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.
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
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
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.
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)
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
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”.
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).
In retrospect how did it go?
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) “…
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 situations to be tackled effectively.”
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
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)
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?’.
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.
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 assignment 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
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
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.
