Kemampuan menulis Bahasa Inggris adalah salahÂ satu kemampuan berbahasa yang dianggap paling kompleks karena melibatkan berbagai kemampuan kognitif dan linguistik. Secara konvensional, pembelajaran menulis dilakukan dengan pendekatan genre dimana siswa mengembangkan karangan secara bertahap mulai dari penggalian ide hingga merevisi karangan. Proses itu sendiri tidak terlalu jelas tahapannya, namun secara umum meliputi kegiatan penggalian ide, penyusunan draf, dan perbaikan/revisi. Pengamatan perhadap pembelajaran menulis tersebut menunjukkan bahwa tidak ada pemantauan yang pasti terhadap proses menulis, dalam arti, proses yang dilakukan dengan susah payah tersebut hanya diakui melalui penilaian terhadap produknya, yaitu draf terakhir atau hasil karangan. Dalam mata pelajaran Bahasa Inggris, menulis paragrap merupakan keterampilan yang paling mudah diukur dengan menggunakan test obyektif sehingga paling banyak digunakan dalam Ujian, seperti Ujian Nasional, Ujian Tengah Semester, Ujian Akhir Semester, Ujian Kenaikan Kelas, dan bahkan Ulangan Harian. Ini membuktikan bahwa kemampuan menulis harus dipandang sebagai keterampilan yang sangat penting sehingga peserta didik perlu mendapat pembelajaran yang baik supaya mereka mahir dalam memahami wacana berbahasa Inggris.Kata Kunci: Teaching Writing, Genre Approaches, â€œUNâ€ Reading TestÂ

Al Firdaus, Moch. Malik

TRANSFORMATIKA JURNAL BAHASA SASTRA DAN PENGAJARANNYA

Transformatika: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, dan Pengajarannya (the Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Their Teaching)

Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  86  THE TEACHING WRITING APPROACHES: GENRE: SOLUTION TOWARD “UN” READING TEST PHENOMENON  Moch. Malik Al Firdaus Tidar University, Magelang – Central Java, Indonesia  Abstrak Kemampuan menulis Bahasa Inggris adalah salah satu kemampuan berbahasa yang dianggap paling kompleks karena melibatkan berbagai kemampuan kognitif dan linguistik. Secara konvensional, pembelajaran menulis dilakukan dengan pendekatan genre dimana siswa mengembangkan karangan secara bertahap mulai dari penggalian ide hingga merevisi karangan. Proses itu sendiri tidak terlalu jelas tahapannya, namun secara umum meliputi kegiatan penggalian ide, penyusunan draf, dan perbaikan/revisi. Pengamatan perhadap pembelajaran menulis tersebut menunjukkan bahwa tidak ada pemantauan yang pasti terhadap proses menulis, dalam arti, proses yang dilakukan dengan susah payah tersebut hanya diakui melalui penilaian terhadap produknya, yaitu draf terakhir atau hasil karangan. Dalam mata pelajaran Bahasa Inggris, menulis paragrap merupakan keterampilan yang paling mudah diukur dengan menggunakan test obyektif sehingga paling banyak digunakan dalam Ujian, seperti Ujian Nasional, Ujian Tengah Semester, Ujian Akhir Semester, Ujian Kenaikan Kelas, dan bahkan Ulangan Harian. Ini membuktikan bahwa kemampuan menulis harus dipandang sebagai keterampilan yang sangat penting sehingga peserta didik perlu mendapat pembelajaran yang baik supaya mereka mahir dalam memahami wacana berbahasa Inggris.  Kata Kunci: Teaching Writing, Genre Approaches, “UN” Reading Test   A. INTRODUCTION The implication of approaches to the teaching of writing with the participation of Genre toward the current issues and evidences of teaching writing in Indonesia have resulted is using writing in authentic meaningful communicative purposes. Additional approaches and theories would possibly be included due to the certain importance. Our ancient had written a lot of master pieces for us the recent generation so that we know what existed in the past that we dig for our future development. Scientists found evidences of ancient tracks in the shape of writing. Through long evaluation, it is recently decided that those evidences were on purpose of communicative writing, meaning writing was a media of communication in meaningful authentic way. Writing has been surviving its original value until the nowadays in the instances of journalistic report, letters and correspondence, publications and advertisements, notions and Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  87  announcement, and so forth. Interestingly, those writings are applied differently in the styles of heterogeneous communities and societies that eventually generated genre. 1. The Current Teaching Writing at Secondary School in Indonesia (The UN Paradigm) In the new curriculum of Indonesian education KTSP which applies the integration of English skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing which are generally divided into two major parts both receptive and productive skills are not exactly performed as the basic purpose of integrated skills that it is only receptive skills given strong emphasize than the productive. This imbalance emphasize was shown in the activities of most literatures, students worksheets, and even how it is assessed in the national examination (UN). Clearly the productive skills; speaking and writing receive less exposure than listening and reading. In addition, writing gets less attention than speaking. In short, writing takes delivery of least disclosure out of those four skills.  However, when it is analyzed in deeper consideration regarding many aspects affecting the achievement and understanding of those two receptive skills especially reading that is most tested in numerous counts of questions in UN, students’ knowledge of writing will surely help students accomplish the UN successfully. This phenomenon is raised because most of reading materials used in UN have strong relationship with writing knowledge. For instance; the reading text was about understanding the form of letter, invitation, advertisement, narrative, argumentative, expository, persuasive, and other types of writing that are considered as authentic reading materials since they are applied communicatively in daily life. Hence, since the basic form of those authentic reading materials are activating writing as it’s foundation, emphasizing the teaching of writing should contribute extra benefits on answering UN test which mostly testing authentic reading materials. The following elaboration is expected to be able to give details on how writing skills knowledge support students in answering reading texts test: a. First, Paragraph Texts (Narrative, Expository, Persuasive, Argumentation, etc) Narrative text frequently is tested in UN, however it is only in reading not in writing since there is no writing test in UN. Subsequent to my investigation on some UN test sheets through sequenced years from 2010 to 2015, narrative text was tested in following instance of questions; candidate (student who joined UN) was asked to determine what kind of text is it Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  88  (narrative text). Though for the test maker, this was a simple question that there is no nee to think any longer; however, for some students it is tricky enough to decide this kind of text. Possibilities for students who have learned in reading class about the types and indicators of narrative text may answer this question easily. Indeed, in reading class, students usually merely remembering this style of text through reading. However, this narrative text would surely easily recognized by students if they have adequate exposure and involved in the process of producing narrative text through writing since students know many details of narrative text from their direct experiences. Other questions such as finding the main idea of the text, deciding characters, and so forth would be easily answered by the students since they were experienced to be a writer of narrative text, so that they know what mostly writer expected the reader to know on what the writer mainly about. Furthermore, the students are already familiar with the structure of the text. This is