Background of the study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the information related to the issues in teaching writing and the importance of having the study. There are six majors covered, namely1 background of the study, 2 problem identification, 3 limitation of the study, 4 statement of research question, 5 research goals, and, 6 the benefits of the study.

A. Background of the study

Teaching writing to senior high school students is a compulsory action PP No. 19 2005. It is an attempt to meet the graduate competency for language lesson which emphasizes on literacy education. Literacy education is a language education which prepares the students to be able to take part in the modern life Hammond, 1992: 171. It proposes that language education has to be education of life skill that is an education that gives abilities so that the students are able to survive in globalisation era. One of the English skills offering a good opportunity in globalisation era is writing. In line with the paradigm stated above, Amado 2010 states that writing is an important vehicle that should be taught for self expression and support students’ creative process. Thus, students can use writing for self expression, which is stating ideas, thoughts and feeling from their own experiences and others. The documentation of written experiences could be a source of life for PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI them to be ready in a competition outhere. Being exposed with a set of writing activities at the school, the stu dents’ creative process of writing will develop automatically so that they can use the skill to support their life as well. Therefore, as a compulsory skill which is taught at senior high school students, teaching writing requires a skillful English teacher. Danielson 2007 asserts that a skillful English teacher is one of the single most important influences on students’ success. During the teaching time, he or she must be able to perform the roles as a teacher in the classroom, such as, by understanding, engaging, motivating the students and facilitating the instructional process. Dealing with the view, that writing skill can take part in globalisation era, the issues of teaching writing have arisen as well. One of the issues was dealt with the implementation of a strategy in teaching writing. There was a story when I was teaching at senior high school in Muntilan region. The story caught my attention and I wrote it down in this thesis. On April 2008, there was a monthly meeting with all the senior high school English teachers around Magelang regency. One of the topics was a discussion about teaching writing. At that time, three English teachers of different private senior high schools shared their experiences of teaching writing in their classes. There were two teachers who were not interested in teaching writing for several reasons. One of the teachers said that during his teaching time for three years, he was hardly able to engage the students in the writing process. According to the teacher, he used to conduct the writing process by giving out the students several topics and ask them to write based on their choice. Then he collected the students’ work, checked them as well as gave scores to the submitted works. After that he returned them back to the students. He did those actions for many times. Similarly, a female English teacher uttered that she had difficulties in teaching writing. Not only did the students have low English proficiency, but also the teacher had the problem with time constraints. For her, motivating the students who have low English proficiency to write makes the teaching writing process ineffective. As the consequence, the teaching writing process required longer time On the other hand, another teacher from another private school said that she had applied a certain strategy in teaching writing to her students. The strategy was shared writing. This strategy had helped her to motivate, engage the students to the writing process. Besides, shared writing strategy had helped her in improving the teaching writing process. She was also able to make some reflections of her teaching. In this case, she could monitor the students’ writing progress simultaneously. According the teacher, one of the output of shared writing strategy implementation was writing on a wall magazine. Based on the facts above, there is a kind of gap between the teacher who uses a shared writing strategy in teaching writing and those who do not. The use of a shared writing strategy in teaching writing is considered as an important factor to provide an actual life skill to the students. Therefore, it is important to know information about the teacher who have applied shared writing strategy in teaching writing. The information that must be explored would be about her life stories in implementing the use of shared writing strategy in teaching writing. To support this study, there were some related research on the importance of shared writing strategy used by the teachers in teaching process. The first research is conducted by Kieft, Rijlaarsdam and Bergh 2006 . It is aim at investigating the teachers’ performance as facilitator in using shared writing in teaching literature through writing. The participants of the study were the teachers’ who performed the strategy in their class. In the findings, it is shown that students’ literary intepretation skill have improved significantly by the teachers who performed the shared writing strategy during teaching process. Furthermore, an implication of the study showed that the strategy applied is influenced the students in which those who have taught through shared writing strategy are having better writing skill. The second research is conducted by Coursen in 2007 at Panorama island. Her qualitative research focuses on the connection between sharing, writing and motivation in teaching process. It aims at describing the implementation of shared writing strategy as the umbrella of a set of sharing writing activities in developing students’ writing skill. Besides, the research also explores that teachers are able to motivate the students through the sharing writing activities during the teaching process. The findings show that exposing the students with a set of sharing writing activities of shared writing strategy have developed their writing skill. Afterward, the second finding reveals that a collaboration between students teachers through sharing writing activities have encouraged students’ motivation during the teaching writing process. To sum up, both research illustrate the usefulness of shared writing strategy in teaching process by the teacher. It is noted that the teacher’s role is very essential in implementing the strategy during the teaching process. To be more specific, teaching writing using shared writing strategy can develop student s’ writing skill to be used as a provision in their life while during the teaching process, the teacher who uses this strategy would be able to work together with them as well. It can be concluded that a description of teacher who uses shared writing strategy in teaching writing is really interesting to be explored. Related to the field of teaching, this research aims to describe and intepret the the use of shared writing strategy in teaching writing by the teacher. The description and interpretation, then, hopefully will have a significant contribution to education scientifically and practically.

B. Problem Identification