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TEACHING WRITING BY COMBINING POWER (Plan, Organize, Write, Edit, and Revise) AND FLOWER WRITING STRATEGY AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
Oleh:
Ria Ervinda*)
(Mahasiswa Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat) Hevriani Sevrika, M.Pd**)
(Staf Pengajar Program Studi Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat)
ABSTRAK
Makalah ini ditulis bertujuan untuk membantu mengatasi permasalahan siswa dalam pengajaran menulis (writing) pada tingkat sekolah menengah pertama (SMP). Masalah yang dihadapi siswa SMP diantaranya adalah siswa sulit membuat teks dengan baik karena mereka sulit menemukan ide ketika menulis. Kemudian, ide yang mereka tulis tidak tersusun dengan baik. Mereka jarang melakukan pengeditan dan revisi tulisan mereka sendiri sehingga mereka tidak bisa menghasilkan tulisan yang baik. Selain itu, makalah ini juga bertujuan sebagai masukan bagi guru-guru bahasa inggris dalam melaksanakan pengajaran writing sehingga siswa tertarik dan termotivasi untuk belajar menulis khususnya descriptive text. Dalam makalah ini penulis membahas dua strategi yang dikombinasikan untuk membantu siswa menulis yaitu strategi POWER dengan strategy Flower Writing. Strategi ini mempunyai langkah-langkah yang sistematis dalam penerapannya. Di mulai dengan siswa memilih topik yang menarik dan sesuai yang nantinya akan dikembangkan menjadi sebuah teks. Sebelum menyusun kalimat, siswa menggali informasi yang berkaitan dengan topik dan menyusunnya dalam diagram berbentuk bunga. Setelah itu siswa menyusun informasi tersebut menjadi teks dilengkapi dengan kata penghubung yang sesuai. Akhirnya teks dilakukan pengeditan dan revisi seperti penggunaan huruf kapital, kerapian, tanda baca, dan ejaan. Adapun kelebihan penggabungan strategi ini adalah siswa akan memiliki kemampuan menulis secara individual berdasarkan langkah-langkah yang jelas dan dibantu dengan diagram yang menarik dalam menulis sebuah teks yang benar.
Key Words: Writing, POWER (Plan, Organize, Write, Edit, and Revise) Strategy, and Flower Writing Strategy.
*) Penulis
**) Pembimbing
2 INTRODUCTION
Writing is one of indirectly means of communication. It means that through writing, the writer can convey our feeling, ideas, expression, and sharing something to another in written form. Although it can be as an alternative way in communication, but writing is not an easy job. It is a comprehensive ability that needs much concentration which involves grammar, vocabulary, spelling, style, punctuation and other elements. In writing actitivity, the writer must learn how to communicate their ideas in order to make the reader understand what s/he is thinking or feeling about. Therefore, writing has important role and teaching writing should become priority in teaching process.
Teaching writing is an activity that the teacher helps the students how to convey their ideas in written form. It means that students should have ability to express their ideas that are relevant with a certain topic that they want to write and they should be able to arrange the ideas systematically. A teacher does not only teach about the way to arrange some sentences into good writing from their mind but also to guide and lead the students to pass the process of writing. The teacher guides the students to convey their ideas in order the writing will have a meaning.
In writing, the students should follow some steps to get a good writing such as choose topic, making a draft, developing the draft, writing, revising, editing and publishing. In addition, students must also consider the use of grammatical rules, vocabularies, and punctuation properly. If students use the things above in writing, the students will be easy starting to write and their writing will be easy to understand by reader.
Unfortunately, some of the students cannot write an English text well. There are several factors that students have problem in writing. Those factors below are found when the writer did teaching practice at SMP Pertiwi 2 Padang especially in class VIII.3 . First, some students had difficulty in getting started. It was difficult for some students to express the ideas, because they did not understand how to write well. Consequently, some students could not develop information, ideas, and argument in sequence. Second, some of the students were not interested and had low motivation in writing. They did not like to write especially in English.
The last problem was the ability of the student’s skill to translate Indonesia languange into English. They like to use
‘calculator language’ in writing. So that, the result of writing was not meaningful.
In order to solve the problem above and to make the writing activity become
3 more interesting, the teacher should apply various strategies in order to develop students’ ability in writing. Some strategies that can be used in teaching writing such as Fast Write, PWIM (Picture Word Inductive Model), POWER (Plan, Organize, Write, Edit, and Revise), and Flower Writing strategy. Fast Write is a strategy in which the students write everything they recall and any new ideas that form in their minds only in 5-7 minutes. PWIM or Picture Word Induction Model is an instructional strategy to help support students’ vocabulary acquisition, word connections and classifications, and then eventually supports students as they begin to write sentences and continue on to paragraphs. POWER is a strategy that helps students to organize ideas in writing by involving all writing processes;
planning, drafting, editing, and revising.