technically equal with the rest of paragraph texts like expository, persuasive, descriptive, and the like. b. Second, Short Texts (Advertisements, Invitations, Business Letter, Announcements, etc) The remaining texts tested in UN are about advertisements, invitations, business letter, announcements, memo and so forth. Frequently asked questions in UN represented in these subsequent instances; candidate was asked to decide what is the type of the text (advertisements, invitations and the like), mention the purpose of the text, pointed who is inviting and who is receiving (invitation letter), what is the purpose of this text (advertisement), and other form of questions that involved both literally and inferentially which was modified and combined to those short text (advertisements, invitations, announcements, and so forth). Technically, this procedure is equally designed with the paragraph text, meaning, the students experience in creating and producing those types of text enable students pile off the details of the texts through their experience as writer of those types of texts.  Generally, this consideration is offered with the support of many wises that those practice will last longer than those who merely listen and read.  B. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 1. Approaches toward the teaching of writing The following description of theories in writing will focus on genre. It is intended to support the critics on the lack of writing exposure of Indonesian Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  89  teaching of writing in secondary school by providing meaningful variation, activities, importance, emphasis on the teaching of writing. 2. Genre: communicative events and communicative purposes Commonly, when a writer is attempting to match a text to a social purpose in which the readers are emphasizing on the form and content, he is organizing them that this phenomenon called genre. The basic idea of genre is a comprising of communicative events that shares communicative purposes John Swales (1990). Questions may appear on how the knowledge of genre help teacher teaches writing and students can use it in daily life. For the teacher, it is apparently evidenced that the importances of genre guide the students using it appropriately. For students, both the relationship in their need for academic demands like examinations and the implication in the social function would be best accommodated.  Contrasting to the phenomenon between the frequent availability of writing genre in the reading text of UN and the less volume of exposure on writing given in daily class, notion from Jim Martin (1989) is powerful enough to raise critics on the phenomenon. Martin (1989) says that school children should be aware of the genre core as they became writers, Jim also discusses various categories of writing done in school, for instance; report (impersonal account in facts), description (personal account of imagined of factual events and phenomena), recount (stories about the writer's own experiences), and procedure (objective of accounts of processes taking place in the world around the writer which generalize experience). In fact, Indonesian curriculum for secondary school student does not provide that kind of instruction in the teaching of writing.  Through out the Martin's opinion, it is clearly concluded that many kinds of writing need to be taught in the school system. Martin also emphasis students need attention of the fundamental differences between descriptions and report that teacher can help students to write consistently in each genre. Consequently, if the instruction is not given, students will have a capacity to express only their views of the world.  The phenomenon of UN demand and the existence of teaching writing in secondary school also invite the factor of "Reader expectation and Schematic structure" to appear. As stated by Swales (1990) that the rationale of genre shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. This idea shares reader's expectation relates to the "schematic Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  90  structure". The schematic structure is used by the students when they are negotiating meaning in writing.  The subsequent elaboration will reasons the relation between "schematic structure" of writing and the demand of UN phenomenon. Let's begin with what so called "formal schemata". Formal schemata here are schemata for a writer to produce appropriately worded and organized texts for specific social purposes. In negotiating meaning in writing, formal schemata is combined with procedural and content schemata so that it is possible for both writer and reader to identify the examples of specific genre. The idea is like working in an investigative way, writer and reader can begin to draw some conclusions about what happens in the   texts, what stages frequently found in such texts, what verb forms are most common, how measures of liquids and solids are described so that they can experiment with their own ideas. This investigation can accomplish process oriented approaches to writing to powerful effect as the writer and reader. Then, when it is negotiated with the phenomenon of UN, the obvious statement raised will be that there is a strong relationship between writing and reading that by accomplishing writing procedures the one is converted automatically to be investigative reader. Clearly, when students are faced to those kinds of texts which are basically the subjects of writing area, they will easily recognize any features of those texts as they master how the texts are configured. In short, when students know the system, they know how to fix problem by identifying how the system works. 