CHAPTER II DIAN ANUGERAH NURROHMAH PBI'18

CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW A. Writing Writing is one of two productive skills which demands the students

  to explore their idea in written form. Nunan (2003:88), and White and Arndt (1991) in Hammad (2013:1) have the same idea of what writing is. They define writing as an intellectual activity to finding the ideas and thinking of the ways to express and organize them into a statement and paragraph that is clear to be understood by the readers. Through planning, goal setting, monitoring, evaluating what is going to be written as well as what has been written and using language for expressing exact meanings. It indicates that the writers are demanded to show the thoughts and organize them into a good composition. In addition, writing presents the writer’s concept in understanding an issue which is shown to the public. It means that writing consists of some stages that should be done by the writer in coveting the message of writing.

  Berninger at al (2002) adds the point of writing that is considered as an active creation of text involves on the one hand lower-order transcription skills such as handwriting, punctuation and spelling, and on the other hand, higher-order self-regulated thinking processes such as planning, sequencing and expressing the content. It requires the writer to express the content of writing into a good composition by considering the aspects of writing to be understood by the readers.

  The description of writing shows that writing is an effort to express the writer’s thinking, feeling, or ideas in written form by considering writing aspects and writing stages to be clear understood by the readers.

B. Steps of Writing

  Writing is a series of activities to create a text that can be understood by everyone. Writing process is not only as a means of telling what the students know, but also as a way of exploring and developing ideas about certain topics. To produce a good text that clearly communicates, thoughts, ideas, feeling and emotion it takes several attempts. These attempts refer to specific action or behaviors that students employ in language learning.

  Wenden and Rubin (1987) cited in Kasmiati (2005: 14) implied that these language learning behavior as strategies. These strategies relate to what the students do, how they manage and what they know about which aspects of their language learning process especially in the second language learning. There are many variations in the way to write to follow up certain patterns. Here are the three steps of writing process that commonly followed pre-writing, while writing and post writing (Weden and Rubin, 1987; Lyons, 1987; Brown, 2000).

  a. Pre-writing Pre-writing is a way of organizing the writers thoughts or beginning to put the information they have on paper. Pre-writing stage help writers generate the ideas by numerous ways such as brainstorming, outlining, topic analysis, free writing and planning.

  Brainstorming permits one to approach a topic with an open mind and to come up with ideas freely. Free writing is designed to help student’s free ideas that they might not realize that they have. Planning, brainstorming and free writing are some different ways to start writing.

  Planning appears to be the stage in which we create a guidance to lead us in writing. It is the step where the students firstly think out things to be the content of writing. Planning provides a means for quickly checking their sentences to see if the deal with the topic, and servers as a guide for checking whether the sentences are logically arranged.

  b. Drafting After getting some ideas, drafting is begin. In drafting, the students need to arrange their writing. It can be done by using native language first and later translate into English or directly write in English with some problems may face. Students often share their drafting result to their friends or teacher to get feedback about their writing. In addition, students start to concern about several aspects related to writing such as grammar, spelling, vocabulary and content of their writing to discover how they can express their ideas in the clearest manner possible so that the readers will receive the same message with the same impact that students intended. c. Revising The process revising means students learn from some feedback they got to improve their writing. When students do not get feedback in this stage they rewrite their result and may do some changes that they would like to make. Good writers always go through several steps revisions because they want to make a good article.

  In this process, students try to check their writing so that the readers can understand the messages. In this final activity, students look again the work, reread what they have written on it, make rearrangement, additions and substitutions on it and rewrite it to make it readable.

C. Essay Writing

  Essay is a short of writing about particular subject, especially one written by a student and writing itself is the skill or activity of producing words on a surface. It means that essay writing is the activity of producing short of written text that can be understood by the readers.

  Zemach (2005) also describes that an essay is a group of paragraph written about single topic and central main idea. It must have at least three paragraph, but a five paragraphs essay is common length for academic writing. Therefore, creating an essay which there is overall thesis statement consist of three supporting paragraphs begin with a topic sentence is required for making essay.

