Teaching writing using pictures

Writing as one of the skills of language becomes the most difficult one in teaching learning process. As stated in (Tribble, 1996: 3) that in language teachers’ opinion, writing is a language skill which is difficult to acquire. Writing is defined  as the act or art forming letters and characters on paper, wood, stone, or other material, for the purpose of recording the ideas which characters and words expression, or of communicating them to others by visible signs (http://dictonary.cambridge.org/define/writing.html). Here writing is the result of forming letter in which the writer records the ideas and expression so that others can easily understand. The form of writing is various, and also the way to make students understand has to be considered with the level of the students.

Teaching writing to adult is different with teaching to young learner because they have their own characteristics. The differences between young learner and adult are (1) They respond to meaning even if they do not understand individual words; (2) They often learn indirectly rather than directly that is they take in information from all sides, learning from everything around them rather than only focusing on the precise topic they are being taught; (3) Their understanding comes not just from explanation, but also from what they see and hear and crucially, have a change to touch and interact with; (4) The general display an enthusiasm for learning and a curiosity about the world around them; (5) They have a need for individual attention and approval from the teacher; (6) They are keen to talk about themselves and respond well to learning that uses themselves and their own lives as main topics in the classroom; (7) They have a limited attention span’ unless activities;  (8) They are extremely engaging they can easily get bored, losing interest after ten minutes or so on (Harmer :8). Understanding the consideration above, the teacher as the actor of the class has to be creative in the way of teaching students in this case teaching is transferring the knowledge and also is forming the character to students. The negative characteristics of the students have to be the key to improve and design a better lesson plan to teach children. The students are very interested if they are close to the material. It means when they are learning they are in the real situation that can make the students are eager to do. For children, intension is important not only for the group work but also for individual.

To make the students involves in the learning process, the teacher can use many materials and media to help the students understand the lesson. Picture is one of the media that is used in teaching learning process. Children are familiar with pictures. Pictures can give us the detail information though it is implicitly shown.  But why we still need to use pictures in teaching writing? It is because picture can attract the children with its dimension. The picture contain some message, and children can easily understand the message if they do know the picture from its graph, color, information, etc. From the book Techniques in teaching writing, the reason why picture can be a resource are that it is a shared experience in the classroom, a need for common language forms to use in the classrooms, a variety of tasks, a focus of interest for student.

As stated above that the children still need a common language form containing vocabularies, idiom and sentence structures to use in the classroom activity when they use pictures in learning process. It will help them to understand the information in the pictures. The pictures have various kind, they can be in the form of drawings, photographs, poster, slides, cartoon, magazine advertisement, diagrams, graphs, tables, chart, and maps.  One picture can be used in many different techniques. The key is on the teacher itself. Because the teacher has to consider many things before he or she teaches in the classroom. The scenario of the teaching learning process can be seen from the lesson plan. Here, it is clear that the pictures are really needed to teaching writing to children or not.

Sources:

Ann, Rames. 1983. Techniques in teaching writing. New York:  Oxford University Press.

Harmer, Jeremy. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.

(http://dictonary.cambridge.org/define/writing.html)

Tribble, Christopher. 1996. Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.