Principles of Teaching Writing

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