THE INFLUENCE OF STUDENTS’ APTITUDE TOWARDS THEIR READING AND WRITING ABILITY
By: Aan Subekti P, S.Pd
THEORETICAL REVIEW
By: Aan Subekti P, S.Pd
THEORETICAL REVIEW
In this chapter, the researcher would like to present some theories concerning the variable stated in this study. The researcher will present the theoretical description in relation to research.
A. Aptitude
1. The Definition of Aptitude
Development of student's naturally different in the intelligence, aptitude, interests, creativity, emotional maturity, personality, physical condition, and social circumstances. These developments are clear differences can be seen during the learning process or learning process in the classroom. As teacher must have role in identifying, developing, and motivating aptitude of the students in all sectors.
An aptitude is a combination of acquire some characteristics indicative of an individual’s capacity to acquire some specific knowledge, skill or set of organized responses such as the ability to become an artist or to be a mechanic. Aptitude means an individual’s aptitude for a given type of activity, the capacity to acquire proficiency under appropriate conditions, that is his potentialities at present as revealed by his performance on selected test have predicted value (R.S. Chauhan, 1979, pp. 308-309). Someone who is aptitude language for example, with the same exercise with other people who are not gifted language, will more quickly master these skills. To be realized aptitude should be supported by interest, training, knowledge, experience in order to actualize these talents well.
Aptitude is the natural or in-born ability to learn. In fact, it concerns the cognitive abilities that underlie successful learning. A person with high aptitude (for a subject) learns it more quickly and easily than a person with low aptitude. The aptitude is, in fact, a combination of various abilities. If we consider language as a subject, here as a test case, then some of the abilities to teach the subject (language), are to identify sounds patterns, to recognize the different grammatical function of words in sentences, rote learning ability and the ability to infer language rules. It has been suggested that the people differ in the extent to which they possess a natural ability for learning a subject.
An aptitude is a combination characteristics indicative an individual’s capacity to acquire (with training) some specific knowledge, skill, or set of organized responses, such as the ability to speak a language, to become a musician, to do mechanical works (F.S. Freeman, 1976, p.431). Often we find the people who have some special abilities or potentialities which enable them to do well in certain fields of activity. Such people have special types of aptitude and therefore, they are able to learn and acquire the necessary skills in a specialized field. They are also interested in such activities as are of their liking, further success or achievement in a given field of knowledge or activity depends to a great extent upon attitude and interests.
B. Reading
1. Definition of Reading
Basically, in learning English, students are faced with two kinds of skills, they are receptive skills and productive skills. Receptive skills include listening and reading, while productive skills include writing and speaking. Next, in this occasion, the writer will start the definition of reading firstly by Harmer.
According to Harmer (2003: 199), reading is called receptive skill, and receptive skills are the ways in which people extract meaning from the discourse they see or hear and he continues when we read a story or a newspaper, listen to the news, or take part in conversation we employ our previous knowledge as we approach the process of comprehension, and we employ a range of receptive skills, which ones we use will be determined by our reading or listening purpose. Grabe and Stoller (2002: 9) state that reading is the ability to draw meaning from the printed page and interpret this information appropriately.
Based on some definition above, we can conclude that reading is one’s skill or ability to get the meaning of the message or information which is created by reader not only through interaction with the text but also through interaction with others and be able to draw the meaning from the printed page and interpret the information appropriately.
2. Types of Reading
Alderson and Urquhart in Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistic (1990:51), divide the different types of reading comprehension into four kinds, according to the readers’ purposes and in reading and the types of reading used. They are as follows:
a) Literal Comprehension: reading in order to understand, remember, or recall the information explicitly contained in a passage.
b) Inferential Comprehension: reading in order to find information which is not explicitly stated in a passage, using the readers’ experience and intuition, and by inferring (inferencing).
c) Critical or Evaluative Comprehension: reading in order to compare information in a passage with the readers’ own knowledge and values.
d) Appreciative Comprehension: reading in order to gain an emotional or other kind of valued response from a passage.
C. Writing
Writing in any language is a difficult skill to acquire. Therefore, as an EFL student, student should approach writing in English carefully.
1. Definition of Writing
Meyers (2005: 2) states that writing is a way to produce language you do naturally when you speak. Writing is speaking to other on paper – or on a computer screen. Writing is also an action – a process of discovering and organizing your ideas, putting them on a paper and reshaping and revising them.
Ten Harmer (2004: b.86) says that writing is a process and that we write is often heavily influenced by contains of genres, then these elements have to be present in learning activities. Writing is a continuous process of thinking and organizing, rethinking, and reorganizing. Writing is a powerful tool to organize overwhelming events and make them manageable. Writing is really a form of thinking using the written word.
From the definitions above the writer concludes that writing is a way to produce language that comes from our thought. It is written on a paper or a computer screen.
2. Steps in Writing
Meyers (2005: 3 – 12) states that there are six steps to make a good writing, among others;
a. Exploring Ideas
Writing first involves discovering ideas. Before writing, let our mind explore freely. And then record those thoughts by writing on whatever we can. As in speaking, we must have something to say, a reason for saying it, and someone to say it to.
1) Our Subject
Before writing ask our self, “what is the subject or the material want to write about and what do I know about it ?” Choose a subject that we care about and know about (or can find out about). Then you will have something interesting to say, and we will say it more clearly and confidently. We must select and then narrow our subject from the general we will practice doing that in the exercise that follows.
