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TEACHING WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT BY COMBINING WORD WALL AND DESCRIBE STRATEGIES AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL.
Oleh Wita Septria*)
(Mahasiswa Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat)
**) Dona Alicia, Pembimbing atau Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan
Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
Mengajar menulis merupakan salah satu aktivitas yang menuntut guru untuk dapat menghasilkan siswa yang mampu dalam menulis. Karena menulis merupakan salah satu keahlian yang harus dikuasai dan dimiliki oleh siswa selain membaca, berbicara dan mendengar. Dengan menulis, seseorang dapat mengekspresikan ide, pengalaman, pikiran, pendapat dan perasaan kepada orang lain. Selain mempunyai ide dan pikiran, siswa harus mempunyai motivasi, keinginan dan ketertarikan dalam menulis. Tujuan penulisan makalah ini adalah untuk membantu mengatasi salah satu permasalahan yang ada dalam pengajaran writing pada siswa Sekolah Menengah Pertama (SMP).Dalam makalah ini, penulis menjelaskan tentang pengajaran writing melalui penggabungan dua strategi yaitu antara Word Wall strategi dan Describe Strategi. Strategi ini dapat membantu guru dalam membantu siswa untuk menyampaikan ide-ide mereka dalam bentuk tulisan yang sederhana. Dalam aplikasinya, guru meminta siswa untuk membuat teks descriptif berdasarkan topik yang telah dipilih. Kemudian siswa diminta untuk melakukan revisi dan pengeditan terhadap tulisan mereka sehingga siswa bisa mengasilkan suatu teks dengan baik.
Keywords: Writing, Descriptive Text, Word Wall and Describe Strategy
*Penulis
** Pembimbing
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INTRODUCTIONWriting is a part of four the integrated skill in language teaching that is learned as school subject, which has a complex process that is needed to be mastered by the students at Junior High School. Based on the writer’s experience during teaching practiced at first year students Junior High School in SMP N 15 Padang, the writer found some problems in writing activities. The students was not interested in writing, because the students was difficult to find a topic to write a text, the students says that writing is bored activities because it took a long time. Then, the students did not know how to write an English word because it different with how to pronounce it. In this case, some of the students get difficulties in developing ideas in writing, especially in writing descriptive text because students only have a few words in English; the students did not know correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. Then, the teacher did not use appropriate strategy and the teacher just gives some explanation about the materials without using media in teaching writing.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Writing is a way of communication. Writing is an act to create communication between a writer and readers. Thorough writing, the writer can express the ideas, feelings, thought and experiences in the written form. According to Jozsef (2001:5), writing is among the most complex human activities. It involves the development of a design idea, the capture of mental representations of knowledge and of experience with subjects. In this case, with writing the students can express the ideas, feeling,
mind and opinion into a written form.
On the other hands, Nunan (2003:88) state that writing is a process and a product. It means that before the students start to write, the student’s
needs to think the ideas about the topic what they want to write, then the students can develop the topic into writing.
From all explanations above, the writer can conclude that writing is a tool that can be used in improving student’s knowledge and as a method of communication writing can be used to transmit information, express thoughts, feeling and reactions. With writing the students can understand about the several of words.
The stages in writing process are divided into some steps. These are:
prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing.
Nation (2009:115) states that one way of focusing attention on different aspects of writing is to look at writing as a process.
a. Considering the goals of the writer and model of the reader.
Teachers should also check writing programmed to make sure that learners are given practice in writing for a range of purposes to a range of readers.
b. Gathering ideas. With list making before writing, each student makes a list of ideas to include in the writing.
c. Organizing ideas. The way learners organize ideas gives them a chance to put their own point of view and their own thought into their writing, particularly in writing assignments and answering examination questions.
d. Ideas to text. Some students are able to say what they want to write but have difficulty in putting it into written form.
e. Reviewing. An important part of the writing process is looking back over what has been written.
f. Editing. Editing involves going back over the writing and making changes to its organization, style, grammatical
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and lexical correctness and appropriateness.In summary, writing process describes about the ways in producing writing and writing process is a way to make students easy in writing. There are some stages that should be following by the students: pre writing, drafting, revising, editing and publishing which are these stages help students produce a good writing.
In teaching writing, the teacher leads the students to explore student’s knowledge of writing process. Based on Caswell and Mahler (2004:3) define to promote the need for good communication skills, teaching writing provides opportunities for students to develop clear thinking skills. When students are granted time to write and process the thoughts, they develop a way to analyze students thinking.
Moreover, through writing, the students discover the channels of logic and the pitfalls of fallacies
According to Harmer (2004:31), the importance given to writing differs from teaching situation to teaching situation.
In some cases it shares equal billing with the other skills in other curricula it is only used, if at all in its writing for learning role where students write predominantly to augment their learning of the grammar and vocabulary of the language. Furthermore, writing encourages students to focus on accurate language use.
Writing should be taught in such way that students should understand the writing text, especially descriptive text.
A Descriptive text is a text which describes about the features and characteristics of a certain thing in detail. According to Mursyid (2006:4) defines that a Descriptive text is a kind of text with a purpose to give information. The context of this kind of text is the description of particular thing,
animal, person, or others. However, Descriptive text is used to describe everything which is seen by writer in detail and descriptive text presents the appearance of things that occupy space.
Then, Hidayati (2006:7) explains that Descriptive text is a text to describe a particular person, place or thing. It means that a descriptive text is text which is usually used to describe something specifically.
