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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Develop Quality of Students in Writing Skills

Writing is one of the most valuable and exotic skill in which lots of intellectual ideas and emotions are expressed. There are plenty of out puts can be made from writing no matter what profession someone is. With writing we can save not only in our sort term memory but also in long- term memory. Writing skill is useful not in collage and graduate school. But in career and business. More or less, writing must be used in every job, especially business. For example, write internal memos, correspond with clients, or help design sales materials. Writing beautiful prose and poetry is a talent. Writing effectively, however, is a skill that can be learned.
Most of students disable and dislike writing lesson. They can not construct sentence and argument in writing. The fact, Harvard University is moving to remedy the quality of student writing, following a report earlier this year that found students are not able to construct well-reasoned arguments in their papers and essays. Earlier this year, Marius report that found fault with the quality of student writing.
So the teacher must have ways to develop quality of student in writing skill. Teacher must have approach to student. We need to choose one of approach, deciding whether we what students to focus on the process, to study different writing genres, encourage creative writing, cooperative, etc.
Beside, teacher must have strategies and ideas to teach and give the student tasks. If teacher have not some strategies, the students must be bored and they will lazy to study. And then students know writing convention. Not only grammar and spelling are emphasized in writing, but hand writing , lay out and punctuation are also emphasized.
Furthermore, to develop quality of students, students must know and understand the process of writing. If they good understanding about it, their quality in writing skill will increase.
Approaches to Students Writing
There are a number of different approaches to the practice of writing skills both in and outside the classroom. First is a genre approaches. In this approach to writing students study text in the genre they are going to be writing before they embark on their own writing. Thus, If we want them to write letters, we let them look at typical models of such letters before starting to compose their own. And they will discover facts about construction and specific language use which is common in that genre.
Chris Tribble ( 1997: 148-150 ) suggest the following ’data collection’ procedure as a prelude to the writing of letters to newspapers. Students are asked to spend some time every ay, for a week, looking at letters to the newspapers. They are asked to make notes of particular vocabularies or grammar constructions in the letters. They can use dictionaries or any other resources they need to check understanding. At the end of a week they bring the results of their research to the class and make a list of commonly occurring lexis or grammar pattern.

A genre approach is especially appropriate for students of English for specific purposes. But it is also highly useful for general English students if we want them, even at low levels, to produce written work they can be proud of.

Second is creative writing. Creative writing is a journey of self-discovery. And self-discovery promotes effective learning ( Gaffield – ville 1998 :31 ). When teachers set up imaginative writing tasks, so that their students are thoroughly engaged. Those students frequently strive harder than usual to produce a greater variety of correct and appropriate language than they might for more routine assignments.
While students are writing a simple poem about some one they care about, for example: They are tapping into their own experiences. This provides powerful motivation to find the right words to express such experience.

There is always a danger that students may find writing imaginatively difficult. Having nothing to say they may find creative writing a painful and de-motivating experience, associated in their minds with a sense of frustration and failure. A lo will depend upon how we encourage them. It is also important not to expect whole composition from the very first. We need to build up creative writing bit by bit, starting with phrases and sentences before expecting whole compositions.

Next is writing as a cooperative activity. Although many people in their personal lives write on their own, whether at home or at work, in language classes teachers and students can take advantage of the presence of others to make writing a cooperative activity, with great benefit to all those involved. In one example of such an approach, group writing allowed the lecturer to give more detailed and constructive feedback since she was dealing with a small number of groups rather than many individual students ( Boughey 1997 )

Cooperative writing works well with both process and genre – based approaches. In the first case, reviewing and evaluation are greatly enhanced by having more than one person working on it. And the generations of ideas is frequently more lively with two or more people involved than it is when writers work in their own.

Writing in groups, whether as part of a long process or as part of a short game like communicative activity, can be greatly motivating for students, including as it does, not only writing, but research, discussion, peer, evaluation and group pride in a group accomplishment.

And then using computer. Computer is one of medias that used by teachers as approach to students writing. There are many good reasons for using them for writing: first, a word-processing package removes the problem of poor hand writing that some students suffer from. Second, a word- processing package allows the competent user to edit his or her materials at great speed and with great facility. Third, spellcheckers can ease the task of achieving correct spelling. Last, if students are working in groups, a computer screen can sometimes be far more visible to the whole group than a piece of paper might be.

