MAKALAH TEFL - Writing Skill

INTRODUCTION

            Why teaching writing (writing) in college necessary ? in college, writing is a way of life. It can be interpreted that most of the activities of students, whether it be daily tasks of student, semester exam, as well as charging paper work, requiring the skill of writing. Without adequate skills in writing, students will find it hard to follow the learning process well, might not even be ableto finish his studies.

            Trends in teaching writing (writing) in learning english or other foreign languages is similar to learning other skills, especially listening and speaking. Current communicative learning requires teachers understand how to teach Fluency (smoothness), not just accurancy,how to use aunthentic texts and contexts in the classroom, how to focus on the goals of linguistic communication, and how to increase student motivation.

            In writing instructional activities in the classroom, teacher act more as facilitators and responder to student writing. As facilitators, lecturers provide guidance to help students engage in the development  of thought and ideas appearing in the process of writing, but is not allowed to impose his ideas into writing students. The role of teacher is more to provide feedback in the form of correction or comment.

DESIGNING PRINCIPLES OF TECHNICAL WRITING

            There is not an activity that can be done well if not planned and designed. Similarly, the learning activities. More result will be achieved when the learning activities are designed to be implemented properly. To that end, it is necessary for a teacher or lecturer to refer to certain principles when designing learning activities in the classroom. In writing class, there are a number of principles propesed by brown who can be a cornerstone in designing writing techniques, including :

1.      Apply the activities carried out by the author of the “good”
when using a writing technique, consider a few things done efective writer, for example:

·        Focus on the purpose or main idea in writing

·        Intelegently attempting to measure their audience

·        Use the time (but not too long) to plan writing

·        Let the ideas flow in their first paper

·        Follow the general plan organization when writing

·        Seek and use feedback on their writing

·        not tied to a particular surface structure

·        Revise their writing result earnest and efficient

·        Make revisions as necessary

2.      The ballance or process and product           
            Because writing is process and usually requires several draft before produced a product of efective writing, make sure that the student carrefully trhough to the appropiate stages of the writing process. This stage includes attention to your role as a mentor and as a responders. At the same time, do not get too hung up on the stages towards the final result that is causing you to ignore the ultimate achievement: a clear writing, critical, well-organized, and effective. Make sure students know that whatever process through which towards the end result is worth the effort.

3.       Consider the cultural background / literature

            Make sure that the students know that rules of english rhetoric. If anything, a real conflict between the student home traditional with want you want to teach, try to help the student understand the conflicts and slowly bring them to the use of english rethorical acceptable

4.      Connect the reading to writing         
            It is clear that students learn to write in part of observing what has been written. So, they learn by observing or bring written words. By reading and studying different types of relevant texts, students can acquire knowledge that is important insights about how they should write, and on a subject that might be a topic of their writing.

5.      Provide as much authentic writing   
            Is the writing of real writing or for display, the text remains authentic if the intent is clear to students, the audience is clear, and there is no intention to convey meaning. Writing task together with other students in the class is one way to add authenticity. Creating a class report, write letters to people outside the classroom, write a script for a drama presentation, write a resume, write an ad – all of which can be concidered as an authentic writing.

6.      Organize your writing technique with pre-writing phase sequence, drafting, and revising           
            Approach writing process tends to be done if three stages of writing. Pre-writing stage to encourage the emergency of ideas in a variety of ways:

·        Read a discourse

·        skimming (Reading speed) and / or scannig (read detail)

·        Conduct research

·        Brainstrom

·        Make a list of the individual

·        Group (starting with the keyword, then add other words to use open relationship)

·        Discuss a topic or question

·        The questions and tests of lecturers

·        Free writing

·        Revising drafting stage and the core of the writing process.

 In traditional approuch to teaching writing, students were given a writing assighment in class to write from start to finish during the lectures took place or were given a homework assighment. Activity / method does not provide the opportunity for students to focus on the drafting stage. In the process approach, drafting is seen as a series of important and complex strategy, masterit takes time, patience, and a trained teacher.

some  of strategies and skills that can be applied to the proccess of drafting/revising in writing:

·        Start the process (an adaptation of technique fabricate free)

·        Monitoring the “optimal” for writing one (without editing the premature and ignores the choice of words,grammar,etc.)

·        utilizing Feedback feedback from faculty

·        editing for grammatical errors

·        Technique of “read aloud” (reading aloud) (in small groups or pairs, student read their draft are almost finished to their friends for the final inspection of the errors, sequence of ideas, etc.)

·        profeading (critical reading)

7.      Endeavor offers  techniques interactive as possible           
            No doubt that the writing process approach to learning is interactive (as students work in pairs and groups to generate ideas and to conduct editing with colleagues), and learner- centered (focused on student) (with ample oppurtunities for students to begin activities and exchange ideas).

            Writing techniques that focus on goals other than essays (such as letters, forms, memos, instruction, brief) is also the activities that should be based on the principles of interactive classroom activities. Group collaburation, exchage ideas, and critized is part of techniques that focus on writing.

8.      Applying the method to respond sensitively and correcting your student writing
            Correction of error in writing must be done in a different way. Because writing, unlike speaking, often covering long planning phase , the correction of error that began on drafting and revising stage, which is the most appropriate time to correct than those in the stages of writing another. When students recieve their written response to the result, the error – which is only one aspect to respond – are rarely corrected by the lecturer on the contrary, those mistakes corrected through self-correction (self correction), peer-correction (correction by peer) and comments by the lecturer.      

