Writing in English Letters

21 social activity. As student move up level they need to be able to handle different kinds of writing.

2.1.3 Writing in English Letters

The status quo of Indonesian curriculum for tertiary education reflected in the Indonesian Regulation concerning Education Number 12 article 64, 2012: The Autonomy of Higher Learning, states that Tertiary educations or Universities have the autonomy to plan, organize and conduct teaching learning activities in the classroom by each university thus the objectives set by the government for Universities in Indonesia may be achieved through different means or unique. Such policy is also imposed in Sanata Dharma University, and English Letters department where I had conducted my research on, was also in the effect of such policy. In English letters writing is divided into two distinct premises. The first premises would be basic academic writing and the second one is creative writing. Basic academic writing is distributed into three parts in three different semester. The latter is also divided into three different parts in the later stage of the study. In the first semester, students learn basic academic writing 1, the objective is to enable students to have a good command in constructing their sentences into a well organized paragraph, However the emphasize is still within the limits of structuring a good sentences. In the second semester, students are expected to have a good command of writing by looking at their ability to construct a well organized paragraphs. The emphasize however is still on sentence structure and how the flow of ideas in each paragraphs is easily understood by the 22 readers. However, the ability of choosing correct vocabulary and understand the use of transitional sentences is also taken into accounts. In the third semester students are expected to have a good command of writing by looking at their ability to construct a well organized paragraphs and become more aware of the aspects that embedded within a good paragraphs such as the paragraphs coherentness, and the use of cohesive devices through the use of different text types. In writing 3 there are three major text types or genres that are being explored they are descriptive, narrative, and expository as well as the subsidiary text types that follows. The syllabus that is used for teaching and learning writing text types was a task based syllabus Brown: 1995:7. A task based syllabus is a syllabus with the coverage of the core materials or learning materials concerning different task that must be achieved by the students such as writing description, reporting experiences, or instructions; and these task will very beneficial later in a more complex of language use. Creative writing began at semester 4, where students are expected to write essays. This subjects will be require the basic knowledge of the previous three semesters, this creative writing continues to writing 6 with which the preparation of the thesis writing is the main focus.

2.1.4 Teaching Writing