A computer screen frequently allows students to see their writing more objectively. It also has the advantages of greatly enhancing the participation of individuals when they are working with their colleagues in pairs or groups.

An important use of the computer is as he means of creating ‘mouse-pals’; the e-mail equipment of pen-pals. Getting students to write e-mail in English to others around the world can be extremely motivating. The communication is immediate and exciting and may well stimulate and motivate students where other letters writing does not.

Process of Writing
Though it may sound freeing, writing about “whatever you want” can actually frustrate struggling writers, so start by recommending concrete topics they can choose from. Most importantly, teach students that writing is a process, not a one-time event. The students trained in the process of writing learn to view the final draft as merely one of several steps in an evolving work. And when the steps seem doable, even the most intimidated writer stands a chance at accomplishment.
The first step of writing process is prewriting. Prewriting is engaging in activities that generate ideas, including reading, brainstorming, free writing, clustering, creating tree diagrams or flow charts, drawing, dramatizing or role-playing, engaging in chat. The effective way in prewriting is brainstorming. Brainstorming make the students get ideas flowing so your student has something to say. They might brainstorm for a how-to composition by listing the steps of the process. If they are writing a descriptive paragraph, they must carefully study the subject for interesting details. For a narrative, they want to list events in order. Whatever the topic, suggest a brainstorming method—mind map, list, or outline, for instance—that’s best for the kind of composition they are writing.
The second step is drafting. It is a composing text. But this is the imperfect, flawed rough draft. In this step, students may write all of their ideas gathered during brainstorming. If they still can’t think of things to say, he may need to brainstorm even more.
The third step is revising. It is re-seeing or re-envisioning the whole text by adding or deleting content, changing the order of presentation, making major stylistic changes, etc. This step has an important role in the writing process. Because it helps the student take more responsibility for his own progress. Beside, they will re-read their own draft, they will surprise with their own draft and they can change or analyze the grammar error and others mistakes.
The next step is editing. Editing is making changes at the local, or sentence, level, including changing word choice and sentence structure as well as correcting any errors.
After that, is final draft. It is where the students make correction based on the teacher comments and puts the finishing touches on their paper.
The last step is publishing. Publishing is formatting, producing, and distributing the revised text, including possibilities like presenting an individual portfolio, publishing a class book, creating a Webpage, etc., as well as simply turning a finished text in to a teacher.
Understanding process helps us recognize where a student writer is in his or her process and offer help appropriate to that phase. We've seen classrooms in which "the writing process" became simply content to be mastered: teachers explained the writing process to students and expected them to know about the various stages, but making these stages into "content" on which students could be tested is of little use to our students.
When we talk about these phases or stages, you should bear in mind that writing is a recursive process. Writers do not move neatly through each step of the process in sequence. For example, the writer who is revising and recognizes that she needs more information about one aspect of her topic will likely revisit the prewriting and planning as well as drafting phases as part of her revising process. Another writer may publish his text by posting it on the Web while he is still drafting; he pre writes, plans, drafts, publishes, revises the published version, possibly drafting more text to add, and so forth.
Strategies to Develop quality of Students
Strategies and ideas are needed to develop quality of students in writing. There is some strategies for students in elementary and high school :
Re-write the short story or short paragraph. Students will easy to understand the story if they write down it. Beside, they will read it automatically. They not only read it but also they learn grammar.
Dictation. Dictation is often used in writing. But it is important to know the writing students. Most of students understand the meaning of a word and they can say it, but they can not write that word and do not know the spelling.
Re-write the story with own sentence. This way to improve the vocabulary of students. They will be busy to look for the synonyms of the words.
Write a letters. Students will surprise if we give them a variety of tasks. Letters is one of genre that often be written by students. Let them to write letters to parents, friends, grandparents, sister or brother. They will show their feeling to them and they will tell what they want to say.
Game. This is a simple way and can improve directly writing of students. As far as they enjoy the game, they will get much improving in their skills.
General Strategies for College.
· View the improvement of students’ writing as your responsibility.
Teaching writing is not only the job of the English department alone. Writing is an essential tool for learning a discipline and helping students improve their writing skills is a responsibility for all faculty.
· Let students know that you value good writing.
Stress the importance of clear, thoughtful writing. Faculty who tell students that good writing will be rewarded and poor writing will be penalized receive better essays than instructors who don't make such demands. In the syllabus, on the first day, and throughout the term, remind students that they must make their best effort in expressing themselves on paper. Back up your statements with comments on early assignments that show you really mean it, and your students will respond.
