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TEACHING WRITING BY COMBINING POW AND TREE STRATEGY WITH ERROR MONITORING STRATEGY AT SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL
Oleh Nosya Anggraini*)
**) Handayani, S.B, M.Pd Pembimbing atau Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
NOSYA ANGGRAINI (NIM:10040297), Pengajaran Writing Dengan Menggabungkan Strategi POW and TREE dengan Error Monitoring di Sekolah Menengah Atas, Makalah, Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat, Padang, 2015
Dalam pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris banyak permasalahan yang dihadapi siswa seperti kesulitan dalam mengembangkan ide tulisan yang disebabkan masalah pada strategi guru dalam mengajar. Ada banyak strategi pengajaran menulis untuk membantu siswa dalam mengembangkan ide menulis. Guru harus mampu menggunakan strategi yang membimbing siswa tidak hanya menghasilkan produk tulisan tapi juga melewati proses menulis, sampai memonitor kesalahan yang mereka buat dalam menghasilkan tulisan. POW and TREE adalah sebuah strategi yang membimbing siswa untuk melewati proses menulis mulai dari memilih topik, mengembangkan ide tulisan sampai menghasilkan kerangka tulisan. Proses ini dilakukan sampai menghasilkan tulisan. Selanjutnya Error Monitoring adalah sebuah strategi yang akan membimbing siswa untuk melakukan evaluasi terhadap tulisan yang dihasilkan dengan menemukan kesalahan dan kemudian direvisi. Dengan diterapkan strategi ini, siswa dapat mengembangkan ide dalam menulis sebuah paragraph dan hasil kombinasi ini juga mampu membantu guru dalam membimbing siswa tidak hanya menghasilkan produk tulisan tapi juga melewati proses menulis hingga mengevaluasi hasil tulisan mereka.
Keywords: writing, POW and TREE, and Error Monitoring
*Penulis
** Pembimbing INTRODUCTION
Writing is a communication activity which is used by people to communicate each others in written form. Trough writing activity, the writers deliver their message to the readers when they do writing. It is also stated as a complex skill which involves some language components such as vocabulary, grammar and mechanic of languages.
A language learner can be said getting successfully in learning a language if they can produce a writing project. Besides having writing skill as the way to communicate, it also should be mastered by the students as the media to share their feeling, arguments, opinions and ideas. Therefore, the students should improve their writing skill to complete their all language skills.
On the contrary, based on the writer’s experience when she did her teaching practice at Senior High School, teaching writing only did as an usual activity where the teacher taught the students
to write based on the demand of book source direction. As the book prepares some topics to be written by the students, the teacher asked the students to choose the topics given and continued by asking the students to write. The writing activity do not appropriate with the guidance of writing process.
In teaching writing for Analytical text, the teacher only asked the students to write the text based on the direction of the book used. The students did not choose the topics based on their need, were not leaded to make draft event no monitoring activities. The students were only asked to produce a writing project and the result of their writing only monitored by the teacher. The teacher did not lead the students to write thesis statement, building argumentation and constructing re- iteration. This condition made the students was lazy to write. If the students did writing activity, they only did it to get score from the teacher. They felt deadlock in developing ideas. It happened
2 because the teacher did not guide them to develop ideas in writing since the teachers do not have appropriate strategy to do it.
Based on the problem above, it is important for the teacher to think and apply about suitable strategies not only to help the students to pass through the process of developing ideas but also to involve the students to monitor their writing.
Therefore, they know their improvement in writing.
There are some strategies can be used to solve the problem of students in developing ideas such as Plan and Write strategy, POW and TREE strategy, POWER strategy which can help the students to think and expand the topic chosen. Plan and Write is a strategy to help the students brainstorming their ideas before writing and arranging the ideas in the best sequences. Next POWER strategy is a strategy which help the students to plan their writing and ending by revising the writing result. POW and TREE strategy is a strategy which completes more in guiding the students to pass their writing process.
However, the above strategies only are able to help the students to pass the writing process, the students still are not involved to evaluate their writing result. Therefore it is needed to use another strategy to complete the steps of the process and product of writing. There is a strategy to help the students to evaluate their writing result to see the improvement of their writing such as Error Monitoring strategy, SHARED strategy and DEFENDS strategy.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE Writing can be defined as an activity to transfer ideas and to express someone’s thinking though written form. It is essential skills that are used to communicate process by using several ways to do. It will help to develop and organize ideas and also it process of delivering information to the readers.
Caswell (2004:3) mention that writing is the vehicle for communication and a skill mandated in all aspects of life. It means that writing is a tool of thinking process and how to express ideas.
Therefore, it can be assumed that if the people want to express their ideas and thinking about something they can write and share it each other. It can be said that writing can be used as tool to do communication by transforming the thought and ideas from some one to each other in written form.
