TEACHING WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT BY COMBINING GUIDED WRITING STRATEGY WITH POW + TREE STRATEY
AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
By:
Merisa Upitri Dahniar *)
**) Yelliza, M M.Pd Staff Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
ABSTRAK
Menulis adalah suatu proses mengungkapkan ide, pikiran dan pendapat kedalam bentuk tulisan.Namun, pada kenyataan nya banyak siswa sekolah tidak memiliki kemampuan yang bagus dalam menulis. Selain itu, siswa sering merasa kesulitan dalam menemukan ide yang akan ditulisnya. Hal tersebut seringkali membuat siswa merasa bosan dan tidak semangat dalam kegiatan menulis kalimat bahasa inggris dengan baik. Guru juga harus bisa menemukan cara yang menarik dan bagus dalam mengajar menulis untuk meningkatkan kemampuan menulis siswa. Dalam makalah ini, penulis mengunakan Guided Writing strategi dan Pow+tree strategi. Strategi ini merupakan alternatif strategi yang dapat digunakan guru dalam pengajaran menulis. Dengan menggunakan strategi ini, siswa dapat mengembangkan idenya agar bisa dijadikan sebuah topik.
Key word: Menulis, Guided Writing and Pow + Tree
INTRODUCTION
Writing is very important skill for students as one of the communication activity. Through writing the students’ can express their ideas, experiences, thought and feeling in the written form. Writing is very important to improve students’ language and also stimulate the students’ cognitive ability in learning English. In addition, writing is a procedure skill that requires students’ ability in producing a language to communicate, as a procedure skill writing becomes one of the focuses in learning English.
Teaching writing is one of important things that should be done by the teacher to help the students to produce a written product. Most of the teacher have
already known some strategies in teaching writing and lead student to make their essay individually. In writing, the students will write what they want to share their ideas.
For example, they can write their experience in a paragraph becomes a story and gives information about something.
Based on writer’s experience, when teaching practice at SMP 17 Padang, she found some problems that are faced by students in teaching writing. The first problem is the students difficult in generating and developing their ideas, because the students did not have idea to write and usually confuse to choose their topic, they are lazy to think something and much need teacher helps. The second, the
students have difficulties to express their ideas and related to the topic and change them into good and complete sentences.
Then, they produce the errors sentences. It makes written language ungrammatically.
As a result they did not produce coherent writing. The students can not provide good sentences in writing. So, they had difficulties in developing their idea to be paragraph. Most of students think that writing is boring activity that spend much time and need more attention in vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, or arrangement of words. Most of them did not know how to present their ideas clearly in written language.
Furthermore, the writer also found that the teachers difficulties when they taught such as the teacher has difficulties to find strategy in teaching writing which suitable for the material. Beside that the teacher has difficulties to find media to support teaching process. Mostly the teacher in teaching learning activities process like monotonous class. The teacher only gives many instrucrion and exercise without clear explanations about material. So, the students bored and the students do not understand about the lesson. The teachers should create the interest class in writing.
Based on phenomena above, the students have difficulties in writing. The writer is interested to choose the appropriate strategy to help teachers in learning process especially writing in order the students easy to understand in learning writing. There are many strategies that can be used by the teacher in teaching writing to help students develop their writing skill such as: First, The RAFT strategy is strategy that helps students to understand a topic from different sperspective. Second, T-Chart strategy is a roadmap for student group to win the issue it has selected to work on. Third, Probable Pessage strategy is to improve comprehension, develop an awareness of story structure, and increase vocabulary development. Fourth, Guided Writing strategy is to help the students to improve their ideas. Then, POW+TREE strategy is hepls students in produce their ideas and generate it into a sentence.
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE Writing is one of the four aspect of language, they are listening, speaking, reading and writing. All of this aspect is useful in developing in English Language.
The students should always consider the choice of words, the structure of sentence, and the sequences of words. We can
conclude that, writing is one of skill that should master in learning English as enjoy activity while the writer never feel bored in writing activity and have much idea to be written in good sentences or a paragraph.
According to Nunan (2003:88) writing is the mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraph that will be clear to a reader. In this case, the students should thinking before make a drafting that they want to write. On the other hand, according to Zamel in Language Teaching Methodology also adds that writing skill can develop rapidly when the students’ concerns and interest are acknowledged, when they are given numerous opportunities to write. It means that, the students will easy to write if the teacher give more attention and opportunities to write something.
