Principles of Teaching Writing

in English. According to BSNP 2006, communicative competence is having discourse abilities; comprehending oral and written texts and producing oral and written texts. Those abilities are carried out into four language skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. The essence of teaching writing is guiding and facilitating students to work. This is supported by Brown 2000: 7 who proposes that “teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, and setting the conditions for learning”. It implies that teaching cannot be separated from learning. When teachers teach writing to students, they do not only teach how to develop ideas in writing, but they also need a serious attention of how to write English sentences grammatically. Hence, teaching writing depends on the teacher‟s ability how to teach writing effectively which can make the students‟ ability improved. Teaching writing for students of junior high schools is one of the important thing that has to be done well because English is one of the compulsory subjects that has to be taught for students of the junior high school level. English learning in junior high schools is targeted to make the students reach the functional level, that is, to communicate written and oral in solving daily problems. One scope of English learning at junior high schools is that students can understand and produce a short functional text and short essays in the form of procedure, descriptive, narrative, and recount Depdiknas,2006. In particular, the standard of competence of writing skills for eighth grade students of Junior High Schools is to express the meaning of written functional texts and simple short essays in the form of descriptive, narrative, and recount to interact with surroundings. The obvious description is presented in Table 3 below: Table 3. The Standard of competence and basic competence of Writing for Junior High School KTSP Curriculum Standard of competence Basic competence 6. Expressing the meaning of written functional text and simple short essays in the form of descriptive and recount text to interact with society. 6.1. Expressing the meaning in the form of simple short written functional text accurately, fluently, and acceptable to interact with society. 6.2. Expressing the meaning and rhetorical steps of simple short essays in written language accurately, fluently, and acceptable to interact with society in the form of descriptive and recount. In conclusion, the students of Junior High Schools are expected to be able to communicate in English well in both oral and written languages. The eighth grade students of Junior High Schools are expected to be able to comprehend and express the meaning of simple transactional and interpersonal conversations, short oral functional, and monolog texts, simple functional texts and short essays in the form of descriptive, narrative, and recount.

i. Assessing Writing

Assessing writing requires test consctruction and evaluation criteria based on course objectives and teaching methodologies. In the English language classroom, especially at the junior high school, teachers are always challenged by how reliably and validly in evaluating students‟ writing skill, so that the students will have better preparation for internal and external proficiency and achievement examinations. To get a valid scoring process, the researcher needs to decide which scoring rubric that should be used as scoring reference. Brown 2004 propose three main types of assessing writing. They are holistic, analytic, and trait-based scoring. They are explained as follows. 1 Holistic scoring rubric Holistic scale is assigning a single score to a script based on the overall impression of the script. A holistic judgment may be built into an analytic scoring rubric as one of the score categories. Holistic scoring results in a more general description for categories, but includes the different elements of writing implicitly or explicitly. 2 Analytic scoring rubric An analytic scoring rubric is much like the checklist which allows for the separate evaluation of each factor. Each criterion is scored on a different descriptive scale and assigned a numerical value. Analytic scoring helps the teacher in recognizing the weaknesses and strength of the learners. This scoring type can be applied in the classroom evaluation. In formulating the rubric, there are five aspects that should be scaled. They are organization, logical development if ideas, grammar, mechanics, and style of expression. Weigle 2002:114 explains that analytic scoring rubric provides detailed information about students‟ writing abilities in different aspects of writing. It is useful for second language learners, who are more likely to show a marked or uneven profile across different aspects of writing.