  In short, essay writing is an activity to produce a group of paragraph written about single topic consist of thesis statement and supporting paragraph that can be understood by the readers.

  Essay writing has been divided into several patterns. Langan (2001) has been divided into the following patterns of development: a. Description A description is a verbal picture of a person, place or thing.

  Because the function of a descriptive essay is to provide the readers with a vivid and real pictures as possible in words, students should choose a topic that appeals strongly to at least one of their sentence. Then, observe and record specific details that appeal to the readers’ senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch).

  b. Exposition In exposition, the writer provides information about and explains a particular subject. Patterns of development within exposition include detailing a process of doing or making something, analyzing causes and effects, and also comparing or contrasting.

  1) Process (procedure) In everyday life, there are many activities that are processes.

  That series of steps is carried out in a define order. Many of these processes are familiar and automatic. An essay process requires the writer to think through the steps involved in an activity. The students may be painfully conscious of the whole series of steps involved in the process. The purpose of this text itself is to instruct someone on how something can be done.

  2) Cause and effect The best essays are often written about a topic that the author genuinely cares about. In everyday life, there are many actions do not occur without causes. It is realized that those action have good or bad effect. When constructing an explanation text it may be necessary to show a cause and effect relationship. By examining the causes or effects of an action, it explain someone to understand things that happened. 3) Comparison and contrast

  A comparison or contrast essay emphasizes how two things are alike or how they differ. Comparison and contrast are two thought processes constantly in everyday life. When comparing two things, there are show how they are similar, when contrasting two things, there are show how they different. The purpose of comparing or contrasting is to understand each of the two things more clearly and to make judgments about them.

  c. Argumentation Argumentation essay belongs to essay which is often used by the people to persuade others by making a point in a class discussion. In argumentative essay, the writer attempts to support a controversial point or to defend a position on which there is a difference of opinion. They will have a chance to judge the statements from others. Giving logical reasons can help other see through faulty arguments that others may make.

D. Learning Reflection

  Reflection is a purposeful activity in which the writers analyze their experiences, or their own practice, skills, responses in order to learn and improve. They are reflect quite naturally in their day to day lives, thinking about things that have happened, why they happened, whether they can handled it well. Gibbs (1988: 9) states that

  “It is not sufficient to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting on this experience it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost ”.

  There are frameworks that the writers can use to aid their reflective process. Alternatively, the writers may want to create their own. It needs to be a set of questions that the writers can ask their selves about an experience, plus a process by which they apply and learn from their reflection. Here are just two examples of models of reflection.

  

Table 1.

Learning Reflection

  1. Reflection before, during and after a learning process (Schon, 1983). A

  

Short Guide to Reflective Writing from University of Birmingham

(Birmingham, 2015).

  Before an experience During an experience

  After an experience What do you think might happen?

  What is happening now, as you make rapid decisions?

  What are you insights immediately after, and or later when you have more emotional distance from the event?

  What might be the challenges? Is it working out as I expected?

  In retrospect how did it go? What do I need to know or do in order to be best prepared for these experiences?

  Am I dealing with the challenges well? What did I particularly value and why?

  Is the anything I should do, say or think to make the experience successful?

  Is there anything I would do differently before or during a similar event?

  What am I learning from this? What have I learnt?

2. Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

  Graham Gibbs (1988) created a reflective learning cycle, including the role of feelings:

  

Figure 1.

Reflective Cycle

  One tentative definition of reflection is offered by Moon (1999) “… a form of mental processing with a purpose and/or anticipated outcome that is applied to relatively complex or unstructured ideas for which there is not an obvious solution

  .” Moon continues by outlining some of the purposes for reflection. The writers reflect in order to consider the process of their own learning, critically review something, build theory from observations, engage in personal or self-development, make decisions or resolve uncertainty and empower or emancipate ourselves as individuals. Reflection is a useful process even if the writers have not been set a specific reflective assignment. It helps the writers to make sense of and learn from their experiences.