In writing process, the studetns learn about how to produce their idea by using different ways by themself. Harmer (2001: 258) states that process writing is an interrelated set of recursive stages. The first stage is drafting. It is like after the student find the information. Second stage is structuring like ordering information, experimenting with arrengement. The third
is reviewing, in here like checking context, connections, assesing impact. The next is focusing, such as making sure in getting the message. And the last one is generating ideas and evaluation, like assesing the draft.
Meanwhile, Richard and Renandya (2002:16) say that process writing as a classroom activity incoporates the four basic writing stages. There are some stages in writing process as follow:
a. Planning (Pre-Writing)
Pre-writing is any activity in the classroom that encourages students to write. So, they do the activities after getting the information.
b. Drafting
The student begins by quickly jotting down ideas inrough form. It is a time gather, explore, and discover ideas without worrying about neatness or correctness.
c. Revising and editing
The means is the re-seeing of a piece of writing. The writer becomes concerned with the effect of the writing.
d. Presenting and publishing
This is stage frequently omitted from school writing.Students have
generally written only for the teacher.
Teaching writing is one of essential aspects in introducing of English besides reading, speking and listening. In teaching writing teacher need to encourage students’
participants by making the experience interesting and inovating.
According to Graham (1996:1), teaching writing is all of the instructions strategies that teachers may employ to develop students writing ability, which are the most powerful. In teaching writing the teacher should be clear on what skill he/she is trying to develop. Next, the teacher must be focus on what topic can be applied to ensure students participant. Also in teaching writing the teacher should have clear explanation before asks his/her students write something. Writing also helps students to create the bridge between the content knowledge and understanding about the topic. So that, the teacher should give the familiar topic to the students.
Teaching writing seems that complex activities be taught at school. There are some text should understood especially for junior high school students. There are many kinds of text, and in this paper the writer will be discussed about descriptive text.
There are many kinds of text that will be learn by the students, one of them is descriptive text. According to Mursid (2005:4) descriptive text is a kind of text which the purpose to give information.
The content of these text are description of particular things, animals, ad person or other.
In summary, descriptive text is a kind of text which is used to draw up out the real object (place, person and things) it will help the reader more understand clearly about real object. Descriptive text consist of identification and description.
In identification, it has to be known something that present to describe. In description, it has to describe the objects as real.
In learning proces, the purpose of descriptive text is essential for the students to get message of the text.
According to Jolly (1994:57) descriptive text have process to describe a particular person, things or place.
a. Description of person
Description of person can be taken by their appearance: person clothes and style of their hair. When we describing a person, we do not focus to describe every detail about person appearance. It
better focuses on one or two features that confey something about the character of person.
b. Description of place
In description of place the writer tries to create a picture into a word. The description must be organized so that the reader can be easy to imagine the scene being describe.
c. Description of thing
In description of thing like place, the writer tries to describe things in the words. The writer can make the reader more understand what will be described.
In summary, purpose of descriptive text are to describes the people, places and things. By writing the descriptive text the students will be easy to express their ideas because they have already known kind of description in their mind before they writing. The purposes of descriptive text are to describe people, things and place.
In learning writing, students are ecpected to write something. Te teacher should use a strategy that can make students easy to develop their idea in writing activities, and produce their ideas into a good sentences.
To help students in improving their ideas, the teacher should divide the
students into several group. It can makes student easy to share their ideas by using sharing ideas with their friends in that group. That is including the strategy that must be used for the teacher. One of that strategy is guided writing strategy, it is the teacher work with a students to help them in share their ideas. According to Rudd and Tyldesley (2006), guided writing strategy is a strategy which the teacher works with a specifics ability group to support them in applying principles they hve learnt in shared session. Guided writing is effective because it tackles problems in a spirit of shared inquiry and problem solving.
In summary, Guided writing strategy is one of the strategy which help the students in share their ideas. In this case, the teacher makes a small group to join with the students in sharing the ideas by using a piece of writing. The students should have more information or ability to improve ther ideas to make them easy when the teacher asks to sit on group.
There are some experts that express steps of guided writing strategy. First, according to Maggle and Chan (2004:36) Guided writing strategy have seven procedures :
a. The students brainstorm (prewriting) to generate ideas for writing. It means the students make prewriting first before making good writing. In here, they use chart, graphic organizer and list to help develop their idea in writing.
b. The students make rough draft. In here, the students put their ideas on the paper without think about grammar, capitalization, punctuation or paragraph structure.
c. The students do peer editing. It means the students share their rough draft and make suggestion to each other for improvement. In here, they demanded to help each other to understand the story by asking who, what, when, where, why and how question. They look for better word to express ideas and discuss among themselves how to make the writing clearly
d. The teacher and the students do revising. It means the students revise their writing after get suggestion from their classmate and make addition or clarify details.
e. The teacher and the students do editing together. It means the
students work with the teacher correct all mistakes in grammar and spelling
f. The students do final draft. It means that the students produce a copy of their writing with all correction made from the editing stage and then discuss the final draft with the teacher
g. The students publishing their writing. It means the writing process is final and the students publish their writing.
