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Another part of the Eclectic Approach is genre-based writing; it holds the idea that writing serves a purpose and the language is used as a media to achieve this
purpose Hyland, 2003. The purpose of the writing may vary: to get things done, to tell a story, to describe something, etcetera. The writer here uses texts as the media to
convey certain information, to make relation with his or her readers, and to achieve the purpose of the text itself. By combining these two approaches, the students will
set the purpose of their writing and also go through several steps in order to achive the goal.
In the classroom, the Eclectic Approach encourages learner-centered activities Richards Rodgers, 2001. Furthermore, Richards and Rodgers also suggest
specific roles of the teachers and learners in the class. For the learners, they have a lot of opportunities to respond to the topic of discussion. In addition, they may also get
the information from the other students, not only from the teachers. Still from Richards and Rodgers 2001, as the students are expected to be active Brown, 2001,
the teachers then have to be creative in choosing the materials that would be given to the students. The hardest job is combining the strengths from different activities into
an activity that will encourage students to learn independently Jackson, 2011. After understanding the nature of the Eclectic Approach, the researcher needs
to design the learning materials that will help the students to understand the materials Petrilli, 2011. This new material is called Group of Activities for In-depth Learning
GAIL.
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2.1.2 Group of Activities for In-depth Learning GAIL
GAIL is a set of activities which will strengthen each writing step in the Eclectic Approach. In the process of making this set of activities, the researcher
applies Kemp’s 1997 Instructional Design and Tomlinson and Matsuhara’s 2004 Material Development in order to get a strong theoretical basis. The detailed
information about these theories is presented in the following section. Presented below is the explanation of GAIL itself.
The activities in GAIL are especially designed for SMA Kolese De Britto students to meet their needs. There are three things that should be considered : the
suitability of the activities to the recent curriculum Davison Dowson, 2003, the students’ learning styles Kemp, 1997, and also the outcomes Swain, 1995.
Suitability deals with the goal that GAIL is trying to achieve; it should meet the goal which was set by the curriculum Davison Dowson, 2003. When the researcher
conducted the study, the school was implementing curriculum 2006. Therefore, GAIL was designed based on the goals that were mentioned in curriculum 2006. Then, the
researcher should also consider the students’ learning styles and the outcomes. Based on the researcher’s experiences while doing the internship program, the students
tended to analyze the problems given to them and the school emphasized cognitive and affective outputs. Considering students’ tendency and output preference, the
researcher set the activities that required them to give a lot of reasonings and also pair discussions Jackson, 2011. Besides these three requirements, GAIL has several
other considerations.
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Each activity in GAIL is chosen based on the aforementioned considerations and aims to ahieve a certain goal. The goal of choosing activities as the main course
is active learning Jackson, 2011; all the teachers need to do is directing and confirming their understanding Jensen Nickelsen, 2011. Even if the teachers need
to explain, it should only contain enough information so the students can tell when they have solved the problems Ohlson, 2011. In addition, activities help the students
to follow the writing processes based on the steps provided Petrilli, 2011. Therefore, the researcher should choose the activities which meet the students’ need Davison
Dowson, 2003. The assessments for GAIL are conducted in the beginning and also in the end
of the study. They are a part of evaluations in order to be able to make improvement. For the syllabus of GAIL, please refer to APPENDIX 1. In the following section, the
detailed explanation of the steps of designing GAIL is presented.
2.1.3 Instructional Design in GAIL
In designing the material for the students, either it is new or adapted, the teachers should follow certain steps, usually the one made by Kemp 1997. There are
eight steps that should be completed. However the researcher only took six steps. The reason was because the other two steps were integrated in the six chosen steps.
Presented in figure 2.1. is the Kemp’s model.
