4. Picture as Media in the Writing Process
Pictures as media play important roles in the writing skill learning:
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1. Pictures can motivate the student and make him or her want to pay
attention and want to take part. This means using pictures can gain students’ interest to the material brought by their teacher. Motivating
students will also give good result in class participation in gaining their frequency to express their ideas from everything they can see in
the pictures. 2.
Pictures contribute to the context in which the language is being used. They bring the world into the classroom a street scene or a
particular object. Pictures play big role in supplying ideas to students mind because the world is depicted clearly through pictures.
This clear depiction brings language context to students because they also can see the situation when the language can be use, the
participants, and also the purpose of using the utterance. 3.
The pictures can be described in an objective way „This is a train.’ or inte
rpreted It’s probably a local train. or responded to subjectivity I like travelling by train.. The expansion of the ideas
depends on students’ imagination and sensitivity in observing the pictures. In describing the pictures, students can be guided by their
teacher. 4.
Pictures can cue responses to questions or cue substitutions through controlled practice. In relationship to writing skill, students need
words to build a sentence, and sentences to build a paragraph, and paragraphs to build a text. To assist pictures, a controlled practice
through guided task can be a good choice for teacher. 5.
Pictures can stimulate and provide information to be referred to in conversation, discussion, and storytelling. Ideas in form of words can
be obtained from pictures. After students got their ideas, teacher can guide students to use their words in form of writing product.
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Ibid., p. 17.
Pictures as media directly help students in writing by giving them opportunities to produce their text. The opportunities given by pictures in writing
are classified by Wright as the following explanation:
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1. Opportunities to express their opinion. These opportunities are given
to students so they can write their ideas from the picture in the range of opinion. For example, if objects in the pictures are jobs, students
can express their ideas about the payment of the job whether it is well paid or not, whether it is outdoor or indoor job, and other
opinion related to the job. 2.
Opportunities to express experience and feelings. Pictures can be used to lure stude
nts’ memories about past experiences and their feelings about them. The ideas are obtained by saying what the
experience is, their feeling whether it is bad or god, and also the implication for their future after learning from past experience.
3. Opportunities to express speculation and opinions. After seeing
objects in pictures, students can make some speculations about the information related to the object. If the object is people, the
information can be about age, family background feeling, and other speculation about the people. When a thing is used as an object in the
picture, students can speculate about the use of the thing, the price, the belongings, and any other speculations in the range of the picture.
A teacher must not have any fixed interpretation of the pictures so that students will have wider opportunities in speculating.
4. Opportunities to express and debate opinions. Since every student
may have different opinions toward a picture, teacher can facilitate them to conduct debate to get ideas to write. Every student can
enrich each other ideas by conducting debates. 5.
Opportunities to dramatize. Picture can show an event. Prediction on what is going to happen after the event, the cause of the event, can be
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Ibid., pp. 96 –113.
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