In line with this, Mc Crimmon also suggested several stages in writing:

·        Pre-writing

            In the pre-writing activities, before it began to show his ideas in the form of an inscription on a piece of paper, a writer should consider the following: what is the purpose of this writing ? to whom this article is intended ?
As this developed into tasks that must be carried out by learners when preparing her writing, the relevance of the task can be expanded, for example as follows: think about the content, think about the reader, and systematic preperation for writing.

Composing and Drafting       
            During writing, a writer stringing setences into a paper that the best fits what they want to convey to their readers. Making up just one part of series, and the moment when the first time the pen hit the paper authors.       
Revising Editing        
            Stage revisions or improvements togethers with the writing process and very different from what is common in the initial concept of learner writing. In fact, a long article could have undergone several revisions before it is really ready to be a paper presented to the reader.  

CONCLUTION
Writing is an activity of a user’s pyschological language to display the information in a written form that it contains a specific topic to be conveyed to the reader. To finish an article, eather in language or foreign language speakers, a learner must perform several steps which generally consists of planning (planning or pre-writing), drafting and writing (drafting), and repaire (revising). A number of techniques and strategies can be applied by teachers or lecturers in the classroom to teach writing skills, so that the learner can produce an interesting and quality article. The application of a particular technique or strategy should be tailored to the characteristics writing classes to raise the performance of learners writing the most.

                                                                   

                                                               ASSESSMENT 

Assessing Writing

            Not many centuries ago, was a skill that was the exclusive domain of scribes and schoolars in educational or religious instutions. Almost every aspect of everyday life for “common” people was carried out orally, business transactions, records, legal documents, political and military agreements all were written by speialitist whose vocation it was to render language into the written word. Today, the ability to write has become an indispensable skill on our global literate community. Writing skill, at least at rudimentary levels, is a necessary condition for achieving employment in many walks of life and is simply taken for granted in literate cultures.

            In the field second language teaching, only a half centurago expert were saying that writing was primarily a convention for reccording speech and for rein-forcing grammatical and lexical features of language. Now we understand the uniqueness of writing as a skill with its own features and conventions. We also fully understand the difficulty of learning to write “well” in any language, even in our own native language. Every educated child in developed countries learn the rudiments of writing in his or her native language, but every few learn to express themselves clearly with logical, well-developed organization that accomplishes an intended purpose. And yet we expect second language learners to write coherent essays with artfully chossen rhetorical and discourse devices.

            It follows logically that the assessment writing is no simple task. Ask you consider assessing students writing ability,  as usual you need to be clear about your objective or criterion. What is it you want to test: handwriting ability? Correct spelling? Writing sentences those are grammatically correct? Paragraph construction? Logical development or a main idea? All of these, and more, are possible objectives, and each objective can be assassed through a variety of tasks, which we will examine in this chapter.

Before looking at specific tasks, we must scrutinize the different genres of written language (so that context and purpose are clear), types of writing (so that stages of the development of writing ability are accounted for), and micro and macroskills of writing (so that objectives can be pinpointed precisely)

Designing Assessment Tasks: Imitative Writing

            With the recent worldwide emphasis on teaching English at young ages, it is tempting to assume that every English learners knows how to handwrite the roman alphabet. Such is not case. Many beginning level English learners, from young children to olders adults, need basic training in and assessment of imitative writing: the rudiments of forming letters, words, and simple sentences.

Designing Assessment Tasks: Intesive (Controlled) Writing

            This next level of writing is what second language teacher training manuals have for decades called controlled writing. It may also be though of as form focused writing, grammar, or simply guided writing. A good deal of writing at this level is display writing as opposed to real writing: students produce language too display their competence in grammar, vocabulary, or sentences formation, and not necessarily to convey meaning for an authentic purpose. The traditional grammar/vocabulary test has planty of display writing in it, since the response mode demonstrates only the test taker’s ability to combine or use words correctly. No new information is passed on from one person to the other.

Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive And Extensive Writing

            In this section we consider both responsive and extensive writing task. They will bw regraded hereas continuum of possiblities ranging from lower-end tasks whose complexity exceeds those in the previous category of intensive or controlled writing, through more open-ended tasks such as writing short reports, essays, summaries and response, up to text of several pages or more.

Rules in assessing responsive and extensive writing

Responsive writing creates the opportunity for take-taker’s to offer an array of possible creative responses within a pedagogical or assessment framework: test-taker’s are “responding” to a prompt or assignment. Freed from the strict control of intensive writing, learners can exercise a number of options in choosing vocabulary, grammar, and discourse, but with some constraints and conditions. Criteria now begin to include the discourse and rhetorical conventions of paragraph structur and of connecting two or three such paragraphs in text of limited length. The learner is responsible for accomplishing a purpose in writing, for developing a sequence of connected ideas, and for empathizing with an audience.

The genres of text that are typically addressed here are :

·        short reports (with structured formats and conventions);

·        responses to reading of an artical story;

·        summaries of articles or stories;

·        brief narratives or diescriptions; and

·        interpretations of graphs, tables, and charts

            It is here that writers become involved in the art (and science) of composing, or real writing, as opposed to display writing.