2) Our Purpose
After deciding the subject, now ask ourself, “what is the purpose?” Communicating always has a purpose : to persuade, or to entertain or may be to do all three. we could inform, persuade or to entertain our classmate with example of odd incidents we have experienced at our job.
3) Our Audience
After deciding our subject and our purpose, ask ourself, “who is the audience?” To answer to that question will determine what we say about our subject and what the purpose we hope to achieve. We may need to provide a lot of evidence to persuade a reader who does not agree with our opinion, but provide far less for someone who tends to agree with us.
b. Pre Writing
The second step of the writing process involves writing our thoughts on paper or on the computer. Don’t worry about making mistakes because we will probably change our mind and our wording later anyway. This step is called pre writing. It is a time to relax, to write quickly and to begin organizing our thoughts.
1) Brainstorming
One way to capture our thought is by brainstorming, or listing thoughts as they come to us. We might brainstorm a second or third time to generate more ideas.
2) Clustering
In clustering, we write our subject in the middle of the page and then circle it. We write related ideas around the circle as they occur to you. Then we circle the ideas and connect them to our subject circle. These related ideas are like branches.
3) Free Writing
Another way to get started is free writing. We simply write about the subject without worrying about sentence, structure, spelling, logic and grammar.
c. Organizing
After we have put our ideas into words, we can begin to organize them. This process involves selecting, subtracting, and adding. Think again about our purpose and audience what goal does we want to accomplish – to inform, persuade, or entertain? What point do we want to make? And what should we tell your readers so that we can accomplish those goals? Return to our pre writing and do the following:
(1) Underline or highlight best ideas in our brainstorming list, putting related ideas together. Add to the as more ideas occur to us and remove or ignore the parts that are not related to our choices.
(2) Choose the part of the clustering diagram that has the best ideas. Do a second clustering diagram that explores those ideas in greater detail. Ignore the parts of the original diagram that are not related to your choice.
(3) Circle or highlight the best parts of your free writing. Do a second even a third free writing on them, Ignore the parts of each free writings that are not related to your choice. And focus more specifically on your subject and add more details.
(4) Outlining
After selecting, subtracting and adding, the writer can make ann informal outline.
d. Writing the First Draft
We have done some pre writing, selected our best ideas, expanded on them, and arranged them in some reasonable order. Now we can begin the first draft of our paragraph. Don’t worry about being perfect, so write fast as if you were speaking to our readers. Some steps for drafting can be stated as follows:
1) Say something about before we write in
2) Write fast by hand or by computer
3) Use only one side of the paper
4) Leave wide margins and double space to make room for changes.
5) Save your work every five or ten minutes on the computer.
e. Revising the Draft
Revising is among the most important steps in writing, especially for people who write in a second language. Revising means improving what we have already written. When our revise, we examine how well we first draft make its point and achieves its purpose for its audience. That may require rearranging ideas, developing ideas further, cut out ideas that do not support our point, and changing the wording of our sentences.
These are some tips for revising:
1) Make notes in the margins or write new material on separate sheet of paper.
2) Circle words we think you misspelled or will want to change later
3) Tape or staple additions where we want them to go.
4) On the computer, use cut and paste or insert commands to move things around.
5) Print out a double space copy for revisions: slow down and revise in pencil.
f. Producing the Final Copy
There are two steps in producing the final copy, they are:
a. Editing
After we have revised our paragraph, we can edit our work. Check in carefully. Focus on grammar, words choice, verb forms, punctuation, and spelling. Read the paper more then once. Copy it over or print it our again with all our corrections. This draft should be net and should represent our best effort.
b. Proofreading
The final stage in the revision process is proofreading. That means carefully reading our draft more than once to check that your revisions and editorial changes were made correctly.
g. Types of Writing Exam
Among the many different kinds of exam tasks that are currently in use, the following are some of the most common:
a. Aplications latter and CVs
b. Articles, reports, and reviews
c. Discription of pictures, paintings, or events
d. Discursive ocmpositions
e. Leaflets
f. Letters (informal and formal)
g. Narratives
h. Transactional letters
In writing composition, based on the type of mistakes, the writer made classification into these following areas:
a. Structure
b. Tenses – espicially past tense
c. Personal pronouns
d. Conjunctions
e. Punctuation
f. Articles
g. Prerpositions
h. Capitalization and spelling
This classification was meant to ease the writer in taking a view of the student’s grammatical errors and analyzing them. She analyzed the error from the area in which the students most frequently made one to that in which they made the last one.
h. Factor Influence Writing Ability
Gere and Anne Ruggles (1985:78) define that learning of writing obviously on writing composition. It can be measuring the student’s skill in explaining ideas and using language as an accurately writing acceptable. It is meant that teacher should be helping the student to be able to write as well as possible because writing skill doesn’t come spontaneously without enough practice regularly.
There are many things that should be influence in writing by students :
1. Student aptitude
2. They must learn the graphic system of the foreign language.
3. They must learn to spell according to conversation of the language.
4. They must learn to control the structure of the language so that what he writes is compressible to reader.
5. They must learn to select form among possible combinations of word and phrase those, which convey the nuance he has in mind in the register, which is most appropriate.
D. Hypothesis
Based on the discussion in the previous section, the proposed hypothesis is as follow:
1. There is influence of students’ aptitude toward their reading and writing ability
2. The student who have a high aptitude in reading and writing they will gets good mark, but if the student who don’t have a good aptitude they will gets bad mark.
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