19 Most writers went through a lot of struggle before mastering the writing
skill and being able to create a high quality piece of writing. To be a good writer, one has to overcome difficulties and weaknesses. Peter Westwood 2008
classified the areas of writers‟ weaknesses as follows:
1. Weak writers produce a much smaller amount of work than more
proficient writers. 2.
Weak writers spend little or no time thinking and planning before they start to write.
3. Weak writers are usually reluctant to revise, edit, and polish a first draft.
4. Weaker writers tend to be preoccupied with the mechanical aspects of
writing. 5.
Weaker writers have problems with spelling. Peter Westwood, 2008: 60- 3
The duty of the teacher is to guide writer-students to overcome the difficulties listed above. Appropriate teaching techniques need to be implemented
to achieve the goal. To implement the „appropriate‟ teaching techniques, the teacher has to first understand the principles in designing the techniques.
e. Cohesion and Coherence
Susan Feez and Helen Joyce 1998 defined text as “any stretch of
language which is held together cohesively through meaning”. This definition implies that a piece of writing has to be unified as a whole to convey meanings,
thus a text has rhetorical features called cohesion and coherence. According to Eli Hinkel 2004,
cohesion refers to “the connectivity of ideas in discourse and sentences to one another in text, thus creating the flow of information in a unified
way”. In other words, cohesion has something to do with the connection between sentences and paragraphs. Furthermore, Eli Hinkel 2004 defined coherence as
20 “organization of discourse with all elements present and fitting together
logically.”
According to Hammer 2004, there are two types of cohesion that make a text „sticks together‟, i.e. lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. Lexical
cohesion is achieved with repetition of words and lexical chains the use of words in the same topic area. Grammatical cohesion, on the other hand, can be achieved
in more varied ways, i.e. pronoun and possessive reference, article reference, tense agreement, conjunctions, substitution, and ellipsis.
Cohesion is what connects sentences, but a text needs to be coherent to make it more „makes sense‟. ɑccording to Hammer 2004, coherence can be
achieved through the way the writer sequences the information. The way information sequenced is very much related to the type of genre being written,
because different types of genre have different writing structures. Therefore, teaching writing with Genre-Based Approach should take into account cohesion
and coherence in the implementation.
2. The Teaching of Writing
a. Teaching Writing
The world-wide need for English has built a great demand for language teaching methodology, materials, and resources. In the 1990s, traditional
language teaching approaches focusing on grammatical competence spread around the world Richards, 2006. However, it was later argued that
communicative competence is more needed in order to make learners be able to
21 use language appropriately. Communicative Language Teaching then became a
solution in language teaching methodology. It is a method in language teaching which helps students to practice using English. In other words, Communicative
Language Teaching brings a concept of learning by doing. In the communicative approach, grammar was no longer the central focus
of language teaching and learning, and some aspects of language use were determined to design a syllabus. These aspects are considered in syllabus design
as to focus on the development of lear ners‟ communicative competence. Van Ek
and Alexander 1980 proposed ten aspects of language use to be considered in syllabus design; they are:
1. the purpose of the learning
2. the setting in which they will use the target language
3. their social role in the target language
4. the events they will participate
5. the language function
6. the topics or concepts involved
7. the discourse and rhetorical skills
8. the varieties of the target language
9. the grammatical content that will be needed
10. the lexical content that will be needed.
The teaching of English is manifested in the four main skills —listening,
speaking, reading, and writing. It means that to learn English, a learner needs to sharpen their skills in these four aspects. However, among these four skills,
learners naturally learn receptive skills before productive skills. Donald and Kneale 2001:14 stated:
“Language teachers conventionally distinguish between four aspects of language which are mastered by means of the “four skills”: listening,
