i. Teaching Writing in Junior High School
Brown 2007: 8 says that teaching may be defined as showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, give instructions, guide in the study of
something, provide with knowledge, and cause to know or understand. He also adds that teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to
learn, and setting the conditions for learning. As a productive skill, writing must be taught in a comprehensive way, Langan 2008: 13 suggests that writing should
be considered as a skill so that it can be learned like other skills such as driving, typing, or cooking. It means that a lot of practices will make a better writing.
According to the content standard which is developed by BNSP 2006 the English teaching of Junior High School in Indonesia is aimed at making the
students develop several competencies. They are 1 developing students’ oral and written competencies to achieve the informal competence which makes it possible
to acces knowledge 2 developing students’ awareness of the importance of English in improving English’s competence at the world’s level, 3 developing
students’ understanding on the relationship between cultures and language. In this research, the materials which are given to the students are used based
on the standard competence of the School-Based Curriculum based on Standar Isi untuk Satuan Pendidikan Dasar dan Menengah 2006: 134. The standard of
competence and basic competence of writing for junior high schools in the second semester of the grade VIII is presented below.
Table 1: Standard of Competence and Basic Competence of Writing Standar Kompetensi
Kompetensi Dasar Menulis
1. Mengungkapkan makna dalam teks tulis fungsional dan esei
pendek sederhana berbentuk recount dan narrative untuk
berinteraksi dengan lingkungan sekitar
12.1 Mengungkapkan makna dalam bentuk teks tulis fungsional pendek
sederhana dengan menggunakan ragam bahasa tulis secara akurat,
lancar dan berterima untuk berinteraksi dengan lingkungan
sekitar. 12.2 Mengungkapkan makna dan
langkah retorika dalam esei pendek sederhana
dengan menggunakan
ragam bahasa tulis secara akurat, lancar
dan berterima
untuk berinteraksi
dengan lingkungan
sekitar berbentuk
recount dan
narrative.
Based on the table above, it can be concluded that in the second semester the materials for writing are about recount and narrative texts. Due to the
materials in the curriculum, in this research, the researcher only focused on teaching a narrative text.
j. Measuring Writing
In order to be fair on scoring process, the researcher needs to decide which scoring rubric that should be used as scoring reference. Brown 2004 states three
main types of assessing writing. They are primary trait scales, holistic scales, and analytic scales.
1 Holistic Scoring
Holistic scale is assigning a single score to a script based on the overall impression of the script. Holistic scoring results in a more general description for