Principle and Approach in Teaching Writing

12 Therefore, Raimes suggests six approaches that can be used by teachers in teaching writing. Those as follows: 1 The Controlled-to-Free Approach emphasizes more on accuracy than fluency. This approach stresses on grammar mastery, syntax, mechanics, etc. 2 The Free-Writing Approach emphasizes on quantity of writing rather than quality. This approach demands intermediate-level students to focus on content and fluency. Once students have ideas and write it down, the other aspect of writing such as grammatical accuracy, organization, and the rest will gradually follow. 3 The Paragraph-Pattern Approach emphasizes on the generic structure or organization of the paragraphs on the selected text type. This approach refers to the principle that in different cultures people construct or communicate with other people differently. So even a student organizes their paragraphs well in their first language, they still need to see, analyze, and practice particular English features of a piece of writing. 4 The Grammar-Syntax-Organization Approach emphasizes the need in working simultaneously on more than one of the writing features since writing cannot be seen as composed of separate skills which are learned one by one. 5 The Communicative Approach emphasizes the purpose of writing and the audience for it. This approach leads the students to think the purpose of their writing and the audience or reader of their writing. The classroom activity can bring the students themselves as the real classroom readers in the assignment. And the last one, 6 The Process Approach has been well known approach in teaching writing recently. This approach emphasizes more on the writing process than the writing product. The students do not write on a given topic in a restricted time. 13 They are asked to show their draft and revise it based on the correction, comment and suggestion given by the teacher as a process in writing. Teacher should provide the students with two crucial supports: time for the students find out the ideas and feedback of the students’ draft. On the other hand, Harmer 2004: 45 states that teachers can implement a two-stage approach in teaching handwriting. These two approaches are recognition and production of letters. The first approach deals with letters recognition and the second approach deals with direction of the writing and the position of the letters on the lines. These two approaches are combined together by the teacher in teaching writing. In summary, teachers can use and combine more than one approaches in teaching writing since every approach has its own lack and benefit. The choice is based on the material and the studen ts’ needs. The selected approaches can be combined to complement each other in teaching writing in order to cover all the students’ needs and learning achievement. Another theory about teaching writing has come from other experts that propose teachers to teach writing not only as one of language skill but also as a process. According to Hyland 2003: 10, teaching writing as a process places the students as an independent producer of text. Because of this reason, teacher should put basic cognitive processes as central to writing activity and emphasize the need in developing students’ abilities to plan, define rhetorical problem, and propose evaluate solutions. The teacher should give the students brief explanation about the material as the basic of their cognitive knowledge in producing writing 14 and activities that lead the students in finding ideas. Correction, revision and feedback are needed to evaluate students’ writing. Hyland 2003: 14 also says that writing not only needs to be seen as a process but also it has to be focused on its content too. Students have to think what they required to write about. This involves a set of topics of interest that establish a coherence and purpose for the core of subject matter that students will write about. The teacher guides the students in generating their ideas and put it in correct sequences in their product writing. One of the examples is by using brainstorming activity in the beginning of the lesson to encourage the students to get their own ideas. Hyland presents a schema for guiding students to do a writing task as stated by White and Arndt 1991: 63. Figure 2: A spider-gram to brainstorming a writing task adapted from White and Arndt 1991: 63 In addition, Brown 2001: 80 states that motivation is one of the important factors that affect students’ learning achievement and thus teaching writing as a thinking process in which learners develop their own ideas freely and openly can improve students’ intrinsic motivation by appealing to the learners’ self- determination and autonomy. 15 In conclusion, teaching writing as process is one of the best ways in delivering writing course. The teacher can give chance to the students to improve their understanding and skill in micro-skill of writing, such as, grammar, spelling, punctuation, paragraph organization, etc. in the process of producing their final writing. The teacher’s role in the classroom is not only as a model that gives brief explanation and example to the students. but also as a corrector that provides feedb ack, such as, correction, comment or suggestion to the students’ writing draft.