Then, Flower Writing is a strategy involves writing down the central idea supported by the detail around that have connection to make a complete paragraph.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Writing
Writing is a complex process that allows the writers to explore thought and ideas and share it with others. It is supported by Sokolik in Nunan (2003: 88), he states that writing is both physical and
mental act. Writing as physical act, it refers to commiting words or ideas to some medium. While as mental act, it refers to work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraphs that will be clear to a reader. This sentence means the students can express something such as ideas or feeling by using their own word in written form.
Based on the theory from the expert above, the writer conclude that writing is complex activity where the students should consider the choice of words and should understand how to develop them in sentences to showing their ideas. By writing the students can interact with other to express their thought, ideas, and feeeling. Then, writing is an instrument of thinking that helps the students to create something in written form.
To help students have ability in writing, teacher should teach the students how to write ot the writing process. There are several necessary stages that students should follow to develop their writing skill. According to Anderson (2002:30), there are four stages in writing process.
They are discovering, drafting, revising, and polishing. Discovering includes everything that writers do in relation to a writing assigtnment or task that leads to
4 their first draft. Drafting refers to getting the thoughts on paper in the form of sequenced sentences, paragraphs, and sections. Revising involves reexamining the effectiveness of the whole paper in terms of the ideas presented and the ordering of those ideas. Then, polishing involves refining language for effect, proofreading for correctness, and checking manuscript format.
In teaching writing, the teacher does not only teach about how to put words into a piece of paper but also students can enjoy the activity and have ability on it. Caswell and Mahler (2004:3) claim that teaching writing provides opportunities for the students to develop clear thinking skills. This sentence means the students are given time to write and process their thoughts, they can develop a way to analyze their thinking. The students should be ready to think clearly to get the chance to write. If they could not think clearly, they will not be able to develop their ideas to write and analyze their writing.
In summary, teaching writing can help the students when they want to write, because it makes students to understand how to write clearly. It also a way to make the students can be easy to express their ideas into some paragraph. The teacher gives feedback and response to students
that should make well writing and discuss how much wrong when they write in writing. The teacher evaluates how much the students’ achievement in writing form.
Besides, teaching writing can improve the students to produce good writer and can publish or share to public in the world.
POWER Strategy
POWER strategy stands for Plan, Organize, Write, Edit, and Revise. Richard (2004) defines POWER strategy as mnemonic strategy that helps students to write by several stages; prepare organize, writing, edit, and revise. It means that this strategy encourage students through the writing task in systematically stages. The stages of POWER is quite similar with writing process. Thus, by applying this strategy, the students will be easy to memorize the stages in writing.
From the definition above, it can be concluded that the mnemonic POWER strategy can be used by teachers to assist students to remember the steps of the writing process by providing a letter to cue each step in the sequence. Each letter stands for a single step that the students must follow. The steps of POWER will require explicit instruction from the teacher. Finally, it will help students to organize ideas when writing texts or essays.
5 For the procedures of POWER strategy, Welkes (2008:46) demonstrate that there are five processes of POWER strategy, they are describe as follow:
a. Planning. It involves brainstorming, or retrieving background knowledge a student posseses on a particular subject.
b. Organization. It involves; (1) taking the information the student generated during the planning, or brainstorming stage, (2) making decision about the suitability of the information, (3) eliminating facts that have little or no relevance to the topic, (4) prioritizing the remaining facts based on their importance as persuasive evidence.
c. Writing. Using the information generated during the planning stage, and organizing and prioritizing the information using the essay organizer.
d. Editing. There are two aspects of editing; editing for content and editing for mechanics.
e. Revising. The answers to the self- questioning in editing stage will enable the student to improve the quality of the essay during the revision stage.
The procedures of POWER strategy above shows that is systematic strategy that can improve student’s ability in writing. It will help students to manage and compose their ideas. It also can contribute student’s communicative competence in written form.
Graham, et al (2007:138) state that POWER strategy is designed to help students to understand the requirements of a well organized text and the strategic process during the writing process. It means that POWER strategy can help students to know and understand how to write, how to organize ideas, and develop their ideas, arguments, and opinions through the steps of writing process.
In conclusion, the POWER strategy is used to help the students in writing. This strategy provides students to remember the steps of writing such as planning, organizing, writing, editing, and revising.
It means that the students can write well by remember and know all about writing process before they want to write a paragraph into a text. In short, by using this strategy, they can improve their ability in writing.
Flower Writing Strategy
Flower strategy is one of strategies that is used in teaching writing. Jacobson (2011:93) states that Flower strategy is a great and simple writing strategy for helping students to explain their thinking
6 process and creativity in order to make support logical argument in making a complete paragraph. This strategy helps students to build their creativity in writing.
