Objectives of the Study Significance of the Study

1 Planning Planning or prewriting is an activity in the classroom that encourages students to write. It stimulates thought for getting started. In fact, it moves students away from having to face blank page toward generating tentative ideas and gathering information for writing. 2 Drafting The drafting stage focuses on the fluency of writing and is not preoccupied with grammatical accuracy of neatness of the draft. 3 Revising Revising writing can be stated by making decisions about how you want to improve, looking at your writing from a different point of view, and picking places where your writing should be clearer, more interesting, more informative and more concise to the reader. The students re-examine what they write to see how effective they communicate their ideas to the reader. 4 Editing In this stage, the students are engaged in tidying up their texts as they prepare the final draft for evaluation by the teachers. The stages of writing are planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Every stage of writing influences the next stages. The first stage, that is, planning is the most influencing stage for it is the beginning of the writing.

c. Types of Writing Performance

Brown 2004:220 divides a written performance into four categories that capture the range of written production. The categories are as follows. 1 Imitative In this category, a learner must attain skills in the fundamental, basic tasks of writing letters, words, punctuation, and brief sentences. 2 Intensive controlled This category captures the writing skill in producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocation, and idioms, and correct grammatical features up to length of a sentence. 3 Responsive In this writing category, assessment tasks require learners to perform at a limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph and creating a logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs. Genres of writing include brief narrative and descriptions, short reports, summaries, brief responses to reading, and interpretations of charts or graphs. 4 Extensive This extensive writing implies successful management of all the processes and strategies for all purposes, up to the length of an essay, a term paper, a major research project report, or a thesis. Some English learners in the beginning level from young children to adults need basic training and assessment of imitative writing. The writing activities in imitative level