The writer concludes that there are many procedures that can be used in Guided Writing strategy. Each procedure has the same purpose. In this case the writer choose the procedure from Maggle and Chan (2004) because this procedure has clear instruction and more details that make the students be easier to understand in writing paragraph. And then, the students know about steps in writing until can be a good paragraph.
Guided writing strategy can help the students to develop their ideas, they do not lose their ideas in the middle paragraph in writing, and they can finish the writing from the first paragraph until
the end. There are many various advantages of Guided writing strategy given by experts. According to Graham et al (2007), there are many benefit of guided writing strategy. The first benefit is enables the teachers’ teaching to the needs of group. The second benefit is the teacher as observe and respond the need of individuals. The third benefit is encourages the children to discuss writing. The fourth benefit is the guided writing can build the confidence. The fifth benefit is allowing immediate feedback on success and further areas for improvement.
In conclusion, this strategy gives some advantages that can be used by the teacher in teaching writing. The main advantages are to help the students to develop their ideas.
Pow + tree is strategy help the students to produce their ideas and develop it into good sentences. By using pow +tree strategy the students will easy to develop their ideas.
There are some procedures that should be done in writing a paragraph by using POW+TREE strategy.
According to Westwood (2008:75), POW+TREE strategy is the strategy to help students write opinion essays. POW+TREE strategy consits of
pick your topic or idea, organise, write and then say more, topic sentence, give reason, expalin reason, and end with good concluding statement. It means that, this strategy can help the students to write main idea like in the story such as know the character of the story exactly, setting of the story, and can develop their ideas into good paragraph.
Not only that, after making a good paragraph, the students can analyse topic sentence, giving a reason that belief’s support, explain about support that they had got and make a conclusion.
In summary, the writer concludes POW+TREE strategy gives opportunity to the students to present their product in write somehing, and also to find good topic. In this strategy students can develop their ideas from the story. So they will study effectively in the classroom. In this strategy as an instance in learning process to make the students come in teaching learning writing process.
There are some expert that express procedures of POW+TREE strategy.
According to Westwood (2008:75) mentions that steps of POW+TREE strategy has some steps, they are : a. Pick your topic or idea
The students plan their idea, what idea that will they write
b. Organise your thoughts and make notes
The students choose one or two idea to be develop or to develop in the topic sentence
c. Write and then say more
Write the ideas in piece of paper, and then students read it to make more understand the idea and will easy to develop it.
d. Topic sentence, state your opinion The students write the topic sentence based on the ideas that they have been write
e. Give at least three reason to support that belief
Students give some reason to support topic sentence or state their opinion about the topic
f. Explain your reason in more detail The students explain their reason more detail with give some example on the reason
g. End with a good concluding statement
Students end their writing into a good conclusion
So in this paper the writer chooses POW+TREE strategy in teaching writing is taken from Westwood (2008:75). This strategy helps the students to explore their idea in writing a paragraph. The students
have opportunity to develop their idea to be a good sentence and pattern. The end of the writing the students can make a good conclusion.
Any strategy that is used by the teacher in teaching learning process give purpose to the teacher and students.
According to Phye (2005:230) POW+TREE strategy help the students to increase their attention to the essential components of writing tasks. Using the graphic organizer for tree taught students focus on the essential components of the topic sentence, reason supporting the topic sentence and good ending. Its also their paper after word to ensure that all the part were present.
In summary, POW+TREE strategy can helps students to develop their ability and background knowledge in writing tasks, also increase their attention to write essays or paragraph. In this strategy the students are focus on the topic sentence reason supporting and the good ending in essays. So this strategy helps students more easier to find a topic sentence and develop it become a good sentences and make a conclusion at the end. The result can help students to increase their ability in writing activities.