3. Reading and Writing Through out the preceding evidences, hence it is quite sufficient to state the relationship between "writing and reading". There two possibilities on how both writing and reading influence one another. First, reading influences writing. Commonly stated that a good writer is a good reader, writers begin writing when they have enough knowledge to write. Second, writing influences reading. The better a writer master knowledge of composition, the better he recognize the features of text he reads. Although there are two possibilities on how "writing and reading" are related, the discussion will focus only the latter for the demand of the main discussed problem with the phenomenon of UN. As cited from Strickland and Morrow (1988) that children construct their own knowledge of reading and writing through experimentation and discovery. By bringing the knowledge they already have to new situations, they make connections and look for patterns in printed words. Through this finding, how students Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  91  accomplish the UN test that mostly delegates reading material from writing subjects can be solved by providing enough exposure in writing class that they will read based on their experiment of discovery of writing conventions by identifying the patterns of the printed words as they learn it from writing class.  This is actually matching with the guideline of curriculum of Indonesian education   that emphasis on meaningful communication that is converted into simple term called authenticity. Meaning the materials should be modified as authentic as possible for its real use of daily life.  The guideline of Indonesian education curriculum is actually in line with Morrow arguments from his research in 1988 that children learn reading and writing by actively using them for real purposes. A major task for the teacher is to structure the environment so that children can explore language in meaningful ways. Interestingly, though the guideline is already clear, the implementation, strategies and development in its real field was almost totally indifferent. Though it is quite frequent experts in language teaching is ringing bells to the misconceptions how the curriculum is appropriately implemented, the fear of UN phenomenon, and other factors such as political importance, less of human resources of teachers and so forth, put aside the dedication of writing as the basic influence of reading test appear in UN.  Evidences through activities in school programs have spoken that they are trapped in anxieties and fear of failure in UN, so that they teachers are trapped in focusing the use of drilling method rather than meaningful strategies in classroom activities. These factors are considered to be the cause of the ignorance toward writing exposure out of reading drills by the creative less of frightened teachers.  4. The Offered Solution: Teaching Writing Strategies Matches to the Need of the Current Condition The following teaching writing strategy is considered beneficial for both the need for UN and the origin of teaching writing purpose. The basic idea of this strategy is that it is not good to avoid the problems of UN phenomenon, but to face and tackle the problems by following the rule stream of curriculum with touches of modification rather than trapped in confusion that eventually do the drilling methods. Considering to when children write to communicative meaning that their writing is purposeful, it is considerable to provide students activities that enable them use writing in real task. This kind of strategies is not applied in the school Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  92  program in Indonesia. There are no such both real writing activities and even classroom activities in academic setting. Modifying writing class in a real situation could bring students challenges that contain so much fun rather than pressuring class task. Practicing writing such as memo, invitation letter, pamphlet, and other kinds of writing that appear in UN test should be modified and implemented in real task. For instance; the teacher to write invitation letter of a party to the other class, certainly the teacher must teach them first on how to compose invitation letters complete with its features and function and through the genres. Soon, they will apply it in a meaningful ways that they can remember longer with great comprehension rather than ends up with teacher’s scoring. Another sample activity is when there is an event done by a class, they should participate in making such advertisement of their event and providing pamphlet, again teacher must give them enough armor on how that kind of writing is appropriately written, as soon as they practice it in real task, they will meant it longer. For writing of paragraph base text like narrative, expository, argumentative, and persuasive and so on, teacher can do these activities: In training students write narrative text, teacher can apply activity like journal writing, wall magazine and so on. For expository writing, let students to participate school magazine that they can share their knowledge. The remaining writing task would be about the same. The basic idea is to provide students enough exposure in the form of media that they find place to display their work. Their exploration of genres will facilitate them acquaintances in recognizing any kinds of texts. C. CONCLUSION As stated by Hayes (1996) that writing is also a social artifact and is carried out in a social writing, what people write, how people write, and who people write to is shaped by social convention and by our history of social interaction. Hence, the genres in which people write were invented by other writers and the phrases people write often reflect phrases earlier writers have written.  Finally it comes to the short statement representing the whole passage. As the foundation of Indonesian curriculum is to provide authentic meaningful tasks, thus UN test mostly explore authentic writing materials although it is largely in the form of reading test. Hence, the combination of genre and writing exposure on real tasks will help students well comprehend features of genre and use it in real tasks so that consequently they easily recognize and analyze it though it is given in the reading test of Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412  93  UN. The more they practice the genre, the more they familiar to the system, the easier they accomplish UN reading test.   References Tribbble Christopher. 1996. Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weigle Sara Cushing. 2002. Assessing Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burns, Roe, and Ross. 1996. Teaching Reading In Today’s Elementary School, Sixth Edition, USA: Houghton Mifflin Company. 

