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
19 present the result and sometimes the product of their observation and analysis. As
stated on the Pedoman Umum Pembelajaran, direct learning is dealing with Core Competence 3 and 4. According to 2013 Curriculum, there are several Basic
Competencies of writing skill for VIII grade Junior High School. One of them is presented in the table below.
Table 1: Core competence and basic competencies of writing skills for Junior High School students grade VIII
Core Competency Basic Competencies
4. Mengolah, menyaji, dan menalar
dalam ranah konkret menggunakan, mengurai, merangkai, memodifikasi,
dan membuat dan ranah abstrak menulis, membaca, menghitung,
menggambar, dan mengarang sesuai dengan yang dipelajari di sekolah dan
sumber lain yang sama dalam sudut pandangteori
4.14 Menangkap makna teks
recount lisan dan tulis, pendek
dan sederhana,
tentang kegiatan, kejadian, peristiwa.
4.15 Menyusun teks recount
lisan dan tulis, pendek dan sederhana,
tentang kegiatan,
kejadian, peristiwa,
dengan memperhatikan
fungsi sosial, struktur teks, dan
unsure kebahasaan yang benar dan sesuai konteks.
The table above presents the basic competencies of writing skill in VIII grade. However, in this research study, the researcher only focused on basic
competency number 4.15 that is “Arranging short simple recount text about activity and event correctly and contextually.” Recount text is a text that retells
past events orderly based on the events occurred. This sequence of events is one of the characteristics of recount text Anderson and Anderson: 1998.
Because of the different materials, goals and students’ characteristics, teaching Junior High School students is different from teaching students from
20 other school levels. Teens according to Brown 2001 are an age of transition,
confusion, self-consciousness, growing, and changing bodies and minds. Then, because of those reasons, Brown proposes some considerations that teachers
should apply in teaching teens. Teacher should pay attention to their intellectual capacity, because they usually have changes with their logical thinking. Teacher
also should pay attention with their attention span, because in their age their attention span can be easily be shortened if they have problems. Students’ sensory
input is still important because they can use the essential nature of appealing through all five senses. Since they are ultrasensitive to something related with
their changing physical and emotional selves, teacher should keep their self- esteem high by encouraging them. Lastly, teens are also becoming adult-like in
their way to think about the material or input but they cannot over think or they will get bored very easily.
In addition, Harmer 2007 says that teachers’ job in teaching teenage
students are to engage students with the material which is relevant and involving and provoke intellectual activity by helping them to be aware of contrasting ideas
and concepts which they can resolve for themselves, though still with teachers’ guidance. At the sa
me time, teachers have to strengthen students’ self-esteem, and always be conscious of their need to identity. From what Brown and Harmer have
proposed, it can be said that teaching teens has a special and different technique. The teacher has able to adapt to teens characteristics and lead interesting teaching
and learning process so that the students will not get bored and lose their attention span quickly in the class. Providing challenging but not overwhelming activities,
21 doing discussion, and giving correction and feedback are some ways to raise
students’ attention span, self-esteem and learning achievement.
2. Writing Skills
In this discussion of writing skills, some main points are presented. Those are the nature of writing, writing as a process, and macro and micro skills of
writing.
a. The Nature of Writing
Read and Hays 2013 state that writing is a complex activity that has wide variety related to the situation, audience, and purpose. Furthermore, Hyland
2003 defines that texts are a set of appropriate grammatical structure and have “slot and filler” pattern in which the sentences can be arranged into a coherent
paragraph by putting those different words in the slots. According to Brown 2001 written language is graphic representation of spoken language, and that
written appearance is almost same with spoken performance, the only difference is in the representation between graphic and auditory signal. It can be said that
writing is a set of written sentences which have particular meaning that the writer wants to communicate with the readers. Writing is one of the productive language
skills but it is different from speaking. Brown 2001 has suggested seven characteristics of written language.
First, permanence deals with the revisions before writing is going to its final. Second, production time leads the writer such times to develop their process in
order to make better final product. But sometimes, some educational contexts ask
