Writing Skill in English Language Teaching ELT

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CHAPTER 2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

The review of related literature in this chapter concern with the theories related to the research. It covers writing skill, descriptive paragraph, cooperative learning, the characteristics of cooperative learning, the benefit of cooperative learning, model of cooperative learning and research hypothesis.

2.1 Writing Skill in English Language Teaching ELT

As one of the four language skills, writing has always occupied place in most English language course. Writing is the expression of language in the form of letters, symbol and words. Through writing everybody can share his knowledge, conveying idea, feeling and intention to other people. Farbman 1985:252 note as way of uncovering ideas as well as expressing them. In writing, the students should be able to develop their ideas by selecting words and putting them together in a written or printed form Fairbairn and Winch, 1996:32. In other words, writing requires the ability of expressing ideas into grammatically structured forms of words and sentences in a text that can help the reader understand. As a means of communication, writing is the writer‟s effort of interacting and communicating with her or his readers. Dealing with this, Fairbairn and Winch 1996:31 say that writing like speaking is a communication. This means that a writer should think carefully about the language that will be used to transform ideas in order to communicate with his or her reader. Meanwhile, writing skill is regarded as one of the most difficult skill to master, especially for most students of english as Foreign Language EFL because when writing. In addition, Richards 1990:100 states that learning to write either as the first or second language is one of the most difficult tasks a learner encounter and fully master. A writer should consider some aspests of writing in order to make good and readable writing, namely grammar, vocabulary, mechanic, content and organization. Thus, to be a good writer, one should consider the above aspects of writing because all of them are related to each other. Therefore this research focused on grammar, vocabulary, mechanic, organization and content. From the explanation above, it can be infrred that writing is not a simple task to do and it indicates that the students need many practices in order to be able to write well in English, particularly for beginners. In writing a paragraph, Hughes 2003:101 states that there are five writing aspects as follow : 1. Grammar refers to a set of rules to help a writer construct sentences that make sense and acceptable in English. 2. Vocabulary refres to the ability to choose and use words and idioms effectively, mastering wordsform and using appropiate register. 3. Mechanics is convention in writing that is related to puntuation, spelling and capitalization. 4. Organization refers to the students‟ ability to arrange the ideas in logical sequence and cohesion, tp make unified contribution the whole paragraph. 5. Content is the ability to use knowledge and understandable subject and information, development thesis, relationship of many details relevance of material and topic.

2.2 The Aspect of Writing