Mursyid (2006:4) explains the generic structures of Descriptive text are: identification and description.
Identification identifies phenomenon to be described. Its means that the identification gives information about things, place and people which will be discussed. Hidayati (2006:7) mentions that the generic structures of Descriptive text are identification and description.
Identification to identifying phenomenon to be described and the description gives information in more details to support the identification. It might describe parts, qualities and characteristics.
There are many strategies that can be chosen by teacher to teach writing in the classroom, but in this paper, the writer will concern with combining Word Wall and Describe Strategies. According to Booth and Swartz (2004:18), Word Wall is a visual display of words children have learned- acts as an immediate, accessible class dictionary and aids in the assimilation of high frequency words. Moreover, the words on the Word Wall are high frequency words that reflect the students writing.
Next, Dugan (2004:49) explain that a Word Wall is bulletin board display of vocabulary words grouped together in a way that make sense to students, it allows students to see key language arts words daily and use the visual support to deepen their understanding of new words. On the other hands, a Word Wall is ongoing,
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organized display of key words that provides visual reference for students throughout a unit of study. These words are used continually by teachers and students during a variety of activities.Describe is a strategy which serve the students in extend their writing and students can describe something in paragraph with their own world.
According to Pennington (2006:1) explains that Describe is a strategy designed to teach the students the skills necessary to write a descriptive paragraph. It means that Describe helps a writing program be more successful.
Describe in writing can help students writing be more interesting and full of details and encourage students to use new vocabulary words.
Then, Haines (2007:2) Describe strategy is an account that creates a vivid mental image in paragraph. The ability to describe people, places or objects is a useful life skill. Its means that describe provide an illustration of people, places, events, situations, thoughts, and feelings.
DISCUSSION
The teacher must have a plan before gives a lesson to the students such as: preparation, implementation and closing to get a good result. In writing class, there are some preparations that the teacher should prepare before teaching process.
1. Prepare a topic or Material
In prepare the material of the lesson that is going to be taught the teacher can choose an appropriate and interesting topic, because it can lead student’s motivation in constructing students writing activity of descriptive text
2. Time Allocation
In teaching and learning process the teacher should concern about the time for predicting the activities and limit the material time
3. Media
Teacher selects an appropriate and interesting media in order to make the students interested and help the students to understand about the material. The teacher uses some media to support the teaching learning process in the classroom, such as: picture, chart, and card.
4. Preparing the Lesson plan
The teacher should prepare the lesson plan before teaching learning process because the lesson plan includes the direction and the rules of teaching learning process
The combination word wall and describe strategies are:
a. Teacher explores student’s background knowledge about the topic. There are many ways to explore student’s knowledge such as: showing a picture or video related to the topic, giving some questions and introducing new vocabularies about the topic.
b. The teacher gives the example how to use word wall strategy.
a) The teacher creates a card. After create a card, the teacher distribute a card to the students.
b) Teacher invites the students to give opinion about the picture.
Then, teacher asks the students to write the opinion on the card.
c) Then, teacher asks the students to stick the card on the white board.
c. Teacher asks the students to make a simple paragraph based on the topic d. After that teacher guides the
students to edit and revise the paragraph into descriptive text.
These activities have function to find out of some grammar error and miss spelling in the text.
e. Then, teacher asks the students to read the text together.
f. The teacher checks students understanding about the lesson.
The teacher should check the students understanding about all
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activities above. If the students do not understand yet, the teacher can give more explanation to the students.CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION CONCLUSION
In teaching writing at Junior High School, the teacher has to choose the different strategy in order to make the students interest and easy to understand about the material. By combining word walls strategy and describe strategy, the students become easily to share/develop their ideas in order to write a descriptive text. Besides that, the process of teaching writing will be enjoyable, fun and make the students more active in classroom because the students can build the knowledge and students own words into the written form.
SUGGESTION
In this paper, in order to make the students eager in studying English especially in writing, some suggestions are given to the English teacher, the students and the readers. First, it is recommended to the English teacher in using appropriate strategy in teaching writing. Second, the writer suggests that the students should ask to the teacher if they still confused about the material and the students have to bring a dictionary to support the students in learning. And the last it is suggested to the readers to understand about the combining word wall strategy and describe strategy to improve students writing ability.
REFERENCESS
Booth, David and Larry Swartz. 2011.
Literacy Techniques for Building Successful Readers and Writers.
Canada: Pembroke Publishers.
Brassel, Danny. 2011. Dare to Differentiate: Vocabulary
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Caswell and Mahler. 2004. Strategies for Teaching Writing. Virginia:
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Cronsberry, Jemmifer. 2004. Word Walls: a Support for Literacy in Secondary School Students.
Retrieved on 12th August 2014.
www.searchforwordwalls.com/docs/235 15368/interactive-word-walls.
Dugan, Christine. 2004. Strategies for Building: Academic Vocabulary in Language Arts. Chicago: Shell Educational Publishing, Inc.
Ediger, Marlow and D. Bhaskara Rao.
2003. Elementary Curriculum.
New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House.
Faith, Pennington. Describe Language Arts (with choices of integration).
A.W Spalding Elementary.
Designed for 3rd. Retrieved on 12th August 2014.
www.documenstoc.com/docs/234 /2006/writing-to-describe
John, Haines. 2007. Describe for Descriptive. Retrieved on 5th
March 11, 2015.
www.englishbiz.co.uk