E. Reflective Writing

  Writing reflectively for the purposes of an assignment should not involve merely describing something that happened. It means pouring out everything and feel in a totally unstructured way. Reflective writing requires a clear line of thought, use of evidence or examples to illustrate the writer’s reflections, and an analytical approach. According to Gibbs (1988) “It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost. It is form the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalizations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalizations that allow new si tuations to be tackled effectively.”

  Reflective writing provides an opportunity for the writers to gain further insights from their work through deeper reflection on their experiences, and through further consideration of other perspective from people and theory. Through reflection the writers can deepen the learning from work. The writers aiming to strike a balance between their personal perspective, and the requirements of good academic practice and hard thinking. This means that a good writer has to develop their perspective or line of reasoning. Other point to consider their writing is demonstrating that the writers has a well informed and already read a relevant literature and reflected on its relevance to their own development. Next point is they can show that they are recognize the situations in their writing, and then they can write about the link between their experiences or practice and what the writers already read. The writers should has a mindset that writing is an appropriate style.

  In this case, while the writers write reflective should be related to their workplace experience, the right focus and emphasis is for the writers to determine.

  When assessing the writer’s reflective writing their tutor or teacher will be expecting more than a superficial review of the writers experience, they will be seeking evidence of deeper reflection. This means moving beyond the descriptive, and subjecting of their experience to greater scrutiny. Many degrees involve assessed reflective writing. This is to allow the tutor or teacher to demonstrate that they can think critically about the writers own skills or practice, in order to improve and learn. It is important to analyze rather than just describe the things that the writers are reflecting on, and to emphasize how the writers will apply what they have learned.

F. Strategies of Writing Reflection

  Reflective writing can be included in a variety of different assignment tasks. It can include keeping a reflective journal or learning log with multiple entries particularly for professional placements or be part of an essay or report. Reflective writing aims to get you to think about and understand your learning experiences. The outline is an approach to reflective writing using a DIEP strategy. The four steps in this approach is adapted from Boud, D (1985) in Reflection: Turning experience into Learning are to describe, interpret, evaluate and plan.

  1. D (Describe objectively what happened) In this point the writers will answer the question such as

  ‘What did I do, read, see, hear, etc. ?’ to describe objectively what happened in their experiences.

  2. I (Interpret the events) In this point the writers should interpret the events. The writers should consider some points why events happened in the way they did.

  There are some consideration to make a good writing. First, what the writers saw and heard. In this point the writers should explain about what they saw and heard in their experiences.

  Second, the writers’ new insights. In this point the writers should explain about their new insights, they can explain it directly or indirectly. Third, the writers’ connections with other learning. Means that the writers should make another connections with other learning if they have experiences with other learning. The last is the writers feeling and then the writer’s hypotheses and/or conclusions. After that, the writers can make a conclusions from their interpreting before. Here is the possible question in this point: ‘what might this mean?’

  3. E (Evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of the experience) In this point the writers should make judgments that are clearly connected to observations they have made. There are some possible questions that might answer by the writers. First, What is my opinion about this experience?, second, What is the value of this experience?, and then Why do I think this?.

  4. P (Plan how this information will be useful to the writers) In this point the writers should consider some aspect in their writing. It is useful or not to the writers next project. Those are the aspects that the writers thinking about. In what ways might this learning experience serve the writers such as in his or her course, program, future career and their general life. Here is the possible question that the writers can answer when they write something

  ‘How will I transfer or apply my new knowledge and insights in the future?’.

  On a whole description, we can conclude that DIEP strategy can help the writers to analyze their own performance as a learner, evaluate their gains in understanding and completing tasks, verbalize how they feel about their learning, make connections with other experiences or ideas, demonstrate transfer of learning and integrate the concepts taught in courses.

G. Self-Review Making mistakes is a natural process of learning a foreign language.

  According to Harmer (2001) there are two distinct causes for the errors which most if not all students make at various stages L1 interference and Developmental errors. The type of error implies their origin and also the ways of dealing with them. The important factor in error correction is learners’ (and teachers’) positive attitude to mistakes, which are just an indication of what has not been learnt yet. An example of teachers’ negative attitude is pinpointed by Medgyes (1994): ‘Studies on error correction show that non-native English teachers tend to penalize grammatical errors with the utmost severity’.