THE TEACHING WRITING APPROACHES: GENRE: SOLUTION TOWARD â€œUNâ€ READING TEST PHENOMENON

Jurnal Universitas Tidar

Kemampuan menulis Bahasa Inggris adalah salahÂ satu kemampuan berbahasa yang dianggap paling kompleks karena melibatkan berbagai kemampuan kognitif dan linguistik. Secara konvensional, pembelajaran menulis dilakukan dengan pendekatan genre dimana siswa mengembangkan karangan secara bertahap mulai dari penggalian ide hingga merevisi karangan. Proses itu sendiri tidak terlalu jelas tahapannya, namun secara umum meliputi kegiatan penggalian ide, penyusunan draf, dan perbaikan/revisi. Pengamatan perhadap pembelajaran menulis tersebut menunjukkan bahwa tidak ada pemantauan yang pasti terhadap proses menulis, dalam arti, proses yang dilakukan dengan susah payah tersebut hanya diakui melalui penilaian terhadap produknya, yaitu draf terakhir atau hasil karangan. Dalam mata pelajaran Bahasa Inggris, menulis paragrap merupakan keterampilan yang paling mudah diukur dengan menggunakan test obyektif sehingga paling banyak digunakan dalam Ujian, seperti Ujian Nasional, Ujian Tengah Semester, Ujian Akhir Semester, Ujian Kenaikan Kelas, dan bahkan Ulangan Harian. Ini membuktikan bahwa kemampuan menulis harus dipandang sebagai keterampilan yang sangat penting sehingga peserta didik perlu mendapat pembelajaran yang baik supaya mereka mahir dalam memahami wacana berbahasa Inggris.

Kata Kunci: Teaching Writing, Genre Approaches, â€œUNâ€ Reading Test



Moch. Malik Al Firdaus

Directory of Open Access Journals

Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
86 
 
THE TEACHING WRITING APPROACHES: GENRE: SOLUTION TOWARD 
“UN” READING TEST PHENOMENON 
 
Moch. Malik Al Firdaus 
Tidar University, Magelang – Central Java, Indonesia 
 
Abstrak 
Kemampuan menulis Bahasa Inggris adalah salah satu kemampuan 
berbahasa yang dianggap paling kompleks karena melibatkan berbagai 
kemampuan kognitif dan linguistik. Secara konvensional, pembelajaran 
menulis dilakukan dengan pendekatan genre dimana siswa 
mengembangkan karangan secara bertahap mulai dari penggalian ide 
hingga merevisi karangan. Proses itu sendiri tidak terlalu jelas 
tahapannya, namun secara umum meliputi kegiatan penggalian ide, 
penyusunan draf, dan perbaikan/revisi. Pengamatan perhadap 
pembelajaran menulis tersebut menunjukkan bahwa tidak ada 
pemantauan yang pasti terhadap proses menulis, dalam arti, proses 
yang dilakukan dengan susah payah tersebut hanya diakui melalui 
penilaian terhadap produknya, yaitu draf terakhir atau hasil karangan. 
Dalam mata pelajaran Bahasa Inggris, menulis paragrap merupakan 
keterampilan yang paling mudah diukur dengan menggunakan test 
obyektif sehingga paling banyak digunakan dalam Ujian, seperti Ujian 
Nasional, Ujian Tengah Semester, Ujian Akhir Semester, Ujian 
Kenaikan Kelas, dan bahkan Ulangan Harian. Ini membuktikan bahwa 
kemampuan menulis harus dipandang sebagai keterampilan yang 
sangat penting sehingga peserta didik perlu mendapat pembelajaran 
yang baik supaya mereka mahir dalam memahami wacana berbahasa 
Inggris. 
 
Kata Kunci: Teaching Writing, Genre Approaches, “UN” Reading Test 
 
 
A. INTRODUCTION 
The implication of approaches to the teaching of writing with the participation 
of Genre toward the current issues and evidences of teaching writing in Indonesia have 
resulted is using writing in authentic meaningful communicative purposes. Additional 
approaches and theories would possibly be included due to the certain importance. Our 
ancient had written a lot of master pieces for us the recent generation so that we know 
what existed in the past that we dig for our future development. Scientists found 
evidences of ancient tracks in the shape of writing. Through long evaluation, it is 
recently decided that those evidences were on purpose of communicative writing, 
meaning writing was a media of communication in meaningful authentic way. Writing 
has been surviving its original value until the nowadays in the instances of journalistic 
report, letters and correspondence, publications and advertisements, notions and 
Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
87 
 