In conclusion, writing is a tool of communication where people can communicate with others through expressing and transferring language into several paragraphs. The writing activity can be started by finding a topic and some supporting ideas, and produces them into a text with some additional information and examples in
order to encourage students’ thinking and learning to be motivated to do written communication.
Teaching Writing
Writing is a process of transferring writer’s ideas to reader so it should be built as effective as possible. The writer should make a writing which easy to understand by the reader by choosing vocabularies which suited to the reader, the writer should aware to whom the writing made.
Leo (2002:1) states that writing is a process of expressing ideas or thoughts in words. It means that writing is the process of thinking and how to express ideas in written form. If the students want to express their ideas or their thinking about something, they can write in a paper and share it to the others. So that, there will be different ideas and form of each writing result from different writers.
It can be concluded that teaching writing is an activity that focuses on the process and product of writing. In the process the teacher guides the students how to convey their ideas and the product is the written form.
POW and TREE Strategy
Vanderbilt (2002) states that POW and TREE are mnemonic devices which are used together with in constructing students’ ideas. It is used to help the students to pass the four elements of writing such as planning, organizing, writing, and editing. It is also used for struggling writers who may have difficulty integrating the elements of writing process.
It can be concluded that POW and TREE is a in two-part strategy which helps the students to determine about their own topic to be developed, guides the students to organize their ideas or opinion. In part of organization, the strategy can be mixed with developing topic sentence, state by giving reasons about the topic and do evaluation and ending. This strategy will be ended by writing more what they want to write based on the developed draft.
POW and TREE is a two-part strategy which can not be separated. Some experts explain that POW and TREE strategy can be used by inserting the TREE within the POW, however some experts states that it can be used as following steps.
De Ruve (2009) gives some procedures about how to use the POW and TREE strategy.
However she has different opinion with the first
“E” of the TREE. She explains that the planning strategy POW requires students to:
3 1. Plan their essay by choosing topic. The students
are guided to choose the topic of their writing 2. Organize their notes and ideas into a writing
plan. Preparing a note before constructing a draft is needed to be done.
3. Write the essay, using their plan. The draft is developed based on what the students construct.
4. Topic, the student is guided with the instruction tell what they believe to reinforce the topic sentence. The topic that has been developed into the first draft will be reinforce into topic sentence based on the draft planned.
5. Reason, the student is told to provide three reasons to support his/her opinion. The topic sentences should be supported by some reasons (arguments)
6. Example, the students develop three examples of their reasons. The arguments or the reasons are give some samples to make it strengthen 7. Ending, the students develop the ending. The
topic sentences, the arguments (reasons with sample) are developed into a text till the writing completed.
Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that POW and TREE strategy is a kind of strategy which help the students to pass through their writing process beginning with determining about the topic untill make the ending of the writing. This strategy helps the students to develop their ideas to write because it guides the students not only to produce a written text but also to proced their writing actvity.
Harris and Graham (2005) state that POW and TREE is a kind of strategy which is developed based on students self regulated strategy development. This strategy is designed to help students learn, use, and adopt the strategies used by skilled writers. It is an approach that adds the elements of self regulation to strategy instruction for writing. It encourages students to monitor, evaluate, and revise their writing, which turn reinforces self-regulation skills and independent learning.
It can be concluded that the POW and TREE strategy is a teaching strategy which can be implemented by the teacher to help the learners to study how to develop their plan into a good writing. The guided processes which are given by this two part strategy make the students can write what they think independently.
Error Monitoring Strategy
It is stated by several experts that beside the students are guided to do and pass the writing process such as choosing topic, drafting, revising, editing, and writing, the students also guided to
evaluate and monitor their writing result after the writing completed.
According to Wong (2004) explains that Error monitoring strategy is a strategy which is designed to teach students a process for detecting and correcting writing errors and helps them to produce a neater writing product. This strategy teaches students how to locate errors in paragraph organization, sentence structure, capitalization, overall editing and appearance, punctuation and spelling. The error monitoring uses mnemonic COPS (Capitalization, Overall appearance, Punctuation and Spelling)
Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that Error monitoring strategy is a teaching strategy which helps the students to pass the process for detecting and correcting errors in their writing and for producing a neater written product. The students correct their errors guided by mnemonic COPS and the students rewrite the passage before submitting it to the teacher.
Error monitoring strategy is a strategy which uses the mnemonic COPS as the guidelines (Capitalization, Overall appearance, Punctuation and Spelling).
Hughes and Hall (2009) claim that the procedures of Error monitoring strategy is not only guided by mnemonic COPs but also with mnemonic WRITER. They explain that the Error monitoring strategy includes six steps that students use to direct the composing process, from generation of an initial draft to editing for mechanical errors. The mnemonic WRITER is used to help the students remember the six steps: First, in developing their initial draft, students write on every other line using sentence writing strategy.
