2.1.1 Aspects of language proficiency in writing achievement

Writing is the most complex skill among other language skills because in writing students need to think hard to produce some words, sentences, and paragraph at the same time. Not only do students need to think hard, but they also need to spell words in right spelling and properly punctuate the sentences. Therefore, the students have to master all aspects related to writing and its component, also do more practices if they want to be good writers.

According to Rogers, he said that writing is not language. Language is a complex system residing in people brains which allow people to produce and interpret utterances. Writing involves making an utterance visible. Betty said that learning to write well will improve the thinking skills –the ability to question, analyze, evaluate and make decision. As Betty said, that writing is a process discovery. When the students write they will discover their thoughts and ideas that lie in their mind.

Writing opens opportunities to learn. Learning to write well also improves our ability in organization skills. The consistency of learning to write well brings us to become more efficient in organizing our writing from the draft until editing process. The improvement of organizational skill of writing will enable us to select writing appropriately. By applying appropriate writing strategies, we can increase thoughts, draft more quickly, and develop ideas more effectively. Good organizational in developing ideas help us in expanding our writing and avoid us from blocking of writing. Traditionally, the process of writing has been divided into four stages that can be observed. The first stage of writing is prewriting. Its purpose is to capture and preserve ideas. The second is drafting, while drafting the people will transform their ideas into sentences in a semi organized manner. The purpose of drafting is to let the people ideas develop, expand, and form connection. The third stage is revision, and the last is editing.

The general purpose of writing may be primarily to inform, to persuade, to express, or to entertain. The specific purpose involves responding to a certain need for writing. These general purposes are combined in various ways. For example, most writing is intended to inform, but it also has a secondary persuasive element to make sure the reader that it is factual and reliable.

Moreover, writing is a way of thinking; express the ideas in written form in order to create an act of communication between the writer and the reader. It is a way to create information and images in a reader‘s mind. Writing is an art of impressing the thought, arguments or idea and information in the form of letters, symbols, numbers, or word on paper. Raymond stated that, Writing is a way of remembering and a way of thinking as well. Writing is a tool for clear thinking, for sharpening our awareness of the realities around us, for solving problems and shaping arguments. It means, through writing people can share their ideas and write down their arguments that can used for solving problems in their life. By writing any kinds of what come into mind, people can remember it well because writing makes things permanent in the written form. Writing can improve the quality of their life. To sum up, writing has an important part in daily life. It is not a simple process as we invert our palms in a crack. It needs a sincerity effort to produce a clear, readable and good writing. Writing also demands competence in organizing and generating the ideas before begins to write. It opens the opportunities to learn about the target language closely since we try to write in target language. Thus, to be a professional writer, the writer should follow some activities from doing the stage of writing process until keeping time to practice it continually (see Appendix A.).

Skehan and Robinson said that there are many dimensions to language proficiency such as fluency, accuracy and complexity. The fluency, accuracy and complexity are theorized to have independent statue in language performance of learner. Accuracy, fluency and complexity have different goals at different times when performing in language of learner.

The three aspects of learner performance can be seen as constituting a language proficiency of learner. That is, it is assumed that a proficient speaker will be able to perform tasks fluently and accurately, using complex language.

1. Fluency. Skehan and Foster defined the fluency is the capacity to use language in real time, to ensure meanings, possibly drawing on more lexicalized systems. It means that fluency is concerned with the capacity of learner to produce language in real time without any pauses or hesitations. Fluency is measured in different ways, such as speech rate, length of the run, pause length, false starts repetitions, and reformulating [6, p.43].

Fluency has been given around attention and it may be the term with the most varied definitions in writing research. This variance in defining writing fluency reflects the different ways researchers conceptualize it.

As Bruton and Kirby put it on Latif article: The word fluency crops up often in discussions of written composition and holds an ambiguous position in theory and in practice. Written fluency is not easily explained, apparently, even when researchers rely on simple, traditional measures such as composing rate. Yet, when any of these

researchers referred to the term fluency, they did so as though the term were already widely understood and not in need of any further explication. In productive language, this can be simply a measure of how many connected words a person can say or write in a given time. Fluency measures may also take into account the number of hesitations, self-corrections, repetitions, and space fillers like um”. A person may speak quite slowly but be very fluent because none of these interruptions occur.

Fluency concerns on the capacity of learner to bring an interlanguage (IL) system to communicate meanings in real time. The learner can produce the language in real time without pausing or hesitation, or not. It depends on more lexicalized modes of communication, like the pressures of real-time speech production are met only by avoiding excessive rule-based computation.

So, focus on fluency emphasizes the capacity of learner to engage in real time processing and to produce language at a speed and with a flow more similar to that of a native speaker.