announcement, and so forth. Interestingly, those writings are applied differently in the 
styles of heterogeneous communities and societies that eventually generated genre. 
1. The Current Teaching Writing at Secondary School in Indonesia (The UN 
Paradigm) 
In the new curriculum of Indonesian education KTSP which applies the 
integration of English skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing which are 
generally divided into two major parts both receptive and productive skills are not 
exactly performed as the basic purpose of integrated skills that it is only receptive 
skills given strong emphasize than the productive. This imbalance emphasize was 
shown in the activities of most literatures, students worksheets, and even how it is 
assessed in the national examination (UN). Clearly the productive skills; speaking 
and writing receive less exposure than listening and reading. In addition, writing 
gets less attention than speaking. In short, writing takes delivery of least disclosure 
out of those four skills.  
However, when it is analyzed in deeper consideration regarding many 
aspects affecting the achievement and understanding of those two receptive skills 
especially reading that is most tested in numerous counts of questions in UN, 
students’ knowledge of writing will surely help students accomplish the UN 
successfully. This phenomenon is raised because most of reading materials used in 
UN have strong relationship with writing knowledge. For instance; the reading text 
was about understanding the form of letter, invitation, advertisement, narrative, 
argumentative, expository, persuasive, and other types of writing that are 
considered as authentic reading materials since they are applied communicatively in 
daily life. Hence, since the basic form of those authentic reading materials are 
activating writing as it’s foundation, emphasizing the teaching of writing should 
contribute extra benefits on answering UN test which mostly testing authentic 
reading materials. The following elaboration is expected to be able to give details 
on how writing skills knowledge support students in answering reading texts test: 
a. First, Paragraph Texts (Narrative, Expository, Persuasive, Argumentation, 
etc) 
Narrative text frequently is tested in UN, however it is only in reading 
not in writing since there is no writing test in UN. Subsequent to my 
investigation on some UN test sheets through sequenced years from 2010 to 
2015, narrative text was tested in following instance of questions; candidate 
(student who joined UN) was asked to determine what kind of text is it 
Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
88 
 
(narrative text). Though for the test maker, this was a simple question that there 
is no nee to think any longer; however, for some students it is tricky enough to 
decide this kind of text. Possibilities for students who have learned in reading 
class about the types and indicators of narrative text may answer this question 
easily. Indeed, in reading class, students usually merely remembering this style 
of text through reading. However, this narrative text would surely easily 
recognized by students if they have adequate exposure and involved in the 
process of producing narrative text through writing since students know many 
details of narrative text from their direct experiences. Other questions such as 
finding the main idea of the text, deciding characters, and so forth would be 
easily answered by the students since they were experienced to be a writer of 
narrative text, so that they know what mostly writer expected the reader to know 
on what the writer mainly about. Furthermore, the students are already familiar 
with the structure of the text. This is technically equal with the rest of paragraph 
texts like expository, persuasive, descriptive, and the like. 
b. Second, Short Texts (Advertisements, Invitations, Business Letter, 
Announcements, etc) 
The remaining texts tested in UN are about advertisements, invitations, 
business letter, announcements, memo and so forth. Frequently asked questions 
in UN represented in these subsequent instances; candidate was asked to decide 
what is the type of the text (advertisements, invitations and the like), mention 
the purpose of the text, pointed who is inviting and who is receiving (invitation 
letter), what is the purpose of this text (advertisement), and other form of 
questions that involved both literally and inferentially which was modified and 
combined to those short text (advertisements, invitations, announcements, and 
so forth). Technically, this procedure is equally designed with the paragraph 
text, meaning, the students experience in creating and producing those types of 
text enable students pile off the details of the texts through their experience as 
writer of those types of texts.  
Generally, this consideration is offered with the support of many wises 
that those practice will last longer than those who merely listen and read.  
B. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 
1. Approaches toward the teaching of writing 
The following description of theories in writing will focus on genre. It is 
intended to support the critics on the lack of writing exposure of Indonesian 
Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
89 
 
