1 Life in language: Teacher of English can help students to expand and enlarge
their worlds, and live more fully by awaking the students to the possibilities of language.
2 Need for writing: Writing is an important medium for self-expression,
communication, and the discovery of meaning. 3
Positive instruction in writing should be positive; students should be encouraged to use language.
4 Learning how to write: Learning how to write requires writing; writing
practice should be a major emphasis. 5
Required writing: Students need a class discipline and class discussion as well as freedom.
6 Classroom writing: Students should have an opportunity to compose in class,
with help during the actual writing process in the clarifying ideas, choosing phrases, and sometimes dealing with mechanical problems.
7 Range of assignment: Assignment should be individualized, adjusted to age,
interests, and abilities of the students. 8
Support for composing: Writing should follow the supporting activity, but not be replaced by it.
9 Talking and writing: The teacher can exploit interest in oral composition as a
step towards writing, but the importance of the write words remains, and practice in oral composition is not sufficient.
d. The Benefits of Writing
Pereira 1991: 50 states that writing has moved up into the scale of classroom priorities, partly because it provides the following benefits:
1 Writing and thinking are closely connected. The process of writing enables
students to explore a topic fully. 2
Writing helps students to discover what they want to say. The writing process is creative. The students sit down to write with a definite idea in mind, but as
the write, new ideas develop. 3
Writing reinforces grammar, idioms, and vocabulary that students have been working with in class.
4 When writing, students become involve with the language, with themselves,
and with their audience. 5
Students have the opportunity to be adventurous with the language, to take risks, to go beyond what has been taught.
In this study, roducing a piece of writing encourages students to think, explore new ideas, express their opinions, and present them in organization way.
e. Characteristics of Good Materials
In this study, according to Hobelman and Wiriyachitra, the modern approach to the teaching of writing involves a combination of the communicative
approach and the process approach writing. They describe the characteristics of good writing materials in accordance to the modern approach to the teaching of
writing as follows:
1 Materials should be learning-centered rather than teaching centered.
2 Materials should be creative.
3 Materials should be interesting.
4 Materials should be task-based.
5 Materials should be practical.
The designed instructional materials, which use mind mapping, require the students’ active involvement in the writing process. It includes some purposeful
activities and tasks. In this study, the writer concerns the characteristic of good materials in
three points. They are materials should be creative, interesting and practical. She applies those three characteristics because she believes that the eighth students of
SMPN 1 Kalikotes Klaten need them. The materials are going to help the students to have more understanding in writing English.
f. Pre-writing and Post-writing Activities
Pre-writing serves as the initial stage. Everything that precedes a particular writing experience can be thought of as the pre-writing stimuli Tiedt, 1989: 11.
The activities should be designed to extend students’ thinking. The post-writing activities are anything that follows the students’ writing –
sharing, editing, or publishing. Post-writing includes evaluation of the writing. Any these activities may be done individually, in pairs, in small groups, in the
large group, or in teacher-student conferences Tiedt, 1989: 11