  Language difficulties in written work perceived by learners and causing concern include grammar and vocabulary (Kavaliauskiene, 2002).

  Grammar errors and inadequate usage of vocabulary worsen the quality of learners’ written assignments. EFL practitioners are well aware of student responses to their written work being corrected by teachers

• – the sole learner’s concern is an awarded mark (grade). Quite understandably, seeing a lot of remarks or correction coding (e.g. ‘T’ for the wrong tense, or ‘S’ for the wrong spelling) in red ink (the most aggressive color possible) makes learners disheartened and can overwhelm them.

  Kavaliauskiene (2000) state that to replaced teacher correction with learner self-review or self-correction. While reading a student’s submitted written assignment, firstly, put ticks in margins of the line with errors in green ink (or other learner-friendly color, e.g. blue, yellow or violet) without specifying the type of error. Secondly, do not award a mark on the assignme nt sheet. In order to keep track of learner’s progress, make a note of awarded grade in the teacher’s note-book. Hand back their assignments to the learners and suggest they do remedial work in the classroom. Allot as much time as you think is reasonable to finish remedial work within one lesson. Allow students an opportunity to exercise various options of spotting and self-correcting their errors - either individually (for those who hate pair work), in pairs (for the ones who prefer it) or in small groups (for those who feel at ease working together). It is to the learners’ advantage to contemplate and work out the right answers after some thought. The teacher’s role is to give help unobtrusively when/if necessary. Allow learners to evaluate their work by awarding themselves marks. The teacher will be surprised at their fairness and clearness.

  This activity of learner self-correction applies the principle of effective learning: ‘you learn from your mistakes only if you think about them’ and can be used throughout the academic year at any level, even with the beginners. Students enjoy being teachers, and correcting one’s own mistakes can be fun. Obviously, this technique is not a panacea for avoiding mistakes in the future, and it is not applicable to final tests. However, it is useful for raising learners’ awareness of dealing with their errors and encouraging responsibility for their own learning. Self-correction is when learners correct themselves instead of a teacher doing it. Teachers can involve learners in self-correction to different degrees, by giving learners more or less guidance as to the location and nature of their errors, and examples of good use of language to compare their own to.

H. Previous Research Finding This research focused on how student reflected their writing product.

  Some relevant research finding support the idea of this research. Maarof and Murat in 2013 conducted a research about writing strategies towards 50 students. It is stated that writing is a complex cognitive activity consisting a number of processes and strategies. The use of strategies in writing process is crucial to successful writing moreover the key to producing good writing or essay relies on the types and amount of strategies used, and on the regulation of the strategies. Therefore, the research was done to identify the strategies use in essay writing among ESL students. The result indicated that the mean of writing strategies is 3.10 and according to Oxford (1990) this mean is at Medium level. This showed that overall the use of writing strategies by the students is at medium level. The strategy of thinking and having mental plan. Which is most frequently used by the students in writing essay.

  Furthermore, an article composed by Yan Chen in 2011 discussed about the use of strategies in writing. This research was conducted on University students by Oxford’s writing strategies to find out the writing strategies used by the students and the rank in terms of total frequency of writing strategies. The findings showed identifying the purpose under the metacognitive strategies with mean 4,04 the strategy which is most frequently used by the students. The rank in terms of total frequency, compensation strategies (mean: 3,95) was the highest frequency. It reveals that EFL students employ various strategies to overcome problems or difficulties encountered in the process of writing. On the other hand, memory strategies are used with the lowest frequencies. It was reported that the students do not use memory strategies very much in learning English.

  Next, the study conducted by Gafoordeen concluded that proficient students do planning, monitoring and evaluating under the metacognitive strategies rather than less proficient students. While the less proficient students do not concentrate on planning and had to go back to reread the resources and recombining are under the cognitive strategies employed favorably by two group. As the result, applying such writing strategies assist the student in ordering the ideas and arranging the text beside the teachers may need to help students how to organize their ideas more reasonably in the teaching writing activities.