Second, the rough draft is read for meaning, and in appropriate sentence, for example the sentences those that are not related to the topic or are unclear, are deleted and changed. Third, students interrogated themselves using COPS strategy:
a. Have I capitalized the first words and proper noun?
b. Have I made any handwriting, margin, messy, or spacing errors.
c. Have I used end punctuations, commas, and semicolons correctly
d. Do the words look like they are spelled right, can I sound out, or should I use the dictionary?
Fourth, if the students are unsure about an error, they are directed to take their to someone else for help. Fifth, students execute a final copy of their paper, incorporating correction made on the rough draft and writing as neatly as possible on every line. Sixth, the composition is reread and final corrections are made.
4 Based on the procedures that have been stated above, it can be seen clearly that the use of Error monitoring strategy should be based on some steps which identified as COPS. However, to make the procedures complete more, it can be enrich with some procedures that are identified as WRITER.
Error monitoring strategy is a strategy which helps the students to evaluate their own writing product. According to Waseloh (2014) that Error monitoring strategy helps the students to improve the writing quality since this strategy involves detecting and correcting errors in written work to increase the overall quality of a student’s final product. Instruction stresses the importance of proofreading written work for content and mechanical errors and eliminating those errors before work is submitted.
It can be assumed that Error monitoring strategy is a strategy which is useful to help students with disabilities in writing to be trained to use the error monitoring strategy were able to improve their detection and correction of errors.
The use of mnemonic COPS make the students are easier enough to improve in their ability to detect errors.
Combining of POW and TREE Strategy and Error Monitoring Strategy
It is stated clearly that teaching writing is an activity where the teacher leads the students to produce a text. The writing process has to be followed and could not ignore some principles of teaching writing. Based on some experts’
suggestion about teaching writing, this process will be begin with pre-writing activities where the teacher invites the student to think about a topic.
POW and TREE strategy have been explained as the strategies which are divided into two parts POW and TREE used together in unity.
This strategy is guided the students to develop their writing plan from choosing topic till producing a writing product, in this paper is till producing analytical exposition text. Since POW and TREE only guide the students to do writing activity till producing draft, it is needed for the students to be guided to do writing activity till the evaluation of their works. The students’ writing product, as usual, are just evaluated by their teachers, therefore it is needed for the students are guided to evaluate and monitor their works by their own. That is why the POW and TREE strategy will be combined with Error monitoring by using WRITER and COPS steps.
The teaching writing by combining POW and TREE and Error monitoring strategy will be done in three teaching activities; pre – teaching
writing activities, whilst – teaching activities and post – teaching writing activities. The combination will be developed based on theory De Ruve (2009) and Hughes and Hall (2009). In Pre – teaching writing activities, some steps on POW and TREE will be implemented such as Pick the topic, next Organize the plan in another note and Write the draft. The whilst – teaching writing activities will be continued by conducting Topic sentence, give the Reason, Explanation and Ending (TREE product is a draft). The implementation will be continued by implementing Error monitoring such as developing their initial draft, students write on every other line using sentence writing strategy.
The rough draft is read for meaning, and in appropriate sentence, for example the sentences those that are not related to the topic or are unclear, are deleted and changed. The use of COPS strategy will be implemented by giving some directed questions. The students are directed to take their composition to someone else for help. The students execute a final copy of their paper, incorporating correction made on the rough draft and writing as neatly as possible on every line. The composition is reread and final corrections are made.
CONCLUSION
In combining POW and TREE strategy with Error Monitoring strategy for teaching writing of Analytical exposition text, the steps of both strategies will be completed each other. The POW and TREE strategy is known as a strategy where the students are helped to organize their idea from a reading text. This strategy can be applied in pre- teaching writing activity. In this activity the students think about the topic will be focus on.
Since this paper applies for Analytical exposition text, the activity will be started by identifying the generic structures of the text from thesis statement, arguments and re-iteration. This strategy is still applied in whilst – teaching writing strategy where the students are guided to do drafting, revising and editing. Whilst teaching activity will be combined with Error Monitoring strategy where the students evaluate their writing. The teaching writing activity will be ended by evaluating the students’ writing result.
SUGGESTIONS
Producing an Analytical exposition text is not easy to be done. Besides the students should write based on the structures of the text, the students also pay attention to the content of the text which has purpose to persuade readers. Based on the previous explanation about the combination of POW and TREE strategy with Error Monitoring strategy, the teacher are suggested to choose a text which familiar and close to students life in order to help the students to build their background of
5 knowledge about a specific topic since this combination is started by identifying a reading text.
It is also suggested that the teachers do not ignore about the process of teaching process such as choosing topic, drafting, revising, editing and writing. The teacher can not only combine the POW and TREE with Error Monitoring strategy but also involve the teaching writing process on the combination. It is done to make the writing process running well. The combination of the strategies can be applied in any kind of text. The choosing of the text should be paid attention to the level and the interest of the students.
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