Methods in Teaching Writing

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3. Methods in Teaching Writing

Considering the importance and difficulties of writing, it must be clearly known that writing is more than just expressing an idea into written texts. There are some important things to be considered when writing, for example choosing topics, making drafts, choosing appropriate words, using connectors, and the like. In addition, when students are given limited time for writing something, they will find it much more difficult. They will get nervous first about what to write because they consider the time a lot. This condition can distract their concentration due to the demand for writing as much as possible. The students need very good abilities dealing with some essential processes to achieve a good writing product. For L2 learners especially teenagers like senior high school students, they must be facing many obstacles in producing written texts. The teacher as the facilitator needs to help them find their ways out from these problems. Teachers can guide the students in writing through steps that have the highest chance of success to be applied for senior high school students. Kern in Thohid 2014: 14 proposes three main approaches that can be applied in the teaching and learning process of writing in the classroom as can be seen in the following terms. a. Product-oriented approach This approach concerns with the internal and structural patterns of writing. The focus is dealt with grammatical rules, sentence arrangements in the text, and other writing structural aspects. 16 b. Process-oriented approach Instead of drilling students to produce well-organized writing works, process-oriented approach emphasized on leading the students to express their creativity and guiding them to reconstruct and to recognize their writing to be better. In this approach, the students are expected to have centre roles along the process. c. Genre-based approach The focus of this approach is on the students‟ ability to formulate communicative writing. The emphasis is not about how grammatical their writing works are, but how well they organize their writing to be understood by the readers. To produce a good writing, the writer should not only pay attention to what to write, but also how to write. How to write means the process or stages of writing. Many experts have proposed various stages of writing. Hyland 2003: 11 wrote several steps to help students compose their writing products. The first step is selecting a topic. The selection can be done either by the teacher or the students. After selecting the topic, there will be prewriting stage in which the students do the brainstorming, make outline, collect the data and take notes to support their writing. After the materials and preparation completed, the students will arrange their ideas in writing as the first draft. After drafting, the stud ents will have peer‟s or teacher‟s response to ideas, organization, and style of the draft. The students later on will revise their writing by reorganizing and refining ideas. Another response will be 17 done one more time to check their revisions and it is followed by editing and proofreading. In editing and proofreading stage, there will be checking and correcting the form, layout, and evidence of their writings. Then, before the writing products are published, the teacher evaluates the progres as well as th e process of the student‟s writing. Finally, the writing process is finished by follow-up task to address weaknesses. Next, Harmer 2004: 41 describes several roles to be fulfilled by teachers in a writing teaching and learning process. They are: demonstrating, motivating and provoking, supporting, responding, and evaluating. First, in demonstrating, the teachers have to make sure that their students‟ are aware of fundamental rules, arrangements, and certain functions in writing. Through convention demonstration, the students are expected to have more attentions when they are dealing with writing works. Second, in motivating and provoking, the teacher has roles as motivator as well as provocator for the students. The students often find it difficult to deliver the ideas in their mind into written forms. Third, in supporting, the students‟ need the teacher‟s help not only when they start to write but also when they are working on their writing. The teacher is expected to be as supportive as possible to help the students overcome the difficulties. Fourth, in responding, the teacher will react towards the students‟ writing works. The responses can be related to the content, the text construction, as well as the feeling towards the text that can be delivered through comments and suggestions. Fifth, in evaluating, the teacher can tell the students about how well they have done their writing 18 works. Through evaluating, the students‟ progress and achievements in writing can be seen. What makes evaluating different from responding is that in evaluating, the teacher is allowed to grade the works. Furthermore, evaluating can be a learning opportunity that allows the students to realize the mistakes they made and then they try to put them right.

4. Feedback on Writing