b. Teacher’s Role in Teaching Writing

In teaching language skills, teachers have many different approaches and techniques. The same as the teaching approaches and principles of teaching writing, the roles of the teachers in teaching each language skill are different too. Harmer 2007 says that in teaching writing, teachers have three main roles. These three main roles are: 1 Motivator means that teachers have to motivate the students. Teachers can create the right condition for the students to generate and develop their ideas and tell them the importance of the activity given, and encourage the students to make as much effort as possible to reach maximum benefit. 2 Resource means that teachers have to be ready to provide information and language where it is needed. Teachers can tell the students that heshe is ready and available to check their draft, give advice or suggestion in the process of producing their writing in a constructive and tactful way. 16 3 Feedback provider means that teachers have to respond positively and encouragingly to the content of the students’ writing. In addition, Harmer 2004: 41 specifies some teacher’s important tasks that have to be performed in pre-writing, whilst-writing and post-writing when students do “writing for writing” activities, where they feel reluctant to write or find difficulties to find idea or express themselves to their satisfaction. Those tasks are presented here: 1 Demonstrating: teachers have to show what kind of writing or genre and what specifics point of the text type the students will produce. 2 Motivating and provoking: teachers should help the students in writing by encouraging and giving clue to them when they have no idea, lost of words, or do not know a word they want to say in English. 3 Supporting: almost same with motivating and provoking, teachers should support the students in writing class. For example teachers can help the students to overcome difficulties in writing but this task is not allowed to do in writing test. 4 Responding: teachers have to give respond to students’ writing draft. Teachers do not assess the students’ work as it finished. They only check the students’ draft and give feedback, such as corrections and sometimes but not always suggestions that are useful for their revision and improvement. 5 Evaluating: teachers have to evaluate students’ work and tell them the result by simply giving them back their work with our corrections or tell them how well they have done. 17 I n evaluating the students’ work, sometimes the teachers also need to assess the students’ work in writing test to infer the students’ writing ability and make decision based on the inference. Weigle 2002: 46 proposed the notion of performance assessment by applying Bachman and Palmer’s 1996 contextualization of language use and language ability into writing assessment. According to Weigle the term performance assessment means that any assessment procedure that involves either observation of behavior in the real world or a simulation of real life activity, for example performance of the ability being assessed and the evaluation of the performance by raters. In this topic, dealing with writing, any writing test that involves actual writing can be classified into a performance test since the written product represents performance writing. In this research, analytic scoring was used to assess students’ writing performance. In this type of scoring, the writing performance is not assessed by single score but rated on several aspects of writing. Weigle 2002: 14 suggests scoring rubric of writing proposed by Jacobs et al. 1981 which is one of the best known and most widely used analytic scales in ESL. Back to the teacher’s roles in teaching writing, Harmer 1998: 84 also says that teacher should not make the students feel burdensome and de-motivated. The teacher has to get a balance between being accurate and truthful on the one hand and treating students sensitively and symphatically on the other. The teacher can tell the students what is the focus or the point that will be assessed in the end of the lesson. For example, the teachers will assess only on several micro skills of writing such as, punctuation, or spelling, or grammar, etc. This method gives two 18 advantages. The first one is that the students can concentrate on the particular aspect of skill and the second, it decrease students’ mistakes and cuts down correction.

c. Teaching Writing in Junior High School

Teaching English in Junior High School, like other school levels, is under the control of The Ministry of Education and Culture. Nowadays, Indonesian Government has released 2013 Curriculum that has to be applied in every school in Indonesia. This latest curriculum has to be the guideline for the teacher in conducting teaching and learning process. 2013 Curriculum develops two kinds of learning process; those are direct learning and indirect learning. In this research, the researcher use direct learning. Direct learning is a learning process where the students develop their knowledge and thinking ability through direct interaction with learning sources in the form of learning activities that has been arranged in course grid and lesson plan. In direct learning the students have five learning activities; observing, questioning, collecting data, analyzing data, communicating and creating. Observing is the first stage of scientific method that drives the students to read, listen, or see with or without equipment. In questioning the students’ learning activity is asking question about the information that they do not know from what they have observed. In collecting data, the students suppose doing an experiment or finding more information from other sources. In analyzing data, the students have to analyze the information that they got in to enrich or deepen their knowledge. In the last step, communicating and creating, the students are asked to