25 4.
Factors surrounding ego, self-image, and self esteem are at their pinnacle. Teens are ultrasensitive to how others perceive their changing physical and
emotional selves along with their mental capabilities. One of the most important concerns of the secondary school teacher is to keep self-esteem
high by avoiding embarrassment of students at all costs; affirming each
person‟s talents and strengths; allowing mistakes and other errors to be accepted;
de-emphasizing competition
between classmates
and encouraging small-group work where risks can be taken more easily by a
teen. 5.
Secondary school students are of course becoming increasingly adult-like in their
ability to make those occasional diversions from the “here and now” nature of immediate communicative contexts to dwell on grammar
point or vocabulary item. But as in teaching adults, care must be taken not to insult them with stilted language or to bore them with over analysis.
Besides taking into account the characters of the students as adolescent, teachers need to design materials for teaching and learning at students‟ level, with
topics which they can react to, by linking language teaching to the stu dents‟
everyday interests Harmer, 2007. Harmer 2007 further argued that adolescent learners need to be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own
thoughts and experiences, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. Therefore, the teacher
‟s role is to create tasks that are interesting enough for students to get engaged in activities and challenging
enough to encourage them to learn.
d. The Microskills of Writing
Writing is a complex skill. The mastery of writing is measured by the mastery of smaller skills, referred by Brown 2001 as mikroskills. The following
microskills of writing proposed by H. Douglas Brown 2001 are taken as a guide to decide what learners need to actually perform in mastering the writing skill.
26 a
Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English b
Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose c
Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns
d Use acceptable grammatical systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization,
patterns and rules e
Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms f
Use cohesive devices in written discourse g
Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse h
Appropriately accomplish the communicative functions of written texts according to form and purpose
i Convey links and connections between events and communicate such
relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
j Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.
k Correctly convey culturally specific references in the context of the written
text. l
Develop and use a battery of writing strategies, such as accurately assessing the audience‟s interpretation, using prewriting devices, writing
with fluency in the first drafts, using paraphrases and synonyms, soliciting peer and instructor feedback, and using feedback for revising and editing.
Brown, 2001
The teacher, as a performer that directly faces and deals with the students, therefore need to take into account the microskills of writing mentioned above.
The implication in teaching and learning process is that the teacher needs to plan and designs tasks and activities to help students master and finally be able to
perform those microskills of writing. Therefore, the teaching and learning activities should assist students to be able to perform those microskills.
In order to help the students to master the micro skills of writing, Brown 2001 set four principles for designing writing techniques. They are:
1 Focusing on goal or main idea in writing
Writing is an activity that is moved by a clear purpose to reach a certain goal. Therefore, the teacher should make sure that the students know what they
want to write.
27 2
Balancing process and product Writing is a composing process. It requires multiple drafts before an effective
product is created. The teachers should make sure that students are carefully led through appropriate stages in the process of composing.
3 Accounting for literary background
Teachers should help students to understand that there are differences between students
‟ native language and the target language. 4
Connecting reading and writing Students learn to write by carefully observing what is already written. By
reading a variety of relevant types of text, students can gain important insights about how they should write and about the subject matter that may
become the topic of their writing. Brown 2001 also suggests that reading should be taught before writing.
For that reason, reading and writing skills are put together as one package known as the written cycle. Such notion is applied in the Genre-Based Approach that puts
reading as a way to grasp the knowledge of the field to later be manifested in writing products.
3. Genre-Based Approach
The term approach according to Edward Anthony 1963 in Brown 2001 is “a set of assumptions dealing with the nature of language, teaching and
learning.” Meanwhile, ɒrown himself defined approach as “assumptions, beliefs and the
ories about the nature of language and language learning”. ɑs for the
