Writing instruction began to change throughout the United States as teachers found more holistic approaches to teaching writing (McCarthy, Hoffman, Stable, Elliott, Dressman, & Abbott, 1994). Responding to the need for innovative instruction and pedagogies, the last two decades saw an emergence of new practices that moved beyond rote repetition and technical instruction. Instead, writing was
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taught as a vehicle for creative expression and critical thought. Rather than focusing on spelling, grammar, and other writing conventions, the holistic stages emphasize the actual stages of writing. It concentrates on writing as a recursive stage in which writers have the opportunity to gather ideas, organize the ideas, draft, edit, and revise their work (Hillocks, 1987; Murray, 1982).
The teaching of writing is a matter of prescribing a set of predetermined tasks or exercises to the students. When teachers teach writing course not only teach about how to develop ideas in writing, but also need a serious attention of how to write English sentences grammatically and systematically. Therefore, teaching writing will be good if it depends on the teachers' ability how to teach writing effectively which can make the students’ ability being improved. In improving the effectiveness of writing, some important notes must be noticed in teaching writing and assessment. In teaching writing, the teaching should engage students in self- evaluation. In assessing writing, teacher should respond to writing based on criteria that have been communicated and taught to students and responses to errors. To respond the error teacher can use a feedback that contains specific criteria for the writing task.
According to Harmer (1998, p. 79), teaching writing to students of English include some reasons as follows:
Firstly, it is reinforcement. Most of students gain great benefits from seeing the written language especially the visual demonstration of language construction is valuable for both their understanding and committing the new language to their memory. So it is very useful for them to write sentences using new language after they have just studied it.
Secondly, language development is also a reason for teaching writing. It seems that the actual process of writing helps students to learn language better. The highest level of writing skill involves critical thinking. To deal with their mental activities, students have to construct proper written texts using all their learning experience.
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Thirdly, the most important reason for teaching writing is that it is a basic productive language skill. Obviously, students need to know how to write a letter, how to write a report, etc. Therefore, they need to know some writings’ conventions such as punctuation, paragraph construction, forms of paragraph.
2.4.1. Principles for teaching the writing skill
According to Huong, T.T, MinhN.T.T.etal. (2007, p. 58), teachers should consider some of following principles when teaching writing.
First of all, teachers should provide many opportunities for students to write regularly and frequently. Students’ writing skills just improve when they practice writing a lot. So, just asking students to practice in writing lesson is not enough.
Secondly, the teachers have to stress “pre-writing” process. Teacher can create writing tasks from listening, reading and speaking lessons with different style of writing such as letter writing, e-mail writing, etc.
Then, teachers should make their feedback to students helpful and meaningful by the way of giving comments in detail at the end of students’ writings.
And teachers’ comments should help students to be independent writers. It means that teachers’ comments should help students to correct their errors instead of correcting their errors.
Moreover, to evaluate students’ writings clearly and exactly, teachers should make criteria for each item such as spelling, accuracy of vocabulary, use of cohesive devices, etc.
Besides, as often as possible teachers should create the right conditions for students’ generation of ideas, and teachers always consider themselves as a resource for information and language when necessary.
Lastly, teachers should provide students communicative writing activities.
With this kind of activities, students write with the answer to the three questions:
What they are writing? (genre), for whom? (audience) and why (purpose). This is useful for students because these writing activities in the class tend to resemble communicative writing tasks in the real life.
29 2.4.2.Steps in a writing lesson
Writing is not an easy task as it needs skills and high thinking abilities. It is a productive skill of important stages which should be focused on during teaching writing. White and Arndt (1991:5) assert, writing serves as cyclical process.
Millrood (2001:147) describes three-phase frame work of teaching to write:
- Pre-writing (schemata-the previous knowledge a person already has- activation, motivation for writing, preparation for the writing, familiarization with the formatof the text).
- While-writing (thesis development, writing from notes, proceeding from a givenbeginning phrase and following a plan).
- Post-writing (reflection on spelling and grammar errors, sharing the writing with other students-redrafting, peer editing).
Lindsay and Knight (2006: 94-95) also divide writing into three stages:
- Pre-writing stage: the teacher sets the task, learners prepare for what they will write.
- The writing stage: the learners do the task, for example, writing a report, a story, a letter.
- Post- writing: feedback and follow-up work.
Teaching writing is based on the process of the writing including three stages of pre-writing, writing and revising. (Nguyen Thi Van Lam & Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007:91)
-Pre-writing: This stage is aimed at preparing students with everything necessary for writing. Some activities are:
Introducing the writing topic to stimulate interest: The teacher may motivate the class, gradually setting up the context for their topic by asking questions to elicit students’ experiences, ideas concerning the text or by using some sort of visual aids or their imagination. The teacher can provide students some discussion.
Working with ideas: Students do the pre-writing stage of the process of writing.
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Working with the model. A model is very useful here. It reminds students of the typical features and structures of the text type they are writing.
Presenting key words related to the topic and necessary for the students.
Outlining: Students make an outline to prepare for their writing.
- While-writing: This stage consists of three steps- drafting, revising and rewriting.
At the beginning of the second session, the students will be encouraged to read a sample model on the topic they will write about. Then, the students will be asked to organize the information and ideas they generated in the pre-writing stage to draft a writing.
- Post –writing: Students will be asked to share their first drafts with one another to get peer feedback. This stage will allow them time to reflect upon what had been written to rethink, re-see, and reshape words and ideas. Students will receive comments, discuss them further with peers and decide what to incorporate in their final drafts. Finally, students will be requested to write the revised essays and submit them to the teacher.
2.4.3. Methods of teaching the writing skill
Graham and Perin (2007) conducted a meta-analysis of research onwriting.
They identified a set of recommended approaches for teaching writing to adolescentstudents. They ordered by descending effect size that the 11 instructional methodsare the following (Graham & Perin, 2007, pp. 4-5):
1. Writing strategies involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, andediting their compositions.
2. Summarization involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how tosummarize texts.
3. Collaborative writing uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents worktogether to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions
4. Specific product goals is a method in which students are assigned specific,reachable goals for their writing.
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5.Word processing uses computers and word-processors as instructional supports forwriting assignments.
6. Sentence combining involves teaching students to construct more complex,sophisticated sentences.
7. Prewriting engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organizeideas for their composition.
8. Inquiry activities engage students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to helpthem develop ideas and content for a particular writing task.
9. The process writing approach interweaves a number of writing instructionalactivities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities,writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing
10. Study of models provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulatemodels of good writing.
11. Writing for content learning uses writing as a tool for learning content material.
In general, many various methods used to teach and improve students’ writing skill.
Some methods are useful for improving accuracy, others are used for fluency or richness in content of the writing text. However, no researcher is concerned about tutorials for improving writing so far. That is the reason why we have ideas to find out whether tutorials can bring any benefits to EFL students in developing their writing skill or not.