23 equip students with acknowledgement of the language so that they are able to use
English in their life. Due to the importance of English learning, English is taught as a compulsory subject in secondary schools BSNP, 2006.
According to Indonesian curriculum BSNP, 2006, there are four skills that Indonesian students have to perform in learning English
—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In addition, there are four literacy levels that the curriculum
expects from Indonesian students to perform in all the skills —performative,
functional, informational, and epistemic. While the students of elementary schools are expected to reach
performative level, those of junior high schools are projected to reach functional literacy levels. The English proficiency target of the junior high school students is
the ability to use the language in their daily life. The government through the Ministry of Education has set the standards
for the teaching of writing in grade seven of junior high schools BNSP, 2006 as cited from the regulation about the standard of competence and basic competence
of English learning below.
Standard of competence
12. To express meanings in short functional texts and short essays in the
form of descriptive and procedure texts in
order to
interact with
the surroundings.
Basic Competence
12.2 To
express meanings
and rhetorical structures of short essays
using written expressions accurately, fluently, and appropriately in order to
interact with the surroundings through descriptive and procedure texts.
Table 1.Standard of Competence and Basic Competence
24
c. Characteristics of Junior High School students
Knowing what to teach and how to teach is barely enough. Teachers should also consider who they are facing in the classroom
—the students. Age wise, the students of Junior High School are about the age of 13-15 years old
—the age group categorized as adolescents or teenagers. While most language teachers
agree that motivation is often the key to success, teenagers are probably the least easily motivated group of learners. Young children are generally eager to learn
and unembarrassed about sounding silly. As they get older, they grow more and more sensitive to peer-pressure, and less and less interested in the outside world.
ɒrown 2001 stated that “the terrible teens are an age of transition, confusion, self-consciousness, growing,
and changing bodies and minds”. ɑs this transition phase also influences teenagers psychologically, teaching adolescents
needs to apply a special set of consideration. The following is the characters of adolescent and its implication to teaching and learning according to Brown
2001. 1.
Intellectual capacity adds abstract operational thought around the age of twelve. Therefore, some sophisticated intellectual processing is
increasingly possible. Complex problems can be solved with logical thinking. This means that linguistic metalanguage can now, theoretically,
have some impact. But the success of any intellectual endeavor will be a factor of the attention a learner places on the task; therefore a learner is
attending to self, to appearance, to being accepted, to sexual thoughts, to a weekend party, or whatever, the intellectual task at hand may suffer.
2. Attention spans are lengthening as a result of intellectual maturation, but
once again, with many diversions present in a teenager‟s life, those potential attention spans can be easily shortened.
3. Varieties of sensory input are still important, but, again, increasing
capacities for abstraction lessen the essential nature of appealing to al five senses.
25 4.
Factors surrounding ego, self-image, and self esteem are at their pinnacle. Teens are ultrasensitive to how others perceive their changing physical and
emotional selves along with their mental capabilities. One of the most important concerns of the secondary school teacher is to keep self-esteem
high by avoiding embarrassment of students at all costs; affirming each
person‟s talents and strengths; allowing mistakes and other errors to be accepted;
de-emphasizing competition
between classmates
and encouraging small-group work where risks can be taken more easily by a
teen. 5.
Secondary school students are of course becoming increasingly adult-like in their
ability to make those occasional diversions from the “here and now” nature of immediate communicative contexts to dwell on grammar
point or vocabulary item. But as in teaching adults, care must be taken not to insult them with stilted language or to bore them with over analysis.
Besides taking into account the characters of the students as adolescent, teachers need to design materials for teaching and learning at students‟ level, with
topics which they can react to, by linking language teaching to the stu dents‟
everyday interests Harmer, 2007. Harmer 2007 further argued that adolescent learners need to be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own
thoughts and experiences, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. Therefore, the teacher
‟s role is to create tasks that are interesting enough for students to get engaged in activities and challenging
enough to encourage them to learn.
d. The Microskills of Writing
Writing is a complex skill. The mastery of writing is measured by the mastery of smaller skills, referred by Brown 2001 as mikroskills. The following
microskills of writing proposed by H. Douglas Brown 2001 are taken as a guide to decide what learners need to actually perform in mastering the writing skill.
