CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Transcription

1 digilib.uns.ac.id 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A. Background of the Research Writing is communicating one s ideas through written media. Writing is of great importance for us because this activity is indispensable and quite close to our day-to-day life. We send messages, colleagues, and update statuses on social media. We can also keep knowledge engraved on our mind by writing it. Writing serves as an effective means of communication to share ideas, thought, and feeling. The effectiveness could be in terms of money. Instead of making a call, we could text or someone. This will economize our expense. Besides, writing is also effective in terms of clarity. What someone said might be easily forgotten, but what someone wrote can be checked over and over. Manser (2006: 7) states that the great advantage of writing as a means of communication is that we have plenty of time to consider carefully what we are going to communicate. Revising can be carried out many times to our writing. It is pretty unlikely that we will do such a thing in speaking. Writing is an essential skill upon which everybody and particularly students of university rely. Students of university are supposed to master this skill for two reasons: academic and carreer pursuit. If they succeed in 1

2 digilib.uns.ac.id 2 achieving writing skil, they will get agreeable academic achievement during their study. Similarly, unsurpassed writing skill will help them get satisfactory level at its best at work. Even so, writing has never been easy for most learners. Many learners fail to get their opinions across due to some writing problem. They chiefly make these following errors: wrong word order, wrong word choice, wrong grammar, and wrong spelling. Those errors, in turn, makes their writing misleading and bring about misunderstanding. Thus, writing is not simply transfer of words to paper. It demands good comprehension on grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and so forth. Without the expertise on grasping those elements, student s writing will not make sense. Students also find writing burdensome and humdrum. They have to consider many things to generate a good writing. They are not confident enough to hand in their own writing, worrying about bad marks. As a result, many plagiarize their friend s work and the rest copy the material on internet. Additionaly, they also grow passive during writing activities, seeming reluctant to get engaged. They assume that writing is by no means absorbing. Considering the overview above, creating a successful learning should be taken into consideration. Teacher needs to provide students with a learning athmosphere where students enjoy the activities and actively learn and understand how to write well. A good learning atmosphere is the one which explores content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics. It can

3 digilib.uns.ac.id 3 also draw students personal engagement and suits students characteristic. To create such a situation, teacher can make use of a good teaching technique. One of possible teaching techniques to employ is RAFT. Topping & McManus (2002: 20) argue that RAFT occupies a nice middle ground between standard, dry writing and free-for-all creative writing. It combines the best of both. It can also be the way to bring together students understanding of main ideas, organization, elaboration, and coherence (the criteria by which compositions are most commonly judged). RAFT is an acronym that stands for Role of the writer (Who or what are you?), Audience (Who are you addressing?), Format (What form will the writing take: letter, editorial, diary, memo, etc?), and Topic and strong verbs (What will you write about? Why?). Groenke & Puckett (2006: 23) state that both teacher and students can brainstorm the choices of role, audience, format, and topic. Possible roles that students can take include: inventor/scientist, historian, journalist, person living during a particular time period, victim, animal/object, etc. Varieties of audience could be: community, jury, president, boss/superior, family/parents, fictional character, self, etc. Types of format encompass poem, editorial, newspaper article, letter, interview, diary/journal, political cartoon, party invitation, resume, etc. Choices of topic might contain issue relevant to classroom study/unit, issue relevant to text/time period, personal interest, etc. RAFT writing assignments are written from the viewpoint of a selected person. RAFT can be used to begin or conclude a unit. At the beginning of a unit, a RAFT writing assignment can assess the students background

4 digilib.uns.ac.id 4 knowledge. At the end of a unit, it can be used to summarize the main ideas and concepts. The strategy guides students to think from the perspective of others, to consider how to tailor writing for different audiences, and to vary formats according to the purpose for the writing. Another interesting technique to consider is guided writing. Guided writing lesson is a lesson where the teacher demonstrates the students the process of writing sentence or paragraph using proper English conventions then students given opportunities to use these strategies in their work (Simpson, 1998: 1). Teacher plays a significant role in students learning process. Primary National Strategy (2007: 6) argues that guided writing can also be applied in small groups which consist of students sharing similar writing skill. Guided writing enables the teacher to tailor the teaching to the needs of the group. In addition, it facilitates the teaching and learning of individual student. Although guided writing is a group activity focused on the needs of the group, the teacher is able to observe and respond to the needs of individuals within the group. Besides applying appropriate teaching technique, a successful learning should cogitate students creativity. Creativity deals with psychological aspect that students have. It is the ability to generate ideas, alternatives, or possibilities to solve problems. Students having high creativity are those who experience the world in novel and original ways. Their perceptions are fresh and insightful. They usually view things in new ways or from different

