6 Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signalling the relationship between and among
clauses. 7 Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their
role in signalling the relationship between and among clauses.
Macro skills 8 Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and
their significance for interpretation. 9 Recognize the communicative functions of written texts,
according to form and purpose. 10 Infer context that is not explicit by using background
knowledge. 11 From described events, ideas, etc., infer links and
connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea.
12 Distinguish between literal and implied meaning. 13 Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a
context of the appropriate cultural schemata. 14 Develop and use a battery of reading strategies, such as
scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating
schemata for the interpretation of texts.
3. The Writing Skills
a. The Nature of Writing
Writing is one of the productive skills which is dealing with the production of written language. Brown 2001: 335 defines writing as
the nature of composing process of writing. Elbow 1973 in Brown 2001:337 states that writing is a thinking process, in which the
learners develop what they presently think, feel and perceive into a written product. Both theories propose the same ideas that in order to
write, the learners should be able to compose their ideas through the process of thinking, drafting, and revising. In the process of composing
a written product, the learners have to learn how to generate the ideas,
how to arrange them coherently and organize them cohesively into a text using discourse markers, how to check and revise the text to make
it clearer, how to use appropriate grammar, and how to produce a final product of writing.
Further, Nunan 2004: 218 stated that writing is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life and simply
taken for granted in literate cultures.
b. Types of Writing
According to Brown 2004: 220 there are five major categories of written performance.
1 Imitative This category includes the ability to spell correctly and to
perceive phoneme-grapheme correspondences in the Englsih spelling system. In this stage, form is the primary if not
exclusivefocus, while context and meaning are of secondary concern.
2 Intensive controlled Meaning and context are of some importance in determining
correctness and appropriateness, but most assessment tasks are more concerned with a focus on form, and are rather
strictly controlled by the test design. 3 Responsive
Here, assessment tasks require learners to perform at limited discourse level, connecting sentences into a paragraph and
creating a logically connected sequence of two or three paragraphs. Genres of writing include brief narratives and
descriptions, short reports, lab reports, summaries brief responses to reading, and interpretations of charts or graphs.
4 Extensive Extensive writing implies successful management of all the
processes and strategies of writing for all purposes, up to the length of an essay, a term paper, a major research project
report, or even a thesis. Writers focus on on achieving a purpose, organizing and developing ideas logically, using
details to support or illustrate ideas, demonstrating syntactic and lexical variety.
c. Micro and Macro Skills of Writing
