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.