The various definitions proposed for writing fluency may have resulted from the different indicators used for measuring it. Many L1/L2 writing process studies measured writing fluency in terms of the composing rate, i.e. the number of words written per minute obtained through dividing the text quantity by the time spent writing. Other reported measures of writing fluency include holistic scoring of the text, number of words and t-units, number of correctly spelled words written, number of sentences written, and number of letter sequences.

As defined by W. Hunt, the t-unit, or minimal terminable unit of language, was intended to measure the smallest word group that could be considered a grammatical sentence, regardless of how it was punctuated. Research suggests that the length of a t-unit may be used as an index of syntactic complexity. Of all these indicators, the composing rate has been the most frequently used one for assessing fluency of writer. It may be argued that the validity of the composing rate and the above product based indicators of writing fluency is questionable.

2. Accuracy. Skehan and Foster defined the accuracy is the ability to avoid error in performance, possibly reflecting higher levels of control in the language as well as a conservative orientation, that is, avoidance of challenging structures that might provoke error.19 This relates to the number of mistakes a speaker (or writer) makes, and to whether they use the forms that are expected for the type of text being produced.

Accuracy will be measured by calculating the number of grammatical errors per total number of t-units. In order to measure the aspect of accuracy in writing performance of participant, the researcher counted the number of errors in every 100 words. This would indicate how learners were accurate in their writing performance.

Richard in his book, he stated that the ability to do the following kinds of things in accuracy language teachers need to know and be effective classroom practitioners and language teaching professionals; that are 20to comprehend texts accurately to provide good language model to maintain use of the target language in the classroom, to maintain fluent use of the target, to provide example of words and grammatical structures and give accurate explanations (e.g., of vocabulary and language points), to use appropriate classroom language, to monitor his or her own speech and writing for accuracy. Accuracy relates to a learner belief in norms, and to performance which is native-like through its rule-governed nature. It is concerned with a learner capacity to handle whatever level of IL complexity he has currently attained. It means that language produced well in relation to the rule system of the target language is focus on accuracy implies a greater level of control, and perhaps with this more conservatism in the approach to communication, with the learner possibly avoiding more demanding language forms in order that error can be avoided.

Developing structural accuracy in speaking is a process that should be accompanied by classroom activities which are guaranteed involving pupils in contributing to the activity from the earliest stage, even when their contributions may be largely inaccurate. Nothing will motivate pupils more than the achievement of communication even if it is accompanied by means of making a point. It is important, however, that accuracy is reinforced frequently without putting pupils off communicating. Writing, therefore, becomes most important in the reinforcement of aspects of structure such as sequencing and tenses. Writing and speaking, as a result, are mutually supportive learning activities [7, p.43].

Developing structural accuracy is particularly important in writing tasks because the pupil has time to work on written text with the objective of producing a perfect final version. The teacher must use a variety of means to make pupils aware of the importance of both accuracy and orthography (handwriting) in their written work. Accuracy will automatically be reinforced through comment and feedback from the teacher. It is advisable, however, to encourage pupils to identify and correct their own mistakes by drawing attention to them but not immediately providing the correct answer. The more a language learner, of any age, is encouraged to work at a problem such as a vocabulary item, or a structural/grammatical inaccuracy, the more he/she will retain the information and apply it in the future.

3. Complexity. Skehan and Forrest defined the complexity is the capacity to use more advanced language, with the possibility that such language may not be controlled so effectively. This may also involve a greater willingness to take risks, and use fewer controlled language subsystems. This area is also taken to correlate with a greater likelihood of restructuring, that is, change and development in the IL system. It has a relation with aspects for instance the totals of different words from students take to write. It refers the size of their vocabulary, the various and complexity of using structure or grammatical, and also the complexity of students’ sentences in the texts. Generally, most of the expert measures complexity through a relationship of how much subordination per t-units or c- units.

The formal definition of a c-unit refers an independent clause with its modifiers. It includes one main clause with all sub ordinate clauses attached to it. It cannot be further divided without the disappearance of its essential meaning. Research suggests that the length of a t-unit may be used as an index of syntactic complexity. To measure the aspect of complexity, the t-unit was selected as the rating scale. The raters were supposed to count every clause which was attached to a t-unit. Complexity is measured by calculating the number of content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) per total number of t-units.

Complexity and its attendant process of restructuring related to the stage and elaboration of the underlying inter language system. It focuses on complexity emphasizes the learner‘s capacity to use cutting edge language, and to try to use the target language in the most advanced way.

Granfeldt observed more errors and vocabularies diversity in writing than in speaking. In the same time, Granfeldt tried to detect some mistakes from students’s writing by looking their assessment of less grammatical and complexity in writing than in speaking [8, p.22].

Kuiken and Vedder also noticed that the students made more errors in writing than in speaking, and that they scored (slightly) higher on lexical variation in writing. Assessing complexity of a written language, compares to of a spoken language, is usually performed by counting the number of longer clauses and subordinators.