Types of Writing Performance

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b. Teaching English for Junior High School Students

There are four literacy levels of language and those are performative, functional, informational, and epistemic BSNP, 2006: 277. On the performative level, students have to be able to read, write, listen, and speak using shared symbols. On the functional level, students need to be capable of using language to meet their daily needs such as reading newspaper or manuals. On the informational level, students must be able to access knowledge with their language competency. Meanwhile, on the epistemic level, students will have to be able to express knowledge into the target language. Hartoyo 2011: 63 in his handout states that English language teaching in junior high school is usually aimed at assisting students to achieve the functional level of language literacy. They are expected to be capable of using English to communicate both in spoken and written way to accomplish their daily needs. He further explains that the goals or purposes of English language teaching in junior high school are: 1. Developing communicative competence in spoken and written language to reach functional literacy. 2. Generating awareness about the nature and importance of English to improve nation’s competitiveness in global society. 3. Developing students’ understanding about the relationship between language and culture. Teaching English in junior high school will focus more on teaching students communication skills in English through important language skills such as speaking and writing. The thing one has to remember is that making sure the students all pass the National Examination UN is never the goal of English language teaching or any other teaching activities in junior high school. This, of 19 course, makes the claim that a higher score indicates students’ high competence in English and success in learning English is a total fallacy, since, although students may have made the cuts or get perfect grade in the National Examination UN, it does not necessarily guarantee that they have the ability to communicate well in English.

c. Teaching Writing

The success of English teaching process of writing is influenced by at least three factors which are student, material, and teacher. Student is the object in the teaching writing process. Teacher, in this case, has a role as the subject, a person who is doing the teaching, whereas material is the medium for teacher and student to do the process of teaching writing. The three of them have to be balanced and each element must play their role well and effectively. There are many different approaches when it comes to the practice of writing skills. Teacher’s job is to select between them and decide many things from whether they want their students to put more focus on the writing process or the final product of writing itself to how technologies such as computer can be a useful tool for writing. Harmer 2001: 257-261 offers five different approaches to student writing. The first one is process and product. Teacher has to choose whether the aim of the writing tasks given to their students will only concentrate on the product which is the end result or it will focus on the process of writing instead. If a teacher advocates a process approach, they will design writing tasks which put emphasis on the numerous stages that any writing pieces go through. By using 20 process approach, students are required to spend more time on prewriting phases, editing, redrafting, and finally publishing their work. Process approach may seem perfect for any writing classroom activities but if classroom time is limited, it is kind of impossible for teacher to use this approach. Therefore, it all comes back to the classroom situation and condition whether teacher needs to use process or product approach. The second approach is writing and genre. In a genre approach, teacher will let their students to look at and examine many models of typical writing they are going to write. If, for example, students have to write announcements, the teacher will then ask them to observe various types of announcement. Studying real examples will help students to discover some facts about construction and also specific language being used in that genre. In addition, there are several different factors need to be considered whilst one is writing within a particular genre. The first factor is conventions and style of the genre. The next two are context in which the writing will be read and by whom. And last but not least, students also need to have knowledge of the topic. On the surface, a genre approach is really suitable for ESP students. However, it still is also appropriate for general English students if they want to produce quality writing product. The next approach is creative writing. According to Gaffield-Vile cited in Harmer 2001: 259 creative writing is a journey of self-discovery which promotes effective learning. This type of writing produces things such as stories, poetry, and plays. The term itself points to imaginative tasks, which means students can base their work on whatever that is in their mind. One thing that is