teaching of writing in secondary school by providing meaningful variation, 
activities, importance, emphasis on the teaching of writing. 
2. Genre: communicative events and communicative purposes 
Commonly, when a writer is attempting to match a text to a social purpose 
in which the readers are emphasizing on the form and content, he is organizing 
them that this phenomenon called genre. The basic idea of genre is a comprising of 
communicative events that shares communicative purposes John Swales (1990). 
Questions may appear on how the knowledge of genre help teacher teaches writing 
and students can use it in daily life. For the teacher, it is apparently evidenced that 
the importances of genre guide the students using it appropriately. For students, 
both the relationship in their need for academic demands like examinations and the 
implication in the social function would be best accommodated.  
Contrasting to the phenomenon between the frequent availability of writing 
genre in the reading text of UN and the less volume of exposure on writing given in 
daily class, notion from Jim Martin (1989) is powerful enough to raise critics on the 
phenomenon. Martin (1989) says that school children should be aware of the genre 
core as they became writers, Jim also discusses various categories of writing done 
in school, for instance; report (impersonal account in facts), description (personal 
account of imagined of factual events and phenomena), recount (stories about the 
writer's own experiences), and procedure (objective of accounts of processes taking 
place in the world around the writer which generalize experience). In fact, 
Indonesian curriculum for secondary school student does not provide that kind of 
instruction in the teaching of writing.  
Through out the Martin's opinion, it is clearly concluded that many kinds of 
writing need to be taught in the school system. Martin also emphasis students need 
attention of the fundamental differences between descriptions and report that 
teacher can help students to write consistently in each genre. Consequently, if the 
instruction is not given, students will have a capacity to express only their views of 
the world.  
The phenomenon of UN demand and the existence of teaching writing in 
secondary school also invite the factor of "Reader expectation and Schematic 
structure" to appear. As stated by Swales (1990) that the rationale of genre shapes 
the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of 
content and style. This idea shares reader's expectation relates to the "schematic 
Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
90 
 
structure". The schematic structure is used by the students when they are 
negotiating meaning in writing.  
The subsequent elaboration will reasons the relation between "schematic 
structure" of writing and the demand of UN phenomenon. Let's begin with what so 
called "formal schemata". Formal schemata here are schemata for a writer to 
produce appropriately worded and organized texts for specific social purposes. In 
negotiating meaning in writing, formal schemata is combined with procedural and 
content schemata so that it is possible for both writer and reader to identify the 
examples of specific genre. The idea is like working in an investigative way, writer 
and reader can begin to draw some conclusions about what happens in the   texts, 
what stages frequently found in such texts, what verb forms are most common, how 
measures of liquids and solids are described so that they can experiment with their 
own ideas. This investigation can accomplish process oriented approaches to 
writing to powerful effect as the writer and reader. Then, when it is negotiated with 
the phenomenon of UN, the obvious statement raised will be that there is a strong 
relationship between writing and reading that by accomplishing writing procedures 
the one is converted automatically to be investigative reader. Clearly, when 
students are faced to those kinds of texts which are basically the subjects of writing 
area, they will easily recognize any features of those texts as they master how the 
texts are configured. In short, when students know the system, they know how to 
fix problem by identifying how the system works. 
3. Reading and Writing 
Through out the preceding evidences, hence it is quite sufficient to state the 
relationship between "writing and reading". There two possibilities on how both 
writing and reading influence one another. First, reading influences writing. 
Commonly stated that a good writer is a good reader, writers begin writing when 
they have enough knowledge to write. Second, writing influences reading. The 
better a writer master knowledge of composition, the better he recognize the 
features of text he reads. Although there are two possibilities on how "writing and 
reading" are related, the discussion will focus only the latter for the demand of the 
main discussed problem with the phenomenon of UN. 
As cited from Strickland and Morrow (1988) that children construct their 
own knowledge of reading and writing through experimentation and discovery. By 
bringing the knowledge they already have to new situations, they make connections 
and look for patterns in printed words. Through this finding, how students 
Transformatika, Volume 11, Nomor 1, 15 Maret 2015 ISSN 0S54-S412 
 
