative clause, noun clause, and passive voice. These topics are carefully selected based on the minimum requirements of grammar that are suggested by previous studies in traditional learning. Web-based grammar practice integrates the traditional grammar practices in conventional learning with the technology that simultaneously allow the students to enhance their autonomous and collaborative learning more. Therefore, it is strongly believed that with the autonomous and collaborative learning supported in ELTGallery , web-based grammar practice and grammatical competence as well as writing skill are positively related. It means that students‟ with more web-based grammar practice have higher grammatical competence and writing skill.

C. Problem Limitation