DISCUSSION
A. Teaching procedures of Combining Strategy
The writer combines of Guided writing and POW+TREE (Pick idea, Organize the idea, Write the idea, Topic sentence, Reason, Explain and Ending). The purpose of combining this strategy is to help the students to be more understand about what they are studying. The combination of these strategies is taken from Maggle and Chan (2004:36) inGuided writing and Westwood (2008:75) in POW+TREE strategy. In teaching there are procedures or steps should be applied by the teacher in learning process as follow:
1. The teacher brainstorm the students to generate ideas for writing by using the picture
2. The teacher guide the students to organize their ideas related picture and make a rough draft based on the picture 3. The teacher asks the students to write a
topic sentence and state the opinion 4. The teacher asks the students to give at
least three opinion to support the topic sentence
5. The teacher and the students do editing and revising together
6. The teacher asks the students to make final draft
7. The teacher asks the students to end their writing and create a paragraph clearly 8. The teacher asks the students to publish
their writing
In teaching writing there are many strategies and activities that are suggested. In this paper, the writer would like to discuss one of them. It is about teaching writing by combining of Guided writing strategy wtih Pow+Tree strtegy at Junior High School.
Teaching writing by combining of Guided writing strategy with Pow+Tree strategy makes the students easy to find a good topic to be developed then make the students easy to organize the idea into a cohesive paragraph.
B. Preparation
Preparation is very important for the teacher in teaching writing process. As one prepare learning material by studying.
Actually there are some important aspect that should be considered by teacher before start to teach the activities. The goal is to run the process of teaching learning well.
1. Media
Before class is starting, the teacher has to prepare the approporiate media in order to make the students interested and helps the students understand about the material. In this case, to apply the
combining of Guided writing strategy with Pow+tree strategy the theacher use picture, chart and text as a media in teaching learning process.
2. Material
Guided writing strategy is writing guide for the teacher in helping the students to make a good writing Pow+tree strategy use to descriptive text to pick the idea and explain it more details. So this paper limited on descriptive text.
3. Lesson Plan
Before the teache explain the material in teaching learning process.
First the teacher should make a lesson plan. It caused that the lesson plan the guides and role of the teacher to teach the material for teaching learning process.
4. Time allocation
There are 80 minutes for English subject and it will be divided into three parts; pre-teaching 10 minutes, whilst- teaching 60 minutes, and post-teaching 10 minutes.
C. Classroom Procedures
This strategy can be implemented in three phases: there are pre-teaching activity, whilst-teaching activity and post-teaching
activity. In pre-teaching activity, the teacher brainsstorm through showing pictures about descriptive text. Then, whilst-teaching activity the teacher leads the students to develop their ideas. The last is post-teaching activity, the teacher ask the students to identify the text by using POW+TREE strategy to make them more understand about the ideas that they developed.
1. Pre Teaching Activity
Pre teaching is very important to start the lesson. It aims to make the students get full concentration and more ready to start he lesson as well as to introduce new topic/material. There are some activities that will be done by the teacher before entering to whilst teaching activity. The activity are described as follow:
a. Teacher greets the students
b. The teacher checks the attendance lists
c. The teacher brainstorm the students by using picture and give some question
2. Whilst Teaching activity
Whilst teaching activity are the activitites where the teacher present the material. The activities as follow:
a. Exploration
1. The teacher provide topic sentence related picture 2. Teacher explore students’
comprehension about the sentence
3. Teacher invites the students to find the sentence related with picture and make draft together 4. Teacher tells to students about
the topic material.
5. The teacher explains and asks students to analyze the language feature
b. Elaboration
1. Teacher invites students to pick their own topic sentence related with the same picture.
2. Teacher asks the students to state the characteristics about the picture
3. The teacher provide much help to students in making a good draft
4. Teacher asks student to revise and edit the draft clearly c. Confirmation
1. The teacher asks the students to end their writing and produce into paragraph
2. The teacher asks the students to publish their writing
3. Post Teaching Activity Post teaching activity is the end of the lesson. The teacher gives excercise and discuss it with the students. The purpose is to know how far the students understand about the lesson.
There are some steps in post teaching activities:
The teacher gives evaluation to checks students’ understanding,
CONCLUSION
Writing is one of direct communication between the writers and the texts which are produce by them. Through writing, the writer could deliver their ideas, thoughts, meaning and any other understanding in printed text. In this process, the writer also convey their feelings, ideas, expression and even sharing something to another through writing. Refering to this reason, the students in school must have ability in writing. In order to get the purpose of witing, the teacher have crucial role to improve the students’ writig ability. One way to improve the students’ writing ability is the combination of guided writing strategy and pow+tree startegy.
In teaching writing, teacher needs some strategies to motivate students to be more active to write,and the strategy that can be used is combining Guided writing strategy and pow+tree strategy. These strategy help the teachers to guide the students, especially in produce and improving students’ ideas. Its also can help the students to express and organize their ideas
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