Studying Method

Written Peer Feedback Given to Students’ Composition of the Eleventh Grade

SETYO P. LUHUNG

122084057

THESIS PROPOSAL WRITING L

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

English has become international language that is used to communicate with others in almost countries in the world. So that is why, mastering English becomes a must nowadays. English is needed not only for communicating but also for receiving all information from other countries in the world. In order to be a good English mastery, people have to consider that English has four skills, those are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening and reading are receptive skills while speaking and writing are productive skills. It is a must to master all skills in order to be a good English mastery. Then, in order to communicate well with all people in the world, people should pay more attention in productive skills because both skills are used to convey ideas in form of spoken and writing. But, the receptive skills are also important to be learnt in order to support productive skills.

Nunan (2003) describes writing as a mental work of inventing ideas by thinking about how to express them into written form. Writing is considered as transcription of speech (Magnan cited on Omaio, 1986:222). Its transcripts someone’s thinking to be a written form. Unfortunately, many students transform their ideas into written form are not as good as spoken form.  Especially, in Indonesia, writing is one of the four skills that often given the least attention by Indonesian teachers. Nunan (2003:23) said that writing is a both a process and product. It shows that writing should be taught in both process and product. On the contrary, many teachers only focus on the product of writing. Teachers are often lazy to check and correct the students’ compositions so what the teachers do only guessing in assessing and scoring the students’ compositions by looking at the length of the texts.  It looks like the teachers only focus on the product of writing, yet it will be much better, if the teachers do not only focus on the product of writing, but also the process or writing.

No wonder, if the students always do the same errors and mistakes in making a text. Furthermore, students’ errors and mistakes cannot be avoided, for they are still learning or they are in progress of learning a foreign language. It should be considered as a natural process in order to be a good writer. The process is an accumulation of knowledge and experiences that built over time again and again.

In order to minimize the students’ errors and mistakes, the teacher should use another strategy of teaching. Brown (2001:353) states that what follows an element of writing process that is important: sharing what they have written with others, it is done in order to see whether the writers have been successful in conveying their intended meaning or not. It sounds like the definition of feedback. Feedback  can  be  defined  as  input  from  a  reader  to  a  writer  with  the  effect of  providing  information  to  the  writer  for  revision.  It can be formed as comments, questions, and suggestions a reader gives a writer to produce ‘reader-based prose’ (Flower, 1979).

One of the feedbacks that can be used for improving students’ composition ability is written peer feedback. Written peer feedback is an activity that used or done in writing class by students (pairs). Then a writer writes a text. Then both of the writer and reader, they are likely engaged in the negotiation of meaning of the writer’s text (Lundstrom & Baker,2009).

In addition, Rollinson (2005) states written peer feedback is an alternative strategy offering a number of advantages. It provides both writer and reader record for later consideration, grammatical, structure, and the language. They can discuss everything about the composition so they can save their time because they only focus on the writing not to other unimportant issues.

According to the benefits of written peer feedback, it shows that written peer feedback give good impact not only to the writer but also to the reader as the corrector. Moreover, the students will feel enjoy to ask and share what they do not know or understand about their writing to their classmates than to the teacher directly.

Research Questions

        Based on the background of the study, the researcher formulates the research  problems into two research questions:

1.  How is the implementation of written peer feedback in the process of teaching eleventh graders?
2. How is the students’ writing ability after the implementation of written peer feedback?

Objectives of The Study

Related to the research questions above, the objectives of this study are:

1. To describe how written peer feedback is implemented to teach writing recount text to the eleventh grade of SMA M 04 Sidayu Gresik.
2. To describe how the students’ composition results after the implementation of written peer feedback.

Key Tems

• WRITING ➔ Nunan (2003) describes writing as a mental work of inventing ideas by thinking about how to express them into statements and paragraphs in written form.
• FEEDBACK ➔ Feedback  can  be  defined  as  input  from  a  reader  to  a  writer  with  the  effect  of  providing  information  to  the  writer  for  revision.  In  other  words,  it  is  the  comments,  questions,  and  suggestions  a  reader  gives  a  writer  to  produce ‘reader-based  prose’  (Flower,  1979).

WRITTEN PEER FEEDBACK ➔ Written peer feedback is an activity that used or done in writing class by students (pairs). Then a writer writes a text. Then both of the writer and reader, they are likely engaged in the negotiation of meaning of the writer’s text (Lundstrom & Baker, 2009).

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Writing

Writing becomes one of the “transportations” of exploring ideas. Writing is considered as transcription of speech (Magnan cited on Omaio, 1986:222). Through writing, a writer will be able to convey his/her ideas and feelings to others into written form. Writing is one of the productive skills in language learning. Nunan (2003) describes writing as a mental work of inventing ideas by thinking about how to express them into statements and paragraphs in written form.