Significance of the Study

10 language rather than receive it. Therefore, writing is a product that can be one of the indicators whether the students have achieved the goal of the teaching and learning process or not. Besides, writing is also both a mental activity and a physical activity. Nunan 2003:88 states that the nature of writing can be defined as both mental and physical activities that is aimed to express and impress. Writing is a mental activity because the writer has to be able to commit the idea and it is a physical activity because the writer has to be able to express and organize the idea into a readable text. Brown 2001: 335 also states that written products are the result of thinking, drafting, and revising that require specialized skills on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently, how to use discourse markers and rhetorical conventions coherently into a written text, how to revise the text for clearer meaning and how to edit the text for appropriate grammar and how to produce a final product. It can be assumed that writing contains both physical activity where students are expected to know how to arrange the words and mental activity where students have to be able to invent and express the ideas. Therefore, in order to make a good piece of writing, a writer has to be able to know how to generate the idea, organize it into a cohesive writing, and has good knowledge in some aspects of writing such as grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary. Hayes 1996 in Weigle 2002: 20 has another definition of writing where writing is not simply learning about grammar and vocabulary. He states 11 that writing is also social because it carries out in a social setting. The content, the way the writer writes, and to whom the writer writes are shaped by the history of social interaction. In learning writing, it is also important to learn the culture of the native speakers in order to make the writing understandable and acceptable. It can be assumed that teachers also have to teach the students the culture in order to be able to deliver the exact message of the writing. Hayes 1996 in Weigle 2002: 25-26 also states that the process of writing involves three main cognitive activities, involving text interpretation, reflection and text production. Text interpretation is the process of creating internal representations derived from linguistics and graphics input. Reflection is a process of creating new internal representations from the existing representations. Text production is the last process in which new written linguistics forms or graphic output are produced from the internal representations. Therefore, to produce a writing there are some processes that the writer has to go through. Based on the theories of writing above, it can be concluded that writing is a productive skill which is an activity of inventing ideas and feelings, organizing it, and expressing it with the right words into a good piece of writing.

b. Processes of Writing

In learning writing, students cannot only focus on the product or the output but they also have to pay attention to the process of writing itself. A writer 12 has to go to some stages in producing a good piece of writing. Harmer 2004:4-6 suggests four main stages of the writing processes. They are planning, drafting, revising, and final drafting. The first stage of the processes is planning. In this stage students plan what they are going to write and decide what they are going to say. There are three main issues that have to be paid attention in planning a writing. The first one is they have to consider the purpose of the writing. The second is the audience they are writing for and the third one is the content structure of the piece. In the planning stage, students have to consider those three elements because those three elements can influence the shape of the writing, the choice of language, and the sequence of ideas. The second stage is drafting. At this stage, students begin to write down their ideas. The drafts that they made can be amended later. They also can make outlines of things that they are going to write. The next stage is editing. After making the drafts, students can check their drafts to know where it works and where it does not. To reflect and revise their drafts, they can ask other readers to comment and make suggestions. The last stage is final version. After editing the drafts and change things that are necessary to be changed, students can make their final version. It is the final product that is ready to be sent to the readers. In short, all of the five stages are important to be applied to students in practice writing. It is done to make the students not only focus on the product but