Theory of Teaching Writing

information gap that leads to communicative activities: if the students work with a variety of readings at the same time, then they will be dealing with different content, and anything they write to each other will thus be authentic communication, conveying new and real information Raimes, 1983: 50. The activities we can ask students to do in the classroom to tie their reading in with their writing fall into two broad categories: they can work either with the text or from the text. Students work with the text when they copy and when they examine the writer’s choices of specific linguistic and logical features, such as cohesive links, punctuation, grammar, sentence arrangement, and organization. They work from the text when they use it to create a text of their own, that is, when they summarize, complete, speculate, or react Raimes, 1983: 51. In teaching the integrated reading and writing, the teacher can create many teaching strategies which enhance the students in learning reading and writing skills. These following strategies are some strategies for teaching integrated reading and writing: 1 Asking Questions to Clarify According to Chamot, et al. 1986: 26, in their book The Learning Strategies Handbook states that asking questions to clarify means clarifying involves your asking for explanation, verification, rephrasing, or examples. a. Conducting this strategy, we usually use question words such as: b. Where…? c. Who…? d. How do you know? e. What does it mean…? f. What’s the reason? g. What happened…?Etc. 2 Predicting Predicting involves thinking of the kinds of words, phrases, and information that you can expect to encounter during the task.” In addition, Chamot, et al. 1986: 27 states that “The purpose of using prediction is to motivate the student, increase comprehension, help students to share prior knowledge and give responsibility of comprehension to the students” 3 Activating Background Knowledge According to Bonnie and Jean 2002: 85, when you activate background knowledge, you help students recognize and use information they already posses. Your students probably posses some degree of knowledge about the text they are reading, but they may not think about what they know as they read. To activate background knowledge, you can ask students what they already know about the topic. You should be able whether their background knowledge is adequate, inadequate, or erroneous. 4 Checking Comprehension When conducting reading comprehension activity, the students should really understand the information on the text. According to Greenall Michael Swan 1986: 3 “Checking comprehension means the students need to study the