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4 A tool for increasing awareness and perfection of one’s environment
Writing frequently will exacerbate one’s sensitivity and develop the ability of understanding the environment.
5 A tool for active involvement, not passive acceptance
Writing is a literary work through which one expresses his idea, creates things, and involves in his creation completely.
6 A tool for developing an understanding of an ability to use the language
The main public goals of school are reaching the ability to read and understand what is written by somebody else and also increasing the
ability to use words in writing to retell new idea to the readers. It is obvious that the writing activity is useful to help students reach those
goals.
b. The Principles Of Teaching Writing
To make the teaching writing to be more meaningful and successful, teachers need to understand the principles of teaching writing. The teaching
writing is not a simple matter since it involves not only students’ academic achievement in producing language but also students’ social achievement.
Teachers have to encourage students to produce language in the forms of writings and have positive attitude toward students’ mistakes. “In setting writing
tasks, the teacher should encourage students to define for themselves the message they want to send and the audience who will receive it” as stated by Celce-
Murcia 2001: 207.
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According to Hobelman 1990: 39 as cited in Emilia 2006: 20, the
principles of teaching writing are:
1 Writing is an integrated skill. It should not be taught in isolation. The
teachers should involve other skills to support the writing skill. 2
The students are the center of learning. They should do as much of the work as possible, not the teacher. The teacher role is to advice on
procedures and to monitor the work that is going on. 3
Group discussion is important in generating and organizing ideas for discovering what the writer’s ideas are. Then the actual writing may be
done individually. 4
Feedback is important to build the students’ self-evaluation. It can be done through pair of group work. The students can do this after they have tried
to correct their work themselves. 5
Students should be asked to exchange their compositions so that they become readers of each other’s work. This is an important part of the
writing experience because it is by the responding as readers that students will develop an awareness of the fact that their written work will be read
by other people. 6
In correcting the work, the teacher should introduce a correction code with symbols for the different types of errors, focus on global rather than local
errors, that is attend to errors that interference with comprehensibility rather than errors that have little effect on the reader’s ability to
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understand, and give a short overall comment for the students to let them know how far their successfulness in the task given.
The principles of writing help teachers to set the track for the teaching and learning activities. Since the reading is integrated in writing materials, which ends
at students’ abilities in writing, teachers need to pay attention much on students’ writing activities. Each student has different writing proficiency so that teachers
need to assist students in the process of writing even tho ugh they work in groups. Harmer 1991: 330 - 331 stated that,
“… will be to motivate students, creating the right condition for the generating of ideas, persuading them of the usefulness of the activity, and
encouraging them to make as much as efforts as possible for maximum benefits. … we should be ready to supply information and language where
necessary. Teachers should respond positively and encouragingly to the content of what the students have written.”
Therefore, teachers need to encourage students to express ideas without fears toward errors.
c. Purpose of Writing