5 digilib.uns.ac.id 5 perspectives. They show enthusiasm, confidence, and curiosity in joining learning activities. Meanwhile, students with low creativity tend to be anxious and less passionate to learn new things. For these reasons, students with high creativity generally gain better achievement than those who have low creativity. In relation to those highlighted theories, the researcher tried to reveal them empirically by carrying out a research under the title The Effectiveness of RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, and Topic) Technique to Teach Writing Viewed from Students Creativity (An Experimental Research at the Third Semester of English Department of Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Muhammadiyah University of Purworejo in the Academic Year of 2013/2014). B. Problem Identification There are several arising problems that the researcher encounters: 1. Why do students find it difficult to write? 2. What might promote students writing skill? 3. Is RAFT effective to teach writing? 4. Does the students creativity influence their writing skill? 5. Is there any interaction between teaching techniques and students creativity on students writing skill?

6 digilib.uns.ac.id 6 C. Problem Limitation It is impossible, however, to investigate all questions above. Thus, this research will merely focus on: 1. The significant difference of students writing skill by comparing the use of RAFT and guided writing viewed from student s creativity; 2. The scope of writing skill in this research is limited to the skill of composing paragraph writing. In this type of writing, students are supposed to write a paragraph consisting of some sentences that give information about a topic. The paragraphs include different genres, i.e descriptive, process, opinion, comparison/contrast, problem/solution, and narrative. Before joining paragraph-based writing, students have already learned sentence-based writing in the previous semester. D. Problem Statements In connection with the background of the research, problem identification as well as problem limitation, there are three problems which are formulated here. Those are: 1. Is RAFT more effective than guided writing to teach writing for the third semester students of English Department of Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Muhammadiyah University of Purworejo in the academic year of 2013/2014? 2. Do students having high creativity gain better writing skill than those having low creativity?

7 digilib.uns.ac.id 7 3. Is there any interaction between teaching techniques and students creativity on students writing skill? E. Objectives of the Research The research is aimed at knowing the relationship between teaching techniques and students creativity on students writing skill. The objective of this research is to find out whether or not: 1. RAFT is more effective than guided writing to teach writing for the third semester students of English Department of Teacher Training and Education Faculty of Muhammadiyah University of Purworejo in the academic year of 2013/ Students having high creativity gain better writing skill than those having low creativity. 3. There is an interaction between teaching techniques and students creativity on students writing skill. F. Significance of the Result 1. For lecturers Implementing an appropriate teaching technique is crucial to reach teaching goals. Common teaching techniques might neglect whether students are personally pleased and engaged while following the sequence of activities in the classroom. University students, particularly those in early semesters, are teens who love imagination. They show profound

8 digilib.uns.ac.id 8 adoration of their idols. They also have idealism and creative thinking over surrounding issues. Students of this kind need a teaching technique that accommodates their fondness. For these reasons, RAFT comes up as an answer. RAFT provides students with challenges to generate a piece of good writing written from unusual perspective, audience, format, and topic. Focusing on definite audience of the writing will motivate students to consider and improve the quality of writing indicators. When a student writes for his/her idol, for instance, the whole focus is addressed to shape an attractive and meaningful writing as well. RAFT fosters not only students imagination and creative thinking, but also students writing mastery. RAFT helps lecturers achieve the intended teaching goals. Another benefit of employing RAFT is lecturers can reduce plagiarism among students. Each student is encouraged to choose different role, audience, and format from those of his/her friend. To do this, lecturers can carefully check students writing while circulating around the class. 2. For students Freedom and fun are two things that students demand in learning, and RAFT brings both. Students will not learn conventional writing by following what their lecturer instructs. Instead, they will get a new outlook. They are challenged to write something from different angle. Each student can pretend to be someone else when he/she writes. Each student can confidently choose the audience of the writing. Lecturer is not the one who controls what to write. He/she merely offers choices. As a

9 digilib.uns.ac.id 9 result, students learning enthusiasm will grow and learning atmosphere will be more alive. 3. For other researchers This research is supposed to help other researchers applying the same technique to complete their references. Additionally, other researchers can get an overview from the research findings to conduct upcoming research.