This strategy also makes the students easy to create paragraph or essay by following the steps or instruction that is provided.
It can be concluded that Flower Writing strategy is one of teaching writing strategy that has a flower form where the students are asked to write a text individually by following this flower graph and its steps to find the topic and the supporting details around related to the topic that will be described. Flower writing strategy also one of a good strategy that can be used by the teacher to measure the ability of students in writing and helps the students how to write good sequence of the text. This is a simple and interesting writing strategy to be applied in classroom.
There are some steps of Flower Writing strategy that will help the teacher to apply this strategy in teaching writing.
Holmes (2007:3) states that there are five steps in using this strategy. First, teacher asks students to find the appropriate and interesting topic that will be written.
Second, teacher introduces the flower writing graphic organizer to the students that they use in writing process. Third, students find down the supporting detail that is related to the topic at the center of the graph. Fourth, students recognize the
transition words that will put over in writing the text. Fifth, students arrange the sentences into a good paragragh. In short, for this writing strategy, the students are asked to write a text by following the graph and steps that will help the students to think independently to find the topic at the center and recognize the supporting details around related to the topic that will be described.
There are some advantages of Flower Writing strategy. Jones (2011) adds several advantages of Flower Writing strategy. First, it is an easy writing strategy to be applied at any level. Second, it can be applied in group or individually. Third, it create an individual creative thinking to find the topic and supporting details to make an essay. Last, The steps are provided to help the students in writing paragraph.
In summary, Flower Writing is an interesting strategy that are useful for students in construct paragraph. Students will be guided with steps in flower form. It makes students to think creative and independently. In this case, Flower Writing strategy will be an effective writing strategy especially in descriptive text.
7 DISCUSSION
Preparation
There are some preparations that should be prepared by the teacher such as topic, time management, and media.
Application
In this stage, some activities should be done during teaching and learning process, it consists of pre-teaching activity, whilst-teaching activity, and post-teaching activity.
Pre-teaching Activity
a. The teacher greets the students b. The teacher checks the students’
attendance list
c. The teacher reviews the last material
Whilst-teaching Activity
In this stage, the writer will apply combination of POWER and Flower Writing strategy.
a. Exploration
1. The teacher brainstorms or retrieve the background knowledge a student possesses on a particular subject or topic by showing a picture and asks some questions for the students related to the topic that will be taught.
2. The teacher leads students to organize the information that students generated during the planning, or brainstorming stage.
3. The teacher introduces the flower writing graphic organizer to the students that they will use in writing process later.
4. Teacher asks students to find down the supporting detail that is related to the topic at the center of the graph.
5. The teacher uses the information generated during the planning stage, and organizing and prioritizing the information using the essay organizer.
b. Elaboration
1. After the teacher explains how to make the text by using flower graphic organizer, then the teacher asks the students to make a simple descriptive text by themselves.
2. The teacher asks the students to find the appropriate and interesting topic that will be written based on the pictures that are provided by the teacher.
3. The teacher asks the students to work independently based on the picture that they have choosen by following the previous activities.
8 c. Confirmation
After the students construct their descriptive text, the teacher asks students to edit and revise the paragraph.
1. The teacher asks students to edit the content by using self- questioning based on guidance by the teacher.
2. The teacher leads students to edit the mechanic by paying attention several things such as punctuation, spelling, usage, grammar, and the appearance of the essay itself.
3. The students improve the quality of the paragraph during the revision with the answers to the self- questioning in editing stage.
4. The teacher collects the students’
exercise.
Post-teaching Activity
1. The teacher ask students to conclude the material today based on their own understanding.
2. The teacher gives feedback for the students’ achievement.
3. The teacher closes the teaching and learning process
CONCLUSION
Based on the previous chapter, it can be concluded that writing is one of the language skills that should be mastered by
students. By writing the students can express their feeling, opinions, and ideas into written form. In writing, the writer collects and organizes the ideas and information through some steps such as planning, drafting, editing, and revising into good written form such as paragraphs or texts. Actually, there many texts that can be developed in written form, but in this paper the writer chooses descriptive text.
Futhermore, to help the students in producing a good writing, the teacher has to use a suitable and good strategy or combine two strategies to be applied in teaching and learning process but in this paper the writer uses combination strategy in teaching writing. The teacher can combine POWER (Plan, Organize, Write, Edit, and Revise) and Flower Writing strategy to improve students’ ability in writing. By using POWER strategy, the teacher can lead to manage and compose their ideas. POWER strategy will guide student to be an independent writer through the several stages that include writing process stages. Then, by using Flower Writing strategy, teacher can help the students to explore, organize, and develop their ideas about the topic that will be written based on the steps that have been provided by the strategy in flower form. As the result, the students become
9 easy to follow the steps in developing their ideas in oreder the writing activity can be effective
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