The Value of English Writing Skills in Indonesia

 

 

Yenni Rozimela

 

 

This chapter aims to explore the value of writing skills in the senior high school curriculum in Indonesia and to see the possibilities to develop these skills in the future. As such, two recent curricula, the 1994 and the 2000, will be reviewed. The review is intended to show the position of writing among the three other language skills (i.e. listening, speaking and reading) and to show what writing skills and genres are acquired to students to master. In order to provide an overview about the implementation of the explicitly and the implicitly stated objectives of the teaching and learning writing in the two curricula, some current prevailing practices of the teaching writing will be described. It is expected that the overview will enable us to gauge how far the objectives have and could have been reached. As it will be argued here that writing skills need to be developed, some references - both theories and research findings- indicating the importance of writing for several purposes will be discussed. Taking the discussion on the curriculum, current practices of teaching writing, and theories of writing as a point of departure, I then will propose some possibilities to develop this language skill.

 

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Rozimela, Y. (2004). The value of English writing skills in Indonesia. In B. Y. Cahyono & U. Widiati (Eds.), The tapestry of English language teaching and learning in Indonesia (pp. 83-98). Malang: State University of Malang Press.

 

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