Senior High School Students difficulty in starting to Make Writing

There are not much people who interested in writing. It can be a nightmare for those who have difficulties to express their thought into written form. Students with this difficulty find that the nightmare will continue for many years in their study in the school. Having English as one of subject in their school, surely make the students always meet learning activities in the school which relate to writing skill. Writing is not an easy activity because every person doesnt be born as naturally gifted writer. This indicates that students need to make practice more to improve their writing skill. How can it be real if they dont be guided in the classroom for making writing especially in language teaching classroom? How to solve their difficulty in writing?

Many teachers sometimes find that their students show bad gesture or face expression as their dislike if the teachers give writing exercise or assignment. They find these activities hard because many students dont know how to start to write, especially in writing narrative, descriptive, exposition text and or the article. They still find it hard although they get easy topic as their writing material and the topic has been explained by the teacher. This is not only the problem found by the teachers in our country. every year in the United States large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required by colleges or employers. In addition, every school day 7,000 young people drop out of high school (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006), many of them because they lack the basic literacy skills to meet the growing demands of the high school curriculum (Kamil, 2003; Snow & Biancarosa, 2003).

There are 11 elements which are suggested by By Steve Graham and Dolores Perin in their book Writing Next

1. Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions. 2. Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts. 3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions. 4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete. 5. Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments. 6. Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences. 7. Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition. 8. Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task. 9. Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools 10. Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing 11. Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content material