encouraging students to write narrative essay, Slides of English Literature

Download encouraging students to write narrative essay and more Slides English Literature in PDF only on Docsity! National Seminar Proceeding |57 ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO WRITE NARRATIVE ESSAY THROUGH DIGITAL WRITING Afifah Linda Sari, Nur Alfa Rahmah IAIN Antasari Banjarmasin Abstract The development of technology gives English teachers a great deal of opportunities to provide their learners with a lot of help in writing in a form of internet-based resources. The media to publish students' writing have also broadened to digital world, or also known as digital writing. The growing popularity of social network services among adolescents can be utilized to promote digital writing as an effective medium to encourage students in writing as well as enhancing their writing skill then to offer them chances to produce writing in real-life situated contexts to cyber societies. Through social network, such as facebook, the students can get immediate comments and feedback from their friends and enjoy writing as much as socializing with their cyber friends. In this research, the researchers investigate the efficacy of digital writing to encourage students to write narrative essay. The students' response and enthusiasm to the approach are also analyzed to support the findings. Key words: narrative essay, digital writing, students' response INTRODUCTION Writing essay is a kind of skill that requires not only rich ideas but also good organization, not to mention the language structures that should be noted by every writer to produce a good quality writing. This kind of presumption often times haunt English learners during writing. They also feel anxious knowing that their writing will be formally graded by the teacher. All these conditions and lack of information about certain topic that gement in writing essay. To encourage students to write essay, English teachers need to create certain atmosphere and perception that writing is easy and fun, and that writing is all about telling or communicating what we think, we feel, we believe, and we experience in life. In fact, that is what everybody does every day; they communicate with their acquaintance, friends, and relatives, and exchanging perceptions about life, people, and the like. Writing has the same kind of conception, only that it is in written form. Once a piece of writing is in the Nowadays in digital era, we are connected by technology, which makes communication among people easier. People communicate via SMS, line, Facebook, WhatsApp and all social media without even knowing well the people they communicate. ia, they National Seminar Proceeding |58 has the right to read it and comment on it. ideas can be published to digital world without typing, and the closest generation to digital their friends and acquaintances through their smartphone screen almost every hour (Prensky, 2001). In other words, they are writing every day; they do digital writing without even realizing it. The best part of this phenomenon is that these teenagers never really run out of ideas to tell what is in their mind to their cyber friends. If we connect what teenagers do on the internet with essay writing, we can say that digital writing is the best medium to encourage students to write. This is the part where teacher can introduce essay writing as something challenging yet fun and make writing gradually part of their life. English teachers can start with narrative writing, which seem to be one of the lightest challenges in writing since it consists of stories that can be related to mediate publication and get fast response or feedback from their cyber readers without feeling that they are formally graded by their teachers. In brief, digital literacy nowadays possesses important part in the success of second language learning. This is not only because digital media especially internet has become secondary if not the primary sources of information, but also popular medium of learning and communication. NARRATIVE ESSAY THROUGH DIGITAL WRITING Writing is a complex process to a composition of words resulting from the exploration of thoughts and idea, drafted into written text, and subsequently revised to ensure that the writing product can clearly be understood by readers (Nunan, 2003:88, Brown, 2007:391). It indicates that writing refers to the way a writer composes a text as written communication between writers and readers. Some consideration in producing writing proposed by experts are as follows: content (ideas), organization, language use (grammar), mechanics, and word choiceorvocabulary (Brown, 2007:39, Peha, 2002, and Heaton, 1988:135). Teaching essay writing will be most effective when teachers choose student- centered activities because they can spend more time diagnosin problems and consult with individual students. Technology and media also help to efficiently save the time. It will spend much time if English teachers deny the extent of the instructional role assigned to technology and media during teaching writing (Smaldino, Lowther, and Russell, 2007:13). It is generally accepted that computers now are not merely tools for writing but have changed the processes, products, and contexts for writing. It is also generally accepted that teaching writing in technological environments, both physical and virtual, is quite different from teaching in environments mediated by more traditional technologies. digital refer to a changed writing environment which is produced by the computer and distributed via networks (Grabill and Hicks, 2005). National Seminar Proceeding |61 Is the word choice descriptive, or merely informative? Has the larger message of the essay been conveyed effectively? Has a connection been made between the experience and its meaning to the writer? Will the reader be able to identify with the conclusion made? In the editing phase, writers proofread and correct errors in grammar and mechanics and edit to improve style and clarity. Having a friend read the essay is a good idea at this point because allows the writer to see their work from a fresh perspective. Therefore, teachers can ask the students to have peer editing or peer comments before submitting their works or publishing them. In the publishing phase, there are things the teacher need to realize. Due to its personal nature, sharing a narrative essay with the rest of the class can be both exciting and a bit scary. Naturally, there is not a writer on earth who is not sensitive about his or her own work. The teacher needs to make the students feel secured that their works will not be that what matters in writing essay is to learn from the experience and use the feedback to make the next essay even better. Responding and Correcting s Evaluating and assessing students' work do not only depend on the kind of task but also on the objective of the study that the teachers want students to achieve. In this case, responding and correcting are the ways to give feedback to students' work. When responding to students' work, it should be focused more on the content and design of their writing rather than the accuracy of their performance. The teacher might respond by asking about the reason why choosing that current topic, how much the teacher enjoyed reading their work, then, the teacher recommend the students to look at the book or website which has more information about the same topic. In