The Common Difficulties in Writing
21 use language appropriately. Communicative Language Teaching then became a
solution in language teaching methodology. It is a method in language teaching which helps students to practice using English. In other words, Communicative
Language Teaching brings a concept of learning by doing. In the communicative approach, grammar was no longer the central focus
of language teaching and learning, and some aspects of language use were determined to design a syllabus. These aspects are considered in syllabus design
as to focus on the development of lear ners‟ communicative competence. Van Ek
and Alexander 1980 proposed ten aspects of language use to be considered in syllabus design; they are:
1. the purpose of the learning
2. the setting in which they will use the target language
3. their social role in the target language
4. the events they will participate
5. the language function
6. the topics or concepts involved
7. the discourse and rhetorical skills
8. the varieties of the target language
9. the grammatical content that will be needed
10. the lexical content that will be needed.
The teaching of English is manifested in the four main skills —listening,
speaking, reading, and writing. It means that to learn English, a learner needs to sharpen their skills in these four aspects. However, among these four skills,
learners naturally learn receptive skills before productive skills. Donald and Kneale 2001:14 stated:
“Language teachers conventionally distinguish between four aspects of language which are mastered by means of the “four skills”: listening,
22 speaking, reading, and writing. Listening might be taught as primarily
„passive‟ „receptive‟ or „input‟ skills, whilst speaking and writing are their „active‟ „productive‟ or „output‟ counterparts.”
Consequently, in the field of teaching and learning, the mastery of reading skill naturally precedes the mastery of writing skill. Therefore, students are
supposed to be taught how to read first before they start learning how to write. In fact, the teaching of four skills cannot be completely separated. In accordance to
this, Brown 2001 stated: “Despite our history of treating the four skills in separate segments
of a curriculum, there is a recent trend toward skill integration. That is, rather than designing a curriculum to teach the many aspects of one skill,
say, reading, curriculum designers are taking more of a whole language approach whereby reading is treated as one of two or more interrelated
skills. A course that deals with reading skills, then, will also deal with
related listening, speaking, and writing skills.” Therefore, the teaching of writing skill cannot be separated from the
teaching of other skills, especially reading skill. Reading is the foundation of writing. For that reason, reading and writing skills are often put together as one
package known as the written cycle. Ideally, reading tasks precede writing tasks as through reading a certain type of text, learners grasp the knowledge of the
field. This knowledge of the field later will be manifested in their writing. Accordingly, the teaching of writing skill is integrated with reading skill as well,
as framed in the Genre-Based Approach.