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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
A. LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Writing
a. The nature of Writing
People write for a variety of purposes and in many different forms. History has seen that the form of writing pieces has continuously changed in both its form
and style. We learn from the history that people in the past used to leave messages through engraving on stones with symbols, graphs, or even picture-like writing.
However, today people exchange written information through emails, phone text messages, and other communicating services.
The language used in writing has also changed over centuries. The language itself is evolving. The early fourteenth-century writing has significantly
different spelling from present-day English and some letters are formed differently too Harmer, 2004. It suggests that despite its changing form and
style, writing has always been a part of communication through the history of humankind.
The purposes of writing contribute in the diversity of writing forms as well. A piece of writing aiming to inform an announcement will be different from
13 a piece written to advertise. In the same way, who writes to whom also determines
the writing product. For example, pieces of writing we send to communicate with friends through phone text messages will be significantly different from a piece of
article we write for academic-scientific journals. The mentioned examples are parallel to the theory of the relationship
between text and context which proposes that a text is bound with a certain context Emi Emilia, 2010. According to Halliday 1985, there are two types of
contexts, i.e. context of situation which refers to the immediate environment of language, and context of culture which refers to a broader background with which
the text needs to be comprehended. This notion suggests that a text cannot be separated from the context.
Without context, a text is meaningless. On that note, it should be kept in mind that context is needed to produce a text
—that context is needed in writing.
Writing itself is considered as a language skill that has to be consciously learned. Unlike speaking, writing is not a productive skill we can
just „pick up‟. Naturally, for the first language learners, writing skill comes later than speaking
skill. As Harmer 2004 stated, human being grows up speaking their first language while writing is a literacy skill that has to be taught.
Literacy is the ability to read and write. According to Harmer 2004, literacy skill has been seen as a desirable skill in the last centuries as the need to
be able to read and write becomes vital. On this regard, the idea that learning