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Make feedback helpful and meaningful Feedback should not entail “correcting” a student‟s writing. In order to
foster independent writers, the teacher can provide summary comments that instruct students to look for problems and correct them on their own.
4 Clarification for the teacher and the students how the writing product will be
evaluated Students often feel that the evaluation of their writing is completely
subjective, thus the teachers should develop a statement what is valued in students‟ writing. The teachers can develop a rubric to help evaluating the
students‟ writing. It should outline the weight of grammar and mechanics in relationship to content and ideas, as well as other important features of writing.
e. Types of Writing
According to Brown 2004, p. 220, there are four categories of written performance that capture the range of written production, they are:
1 Imitative
To produce written language, the learner must attain skills in the fundamental, basic tasks of writing letter, words, punctuation, and very brief
sentences. At this stage, form is the primary if not exclusive focus, while context and meaning are of secondary concern.
2 Intensive controlled
Beyond the fundamental of imitative writing are skills in producing appropriate vocabulary within a context, collocations and idioms, and correct
grammatical features up to the length of a sentence.
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Responsive In responsive writing, learners are asked to perform at a limited discourse
level, connecting sentences into paragraph and creating a logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs. Genres of writing include brief narratives
and descriptions, short reports, lab reports, summaries, brief responses to reading, and interpretation of charts or graphs.
4 Extensive
Extensive writing implies successful management of all the processes and strategies of writing for all purposes, up to the length of an essay, a term paper, a
major research project report, or even a thesis. Focus on grammatical form is limited to occasional editing or proofreading of a draft.
In this study, the suitable types of writing fall between intensive and responsive writing. Intensive writing can be used as a tool to improve the
students‟ skill to construct sentences with correct grammatical forms and becomes the fundamental to write a paragraph with correct grammar of certain tasks.
f. Writing Competence
Mosenthal 1983 notes that, “…there is no one adequate definition of
writing competence ” p. 217. Furthermore, there is no evidence that writing
contributes to writing competence; those who write more do not write better and increasing writing does not result in better writing Krashen, 1994. However, he
elaborates that writing make a different kind of contribution: writing can make you smarter. In correlation,
“…writing can aid in thinking and problem-solving Krashen, 2003 as well as positive correlations between eminence and amount