other words, responding to students' work is about reacting to their ideas and to how they put them across (Harmer, 2004: 108). Meanwhile, responding is often more appropriate than correcting. Teacher task is not to judge what is extremely right or wrong, but to ask questions, make suggestions, and indicate where improvements might be made to both the content of the writing and the manner in which it is expressed (p. 109). The teacher is not always the person who can give feedback by responding and correcting. The students can be encouraged to look at each other's work and give advice and make suggestions about how it could be improved. It is a kind of valuable elements in writing activities. Doing peer review give the advantage of encouraging students to work collaboratively and gets round the problem of students reacting too passively to teacher responses. This reduces their self-reliance in the editing process (p. 115). METHODOLOGY OF THE RESEARCH The participants of the research were the fifth semester students of English Education Department at IAIN Antasari Banjarmasin who followed Short Essay Writing class. Eighty students participated in this research. This research was a qualitative research, which is used to discover the implementation of EFL narrative writing skills through digital writing and students' respond toward digital writing. Schultz (2006: 369) considers National Seminar Proceeding |62 qualitative methods to be an appropriate approach to capture the new directions to which literacy, technology and learning are moving in our new digital age. Moreover, qualitative research methods have developed to serve the view that phenomenon, particularly when humans are involved, includes complex interactions. Merriam (1999: 35) characterizes qualitative research as understanding the meaning people have constructed in which the researcher is the primary instrument for data collection and analysis. She identifies several different types of qualitative research methods, as follow: case study, ethnography, phenomenology, historical, action research, content analysis, grounded theory, generic qualitative method. From all the types, case study is choosen for this research. Case study research represents a much broader view which is empirical investigation of a contemporary phenomenon within its natural context using multiple sources evidence (Yin, 2003). Case studies allow for researchers to work within real context, to explore and observe the human aspects of a situation, and focus more on ideas than statistics (Cohen et. al., 2007). Regarding the research design described, the data in this research were mainly descriptive data gathered from the documents which is taken from facebook notes and the result of interview. In collecting the data, the writer used three data collection techniques, namely: observation, interview, and document analysis. The researchers observe the process of writing activity happened both in class and social media. Then, the researchers adopted semi-structured interview, which is used because it gave freedom to the interviewee while the researchers could also get in-depth information on the practice of narrative writing and the response of students toward Facebook digital writing. The data analysis in qualitative research involves three things namely data reduction, data presentation/display and conclusion drawing/verification (Sugiyono, 2012: 91). In this phase, the researchers conducted the process of taking and selecting the right data based on needed criteria, then, focusing, simplifying and abstracting the data selected. After that, the data was presented in the narrative form then interpreted. In the data interpretation, t were not corrected to maintain the originality of the statement. The students whom the statements quoted were given names with numbers (such as Student 1, Student 2, and so on) without mentioning their real names to keep their privacy. At last, the researchers summarized the result of the study after interpreting the data taken. IMPLEMENTING DIGITAL WRITING IN NARRATIVE WRITING CLASS The process below is the writing process that the students were through in this 1. Prewriting In the beginning of writing process, the teacher asks to students to write their personal experiences. The teacher chose the theme in which most of students were interested in order to encourage them to be more enthusiastic in writing narrative essay: First Love. Students were asked to think about their memories of their first love. Then, they created an outline which include: time, setting, people who are involved in the story, and plot of the story. The students were also asked to consider three main issuesas follows: National Seminar Proceeding |63 the purpose of their writing, the audience they are writing for, and the content structure of the piece. In this case, the purposes of their writing were sharing their personal experience and taking positive value from the story. The audience are digital readers, and the content structure consisted of the fact, ideas, and argument which they have decided to include in their writing. 2. Drafting a Narrative Essay Writing narrative essay based on true stories required the students to pay attention to plot-building techniques involvingintroduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Introduction is known as the beginning of the story where characters and setting are established. The students write the introduction based on four basic types of introductory paragraph; they are: funnel, dramaticintroductory, quotation, and turnabout. Funnel begins with the information from general to specific, as written by one of the students (Student 1): grown unconditionally color can be yellow, blue, or grey, for it depends on the story that will be written. Love story can be full of joy or it can be full of tears. No matter how it is going to be, first love is a wonderful thing that can be had. This is how my first love has come and gone." Meanwhile, dramatic introductory unrolls as an eye-witness account. Below is a dramatic opening paragraph written by another student (Student 2): The story of my first love came when I was a student in kindergarten. At that time I did not know what love is. But, when I saw her for the first time, I felt something else in myself and I could understand it after I was old enough. I understood that it might be love. Introductory paragraph in a form of quotation allows the writer quote relevant to help him to introduce the topic as it is done by Student 3: "How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" -Albert Einstein- Then, forturnabout, some students started with the opposite idea of what they were going to write and then moved to the focus as it was written by Student 4: "Everybody sure, ever feel first love in their life. But, there are also some people who never feel first love in their life. What about me? Am I still remember the feelings that I felt when I fall in love for the first time?" To create the conflict of their story, such as jealous, afraid to express their feeling, lost contact, even Long Distance Relationship (LDR), every student had their own way, such as what was done by Student 5: "I must come back to Banjarmasin. I was very sad, but he make me calm and make me believe our relationship will be fine although LDR. When I arrived in Banjarmasin, sometimes we still had a conversation, but unfortunately my phone was broken and I lost his contact."