Definitions of Writing Evaluation of Writing

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CHAPTER 2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter presents the theories of related literature used in this research. It covers the definitions of writing, evaluation of writing, narrative paragraph, pictures as media, picture series as media in teaching writing, some procedures of teaching writing using picture series and research hypothesis.

2.1 Definitions of Writing

Writing is one of the ways for people to communicate to one another. According to Langan 2006:6 three most common purposes of writing are to inform, to persuade, and to entertain the readers. To inform means to give some information to the readers about something, to persuade means to convince the readers to agree with the writer’s point of view on the subject; while to entertain is to amuse, to make someone pleased, and to make the readers have imagination with the author’s writing. Those three purposes always come up when people are doing communication with each other. It is supported by Bram 1995:25 who states that our purpose is communication, when we write, we intend to interact with our readers using written language. In other words, it can be said that writing is a way of communication. In writing, it is necessary to make our writing clear and easy to be understood. To make it clear, the writers should to know the elements of writing. As stated by Hughes 1989:93, students need to know some of the elements of writing such as grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and content. The explanation about each element is given below. 2.2 The Aspects of Writing 2.2.1 Grammar Fairbairn and Winch 1996:108 state that grammar is a set of rules to construct sentences that makes sense and acceptable English. It is also supported by Heaton 1991:135 who states that the grammatical skill is the ability to write correct and appropriate sentences. Thus, it can be concluded that to produce a good and effective writing, the writers should master the grammatical aspects of language. In writing a narrative text, the students need to master grammar, especially Simple Past Tense. Simple Past Tense shows the time that happened in the past. According to Hayden et al. 1956:61, the Simple Past expresses activities that existed or occured in the past. The rule of Simple Past Tense is S+V2+O+adverb of time yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, a long time ago, and so on.

2.2.2 Vocabulary

Vocabulary is one of the important aspects in writing. It is difficult to create writing in certain language, especially in writing English if the writer has only few words. It is supported by Bram 1995:92 who states that words are the basic tools for writing, words carry meanings; wrong words surely do not get the writers’ message across. In order to make a good writing, the writer should have a great store of words in which the meaning of those words have been understood.

2.2.3 Mechanics

Mechanics are very essential in writing. The use of mechanics in writing can influence the message of writing. The use of mechanics incorrectly can make the readers misunderstand the message in writing. According to Bram 1995:92 using correct punctuation is indispensable to careful writing, misused punctuation may convey a different message. The other mechanical skill is spelling. In writing, spelling is important because poor spellings can make the meaning ambiguous and non-sense sentences Fairbairn and Winch, 1996:100. Thus, it can be concluded that the writers should write with the correct spellings so that the readers are not confused with what the writers write.

2.2.4 Organization Organization

is the students’ ability to arrange or to present their ideas into chronological or logical order. Dealing with writing narrative text in this research, the students should write their ideas based on the pictures given and the organization that will be measured is how the students can organize their ideas following the generic structure of narrative text which covers orientation, complication and resolution. Those elements should develop unity and coherence. a. Unity A paragraph is said to be unity if sentences are related to the main idea. Bram 1995:20 states that a paragraph is said to be unified if the sentences in a paragraph focus on the discussion about one thing stated in the topic sentence. In other words, all sentences in a paragraph should focus on the one thing expressed in the topic sentence and a paragraph has connection and supports the main idea. b. Coherence Coherence means how the students arrange their ides in a logical or chronological order. Fardhani 2005:113 states that the logical arrangement of ideas and sentences in a paragraph is called coherence. In other words, every sentence in a paragraph should have connection each other logically. Connecting words such as; first, next, then, soon, shortly, last, finally are oftenly used to organize ideas in chronological manner Carrol, 1990:17

2.2.5 Content

According of Heaton 1991:135, content is the students’ ability to think creatively and develop thoughts, excluding all irrelevant information. In order to be able to compose a good writing, the writers should have an ability to express and develop their ideas about the story. In fact, the students in senior high school especially the eleventh grade students have difficulty to express their ideas in generating a story to become a good narrative text. To solve this problem, the teacher should find ways to make the students more easily in expressing their ideas in the form of writing narrative text.

2.3 Evaluation of Writing

Evaluating the students’ writing is sometimes difficult because it needs certain methods to evaluate their work. There are two methods of scoring the students’ writing task, namely analytic scoring and holistic scoring. Hughes 2003:86 states that to obtain reliable scoring of writing, holistic scoring and analytic scoring can be applied. Hughes 2003:100 defines that analytic scoring method is a method of scoring which requires a separate score for each aspect of writing skill. It means that analytic scoring method is a method which gives scores for each number of aspects of the task. The advantages of using this scoring method are deposes of the problem of uneven development of sub skills in individuals and in fact that the scorer has to give a number of scores that tend to make the scoring more reliable. The scorers are compelled to consider aspects of performance which they might otherwise ignore. However, this scoring method has a disadvantage as it takes a long time in correcting. As stated by Hughes 2003:103 the disadvantage of analytic scoring is the time that it takes. This scoring takes a long time because it evaluates each aspects of writing. Holistic scoring is a method of scoring that involves the assignment at a single score to a piece of writing on the basis of an overall impression on it Hughes, 2003:94. The advantage of this scoring method takes relatively short time. According to Hughes 2003:95, holistic scoring has the advantage of being rapid. In holistic scoring, it is possible for each piece of work to be scored more that once if it is necessary. However, this method also has disadvantage. It is the scorer or the teacher who cannot identify in which aspects of writing that the students have difficulties about their writing. The teacher also has difficulties in scoring the strenghts and the weakness of the students’ writing. From that explanation above, there are two methods of scoring writing, namely analytic scoring and holistic scoring methods. In this research, the researcher applied analytic scoring method to evaluate the students’ writing. The aspects that were evaluated were structure or grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and content because they were the aspects of writing for the eleventh grade students of SMAMAN. Dealing with the aspects of writing, the students ’ results of writing were evaluated by using analytical scoring proposed by Hughes 2003:103. According to Hughes 2003:26, a good test must fulfill two requirements, they are validity and reliability. O’Malley and Pierce 1996:25 state that content validity is important to ensure correspondent between curriculum objectives and the content of the assessment. It means, the test must be appropriate with the curriculum used at school. In this research, content validity will be established because the writing test is constructed based on the KTSP 2006 for SMA, and the theme was also consulted to the English teacher.

2.4 Narrative Text A Narrative text