The Nature of Writing

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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter will discuss the theories which are used by the researcher to conduct this research. Moreover, this chapter helps the researcher to answer the research question. This second chapter consists of two parts. The first part is the theoretical description and the second one is the theoretical framework.

A. Theoretical Description

There are several theories used by the researcher. The discussions of the theories will support the researcher to answer the research question. The researcher discusses teaching writing, recount text, weekly diary assignment, teacher‟s feedback, behaviorism theory, and classroom action research.

1. Teaching Writing

a. The Nature of Writing

Naturally, people communicate with others by speaking toward each other. Then, they have language as the instrument to communicate with others. Besides, human also communicates by writing. Therefore, students should be able to speak and write properly in learning English as the foreign language. 14 According to Hyland 2002, in teaching writing, the teacher should act as facilitator and give some freedom to the students to build some meanings by themselves. Learn t, not taught, and the teachers‟ role is to be non-directive and facilitating, providing writers with the space to make their own meanings through an encouraging, positive and cooperative environment with minimal interference p. 1. Scholes and Comley 1985 write “writing is not simply frozen speech” P. 3 . They stated that writing is more “thoughtful” activity than speaking. They gave an example about sending a message. When people receive a message written by a same person, they have to read it and each person who reads the message will speak it by their own voices. The result is that the message will be no longer the same as the writer writes it first because every person has their own thinking to analyze it. It makes writing as a “thoughtful” activity. Therefore, the students as learners in EFL have to learn writing properly. They hopefully can write in English properly. Raimes 1983 states that after being able to write in English properly, the students write to communicate with a reader, to express ideas without face to face, to explore a subject, to record experience, to become familiar with text in English p. 4. In this study, the researcher wanted to improve the students‟ writing abilities in writing a recount text. It was related to those reasons as stated by Raimes 1983 that the students write to record experience and to become familiar with text in English. Then, this research helped the students to improve their writing abilities which were bad. 15 Bigs and Moore 1993 state Ability refers to a characteristic derived from narrower range of tests, such as verbal, spatial, or musical tests. Abilities are hypothetical characteristic that are invoked to explain why some individuals do better on specified kinds of performance p. 151. Moreover, Bigs and Moore 1993 cite that writing abilities involves a large number of what are called rhetorical skills: handwriting, spelling, punctuation, word choice, syntax, textual connections, purpose, organisation, clarity and reader characteristics. Besides, Raimes 1983 also states the writers have to deal with certain things when they produce a piece of writing. They are including the content relevance, clarity, originality, logic, etc., the syntax sentence structure, stylistic choices, etc., the grammar rules of verbs, agreement, articles, pronouns, etc., the mechanics handwriting, spelling, punctuation, etc., the organization paragraphs, topic and support, cohesion and unity, and the word choices vocabulary, idiom, tune, the writer‟s process, the audience, and the purpose. Those things above can be the measurement of students‟ writing abilities. Moreover, the researcher analyzed the improvement of the students‟ writing abilities and gave the score based on Brown Bailey‟s scoring rubric. It is one type of analytic scoring uses rubric. In this scoring rubric, the elements that should be analyzed in students‟ writing are the organization, the content, the grammar including sentence structure, the mechanics, and the vocabulary. They are almost same with the the elements of writing written by Raimes 1983. 16

b. The Genre-Based Approach