· Regularly assign brief writing exercises in your classes.
To vary the pace of a lecture course, ask students to write a few minutes during class. Some mixture of in-class writing, outside writing assignments, and exams with open-ended questions will give students the practice they need to improve their skills.
· Provide guidance throughout the writing process.
After you have made the assignment, discuss the value of outlines and notes, explain how to select and narrow a topic, and critique the first draft, define plagiarism as well.
· Don't feel as though you have to read and grade every piece of your students' writing.
Ask students to analyze each other's work during class, or ask them to critique their work in small groups. Students will learn that they are writing in order to think more clearly, not obtain a grade. Keep in mind, you can collect students' papers and skim their work.
· Find other faculty members who are trying to use writing more effectively in their courses.
Pool ideas about ways in which writing can help students learn more about the subject matter. See if there is sufficient interest in your discipline to warrant drawing up guidelines. Students welcome handouts that give them specific instructions on how to write papers for a particular course or in a particular subject area.
Writing Convention
A writing convention is a general agreement on or acceptance of a particular writing practice; a usage, format, spelling, acronym, etc. that an organization accepts as true or correct by convention.
Application of a set of writing conventions leads to a standardized product among numerous authors. When adopted for all customer (and even internal) correspondence and documentation, conventions truly help promote the clearest, most effective communication outside your department and with customers.
a. Hand writing
Many students whose native language orthography is very different from English have difficulty forming English letters. Such students should get special training. Sometimes, the teacher can write sentences out neatly with spaces underneath for the student to imitate that writing.
Hand writing is a personal issue. Students should not all be expected to use exactly the same style. Nevertheless badly-formed letters may influence the reader against the writer, sometimes which is undesirable whether the work is the product of some creative task or more seriously, work that is going to be assessed handwriting to improve it.
b. Spelling
Although incorrect spelling does not often prevent the understanding of a written message, it can adversely affect the reader’s judgments. All too often bad spelling is perceived as a lack of education or care.
One of the reasons that spelling is difficult of students of English is that the correspondence between the sound of a word and the way it is spelt is not always obvious. An issue that makes spelling difficult for some students is the fact that not all variety of English spell the same word in the same way.
To help make things clear, we should get our students to focus on particular variety of English as a spelling model for them to aspire to. But we should also make them aware of other spelling varieties, drawing their attention to dictionary entries which show such differences.
One of the best ways to help students improve their spelling is through reading especially extensively. We can also draw their attention to spelling problems and explain why they occur. Copying from written models is one way to do this.
c. Layout and punctuation
Different writing communities obey different punctuation an layout conventions in communication such as letters, report, and publicity. These are frequently non-transferable from one community or language to other. Such differences are easily seen in the different punctuation conventions for the quotation of direct speech which different language use, or the way in which commas are used instead as much as full stop in certain languages, while comma overuse is frowned on by many writers and editors of English. Some punctuation convention, as the capitalization of names, months, and the pronoun are specific to only one or a few languages. Though punctuation is frequently a matter or personal style, violation of well established customs makes a piece of writing look awkward to many readers.
Different genres of writing are laid out differently, business and personal letters are different from each other, and e-mails have conventions all of their own. To be successful as writers in our own or another language, we need to be aware of these layout and use them when appropriate to get our message across as clearly as we can.
In conclusion, there is many way to develop the quality of student in writing skill. Approach, process, strategies and convention in writing. As a teacher we must give the students much strategy to teach them. If they feel boring with our lesson we can give them game or quiz. Because if they boring our lessons, they can not catch our lesson well. Beside, we must introduce them the process of writing. If they do not know the process of writing, they feel difficult to write. And they will lazy in writing. Writing convention is also important. Their writing will look smooth and it is also help the reader to understand the content of the text. So, we must show our creativity to teach writing to the students. It is help the students to improve their skill in writing.

Sources :
www.nwrel.org.
http://www.writeshop.com/blog/2008/04/07/teaching-writing-part-3-the-writing-process/
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-8041877.html
http://www.ttms.org/writing_quality/writing_quality.htm
http://www.bridgewater.edu/~atrupe/ENG315/process.htm
http://www.uww.edu/learn/improve_student_writing.php

Labels: Develop Quality of Students in Writing Skills, Writing