Teaching Writing in Junior High School

There are many different types of narratives including humor, romance, real life fiction, historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, diary-novels, and adventure. There is also a combination of narrative within each of those different types. Teachers can apply genre based approach in teaching and learning process in writing narrative texts. According to Richard 2006:36, genre based approach involves the mastery of different text types. Feez and Joyce 1998:24 explain that genre based approach is based on three assumptions as the following: 1 Language learning is a social activity 2 Learning occurs more effectively if teachers are explicit about what is expected of students 3 The process of learning language is a series of scaffold developmental steps which address different aspects of language. Moreover, Feez and Joyce 1998:28 mention that there are four to five stages involved in genre based approach. Those stages are building knowledge of field BKOF, modeling of the text MOT, joint construction of the text JCOT, independence construction of the text ICOT, and linking related text. The first stage is building knowledge of field BKOF. The students are introduced to the social context of an authentic model of the text-type being studied. The activities involve discussions, field-work and vocabulary building. All those activities build general cultural context and the understanding of social purpose of the texts. The second stage is modeling of the text MOT. The students investigate the structural patterns and language features of model of the text. The activity involves comparing the model with other examples of the same text type. The third stage is joint construction of the text JCOT. Students begin to contribute to the construction of the given text model. Teachers can reduce his her guidance so that students can learn how to construct texts independently. The examples of technique in this stage are skeleton texts and jigsaw. The fourth stage is independent construction of the text ICOT. Students work independently with the text. The activities include doing writing tasks. Students’ works are used for achievement assessment. The last stage is linking to related text. Students analyze what they have learned. The activities involve comparing a text with other texts which have similar purpose and looking at the generic structures and the language features.

f. Assesing Writing

How to assess the students writing is an important point in teaching writing. Brown 2004:241 states that there are three scoring methods that can be applied by teacher to assess the students’ writing. The first scoring method is the holistic scoring. This scoring method is done by assigning a single score to a piece of writing. It views the written product without paying too much attention to the details. Teachers cannot diagnose students’ writing skills since five aspects of writing such as content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics are not rated specifically. The second method is primary trait scoring. According to Weigle 2002:110 in Brown 2004:242, this method focuses on how well students can write within a narrowly defined range of discourse. This scoring type emphasizes on how writers achieve the goal or the function of the written texts. This scoring