c. Micro skills and Macro skills of writing
The earlier micro skills apply more appropriately to imitative and intensive types of writing task, while macro skills are essential for the successful mastery of
responsive and extensive writing. Every skill has its own micro skills. Brown 2007:343 describes the micro skills for writing production as follows:
Table 2: The list of micro and macro skills
Micro skills:
1 Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English. 2 Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
3 Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns.
4 Use acceptable grammatical systems e.g., tense, agreement, and pluralisation, patterns, and rules.
5 Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
Macro skills:
6 Use cohesive devices in written discourse. 7 Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse.
8 Appropriately accomplish the communication functions of written texts according to form and purpose.
9 Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information,
generalization, and exemplification. 10 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.
11 Correctly convey culturally specific references in the context of the written text.
12 Develop and use a battery of writing strategies, such as accurately assessing the audience‟s interpretation, using prewriting devices, writing with fluency
in the first drafts, using paraphrases and synonyms, soliciting peer and instructor feedback, and using feedback for revising and editing.
2. Teaching Writing
Teaching is the process of facilitating learning, enabling students to learn and set the conditions for learning Brown, 2007:7. He also states that teaching is
showing or helping learners how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing learners with knowledge, and causing learners to know
or understand. The effective learning of a foreign language depends on how teachers can
help their learners to successfully memorize and retain the language material. Because writing is one of the skills that is needed to be taught in junior high schools
and one of the difficult skills for language learners to master, teachers should apply the appropriate approaches in teaching writing so that the students are able to produce
a written text successfully. There have been two main approaches to teach writing; skills-based approach
and the „process‟ approach. A skills-based approach involves a fairly structured program of which the
skills and concepts are taught by the teacher directly. Teacher selected the topics from textbooks or other sources to develop the students‟ writing ability in some aspects
such as grammar, sentence construction, spelling and punctuation. The weakness of this approach is to make the teacher as the centre of the teaching and learning
process, so that the students cannot be independent learners and they are not 11
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