91 
 
accomplish the UN test that mostly delegates reading material from writing subjects 
can be solved by providing enough exposure in writing class that they will read 
based on their experiment of discovery of writing conventions by identifying the 
patterns of the printed words as they learn it from writing class.  
This is actually matching with the guideline of curriculum of Indonesian 
education   that emphasis on meaningful communication that is converted into 
simple term called authenticity. Meaning the materials should be modified as 
authentic as possible for its real use of daily life.  The guideline of Indonesian 
education curriculum is actually in line with Morrow arguments from his research 
in 1988 that children learn reading and writing by actively using them for real 
purposes. A major task for the teacher is to structure the environment so that 
children can explore language in meaningful ways. Interestingly, though the 
guideline is already clear, the implementation, strategies and development in its real 
field was almost totally indifferent. Though it is quite frequent experts in language 
teaching is ringing bells to the misconceptions how the curriculum is appropriately 
implemented, the fear of UN phenomenon, and other factors such as political 
importance, less of human resources of teachers and so forth, put aside the 
dedication of writing as the basic influence of reading test appear in UN.  
Evidences through activities in school programs have spoken that they are 
trapped in anxieties and fear of failure in UN, so that they teachers are trapped in 
focusing the use of drilling method rather than meaningful strategies in classroom 
activities. These factors are considered to be the cause of the ignorance toward 
writing exposure out of reading drills by the creative less of frightened teachers.  
4. The Offered Solution: Teaching Writing Strategies Matches to the Need of the 
Current Condition 
The following teaching writing strategy is considered beneficial for both 
the need for UN and the origin of teaching writing purpose. The basic idea of this 
strategy is that it is not good to avoid the problems of UN phenomenon, but to face 
and tackle the problems by following the rule stream of curriculum with touches of 
modification rather than trapped in confusion that eventually do the drilling 
methods. 
Considering to when children write to communicative meaning that their 
writing is purposeful, it is considerable to provide students activities that enable 
them use writing in real task. This kind of strategies is not applied in the school 
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program in Indonesia. There are no such both real writing activities and even 
classroom activities in academic setting. 
Modifying writing class in a real situation could bring students challenges 
that contain so much fun rather than pressuring class task. Practicing writing such 
as memo, invitation letter, pamphlet, and other kinds of writing that appear in UN 
test should be modified and implemented in real task. For instance; the teacher to 
write invitation letter of a party to the other class, certainly the teacher must teach 
them first on how to compose invitation letters complete with its features and 
function and through the genres. Soon, they will apply it in a meaningful ways that 
they can remember longer with great comprehension rather than ends up with 
teacher’s scoring. Another sample activity is when there is an event done by a class, 
they should participate in making such advertisement of their event and providing 
pamphlet, again teacher must give them enough armor on how that kind of writing 
is appropriately written, as soon as they practice it in real task, they will meant it 
longer. For writing of paragraph base text like narrative, expository, argumentative, 
and persuasive and so on, teacher can do these activities: In training students write 
narrative text, teacher can apply activity like journal writing, wall magazine and so 
on. For expository writing, let students to participate school magazine that they can 
share their knowledge. The remaining writing task would be about the same. The 
basic idea is to provide students enough exposure in the form of media that they 
find place to display their work. Their exploration of genres will facilitate them 
acquaintances in recognizing any kinds of texts. 
C. CONCLUSION 
As stated by Hayes (1996) that writing is also a social artifact and is carried out 
in a social writing, what people write, how people write, and who people write to is 
shaped by social convention and by our history of social interaction. Hence, the genres 
in which people write were invented by other writers and the phrases people write often 
reflect phrases earlier writers have written.  
Finally it comes to the short statement representing the whole passage. As the 
foundation of Indonesian curriculum is to provide authentic meaningful tasks, thus UN 
test mostly explore authentic writing materials although it is largely in the form of 
reading test. Hence, the combination of genre and writing exposure on real tasks will 
help students well comprehend features of genre and use it in real tasks so that 
consequently they easily recognize and analyze it though it is given in the reading test of 
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UN. The more they practice the genre, the more they familiar to the system, the easier 
they accomplish UN reading test.  
 
References 
Tribbble Christopher. 1996. Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Weigle Sara Cushing. 2002. Assessing Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press. 
Burns, Roe, and Ross. 1996. Teaching Reading In Today’s Elementary School, 
Sixth Edition, USA: Houghton Mifflin Company. 


http://jurnal.untidar.ac.id/index.php/transformatika/article/view/113/80

THE TEACHING WRITING APPROACHES: GENRE: SOLUTION TOWARD â€œUNâ€ READING TEST PHENOMENON

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