Helping Students to Write Better through Reading and Writing Connections Strategy

Abstract

One of the causes of students’ difficulties in writing is related to the lack of knowledge on how to write. This might be caused by the lack of awareness that a piece of writing might have its own pattern or organization of ideas depending on the topic. Therefore, students need to be exposed with different kinds readings materials in order to develop their awareness on how writing is developed into differrent kinds of patterns of ideas. This study is intended to help students improve their writing achievement especially in writing an essay by integrating the reading and writing activitivities. The students involved in an integrated reading and writing activity in order to help the students develop their writing skills. This study involved 16 students of English Education Study Program who took the writing 3 course. Therefore, convinient sampling method is applied. The results of this study showed that there was an improvement in the students’ writing achievement in means from 63.3 in pretest to 79.8 in the post test. The results of the paired-sample t-test also confirmed that there is a significant difference in students’ essay writing achievement before and after they were taught by using reading and writing connections strategy. Organization of ideas, focus and detail, and voice are the aspects which were mostly developed after the treatment. Therefore, it can be concluded that reading and writing connections strategy is effective in improving students’ essay writing achievement.

EFL Teacher Experiences in Developing Writing Proficiency for Scientific Journal Publication Through Extensive Reading

“…What and how reading activities contribute to developing writing skills are detailed here (Hayati & Jaya, 2018). Based on their research, the reader can not only look for information inside the reading but also identify the writing style and comprehend how the author creates a tale or piece of writing (Thi et al, 2018).…”

“…Therefore, connecting reading and writing is an effective strategy to help pupils improve their writing (Celik, 2019). Hayati & Jaya (2018) explained that writing instruction should be interwoven with reading activities. It indicates that students should participate in the teaching and learning process that merges these two activities, as it will allow them to improve their writing.…”

“…It indicates that students should participate in the teaching and learning process that merges these two activities, as it will allow them to improve their writing. In addition (Hayati & Jaya, 2018) claim that exploration activities are one of the means. Exploration activities are those in which the reader examines the author's use of storylines, characters, settings, themes, and points of view.…”

“…This exploratory activity consists mostly of two activities: reading and writing. Reading and writing activities are essential because, during the reading process, the reader will discover how the author employs particular structures and comprehend their significance (Hayati & Jaya, 2018). This means that, in readingwriting activities, the reading process focuses not only on information-seeking activities but also on recognizing the structure of writing and identifying the writer's development of ideas or concepts.…”

“…Thus, readers are expected to comprehend the framework of scientific writing and witness how an author develops a concept. In other words, it is intended that the reader would be able to identify the process of how an author develops concepts in writing a scientific work so that he or she can apply it to his or her own writing process after examining the reading materials (Hayati & Jaya, 2018).…”