7 comprehend and grasp the meaning and the ideas of the contexts to get
information or knowledge that should be achieved by the first semester students of the History Department.
2. Writing
According to Nunan 2003, writing is a mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and
paragraphs that will be clear to a reader p. 88. He also describes writing as a process and a product. Similarly, Brown 2004 also mentions that writing is
primarily a convention for recording speech and for reinforcing grammatical and lexical features of language p. 218.
In this study, writing refers to the students‟ productive skill to write a composition of paragraphs using correct grammatical form and employ their
vocabulary knowledge in various writing genres.
3. Content-Based Instruction CBI
The term content-based instruction is commonly used to describe approaches to integrating language and content instruction, but it is not always
used in the same way Met, 1999. Another definition of content-based instruction is given by Crandall and Tucker 1990, p. 187
as “…an approach to language instruction that integrates the presentation of topics or tasks from subject matter
classes e.g. math, social studies within the context of teaching a second or foreign language”.
In this study, content-based instruction refers to an approach to language instruction in which the contents of reading and writing materials are specifically
8 related to the field of study for the first semester students of the History
Department.
4. The History Department of Sanata Dharma University
The History Department is one of the departments in the Faculty of Letters in Sanata Dharma University. It aims to provide graduates who excel in historical
knowledge mastery and are culture-conscious. The graduates are expected to make use of history as a bridge of the past, the present and the future.
The History Department focuses in studying Indonesia history. Most of the historical data are written in English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Dutch. Therefore, the
students of the History Department are required to have appropriate English proficiency to be able to read and write. The targets of English learning focus on
reading comprehension and writing competence. In the curriculum of 2006, the students of semester 1 are directly exposed to
two English courses at a time: Bahasa Inggris 1 which focuses on grammar and Bahasa Inggris 2 which focuses on vocabulary. Later on, they are obliged to take
Bahasa Inggris 3 which focuses on writing. In the semester 4 and 5 they are required to implement the knowledge they gained in Aplikasi Bahasa Inggris 1
and 2. In this study, the researcher focuses on the first semester students of the
History Department who take English course. The research is conducted in Bahasa Inggris 1 course in the academic year 20142015, the History Department
of Sanata Dharma University.
