CHAPTER II. LITERATURE REVIEW
B. Teaching Writing
3) Advantages and Disadvantages of Direct
Killen (2009, p. 118) explains when used effectively, direct instruction has the following important features:
a. The learning outcomes and success criteria are made clear to the students.
b. The teacher controls the time for various instructional activities.
c. The teacher organizes and controls the sequencing of lesson activities.
d. There is an emphasis on academic achievement.
e. The teacher carefully monitors students’ activities and learning.
f. The teacher provides frequent clear feedback to students.
However, direct instruction is not always the most effective way to help students to learn. Killen (2009, p. 121) explains some limitation of direct instruction. The teacher center roles makes the success learning depends heavily on the teacher’s projects. If the teacher is not well prepared, knowledgeable, confident, enthusiastic and well organized, the students will get bored or distracted and their learning will be hindered. Moreover, teacher control may have a negative impact on students’ problem solving activities, independence and curiosity because students have limited opportunities to develop their social, interpersonal and communicative skills. If used too frequently, direct instruction can lead students to believe that it is the teachers’ job to tell them all they need to know. Thus, they may not be encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning. Furthermore, direct instruction (particularly in the form of lectures and demonstration) involves a lot of one-way communication, so there may be limited opportunities to gain feedback about students understanding. However, the teacher may not be aware that some students have developed some misconceptions.
b. Process-Oriented Approach
Unlike the previous approach which focuses on the final product, this approach concerns more on the process of how the students develop ideas and formulate them into effective writing works. Steele defines the process approach as focusing more on the varied classroom activities which promote the development of language use; brainstorming, group discussion, re-writing (Sun and Feng, 2009). The focal point of this process is the writer and the writing process. Students are seen as the language creators who are given chances to experience the process of writing, try to organize and express their ideas clearly.
Meanwhile, teacher plays a role as facilitator who monitors the activities in various stages (Palpanadan et al., 2012).
The activities of process approach are intentionally designed to facilitate the students to be the language creators. Brown (2004, p. 335) mentions some typical writing activities in the process approach such as:
1) focus on the process of writing that leads to the final written products, 2) help student to understand their own composing process,
3) help students to build repertoires of strategies for pre-writing, drafting, and rewriting,
4) give students time to write and rewrite,
5) let students discover what they want to say as they write,
6) give students feedback throughout the composing process (not just on the final product) as they attempt to bring their expression closer and closer to intention,
21 7) include individual conferences between teacher and student during the
process of composition.
The nature of the process-approach which involves varied activities in the classroom such as group discussion, brainstorming, and rewriting effectively contributes to the development of language skills (Palpanadan et al., 2012).
Thus, students can see their individual mistakes as they obtain immediate response from peers or teacher and more importantly, all the comment reach out to students themselves and not just their writing. As a result, students find what need to be rectified as teacher’s comments facilitate revision and improvement.
Moreover, producing several drafts before the final draft helps students in many ways (Palpanadan et al., 2012). Because the writing begins in the first draft, students have the opportunity to promote the writing principle as the draft develops further. Next, the students look at the development of writing critically and analytically as they are held responsibility for what it is being written.
Eventually, students and teachers become more motivated and interested readers and not just evaluators who focus on the content development. It caused less worry and fear of making mistakes that could impede students’ creativity in writing among students, where they could get engage in the writing activities and enjoy writing while learning takes place naturally. Also teachers expect fewer errors in the final product.
However, process-approach is time consuming (Palpanadan et al., 2012).
It can be happened because process approach involves several drafts before students produce the final draft. Therefore, many teachers are unable to finish the activities in one or two lessons which were usually allocated to teach writing per week. In addition, teachers need more time to read and mark all the drafts prepared by the students which is added on to their workload. As a result, many teachers overlook to finish the syllabus on time.
Furthermore, because in process approach many errors are tolerated, there is a felt fear among the learners that mistakes will become fossilized. Language teachers are sometimes assumed get confuse over the features of the approach but actually they focus on the structure and content. Therefore, they stress on the grammatical errors which are the main characteristic of the product approach.
Talking about writing activities in process approach, as a complex activity, there are some stages where the writer goes through in order to produce something in its final written form. Actually, everyone writes in different way and whatever works is the best way (Fulwirer, 2002, p. 15). However, the process of writing commonly consists of four basic stages namely pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing (Fulwiler, 2002, p. 16; Harmer, 2004, p. 11;
Dietsch, 2006, p. 11). Linse (2005, p. 102) adds a stage namely publishing to this process. Various learning activities are suggested for each stage to support the learning of specific skills. The planned writing experiences for the students can be described as follows.