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TEACHING WRITING AN ESSAY ARTICLE

THROUGH PEER EDITING TECHNIQUE

(A Survey Study Conducted at English Education Program of

Galuh University)

Yusuf Hidayat

English Education Program, Galuh University

yusufhid@gmail.com

INTRODUCTION

Background

English as a language functions as communication medium among nations

in the world. Dealing with communication itself, it can be done both spoken and

written forms. In spoken form people interacts each other to transfer information

orally in order to have the response from their partner(s), in the other hand,

written form also has similar function to convey someones ideas and thoughts

through the text to the other people in order to understand to what he/she has

written and perhaps respond it. In this context, someone here means the writer

while the other people means as the readers. Although only in written form, but

between the writer and the readers get involve each other, occurring the

interaction, and there is transferring information from the writer to the readers.

To produce the qualified writing where the writer can interact with his/her

readers, it needs several requirements in organizing his/her ideas and thoughts into

a good paragraph, then into a good essay, and so forth. Writing is different from

speaking, if someone speaks to his/her partner, grammar and other rules are not

obliged to be used. In contrast, writing needs an appropriate grammar,

punctuation, diction, and other rules as an obligation to be used in order to be able

to communicate well the writers ideas. In short, writing is not only arrange the

words to be a sentence, the sentences to be a paragraph, the paragraphs to be the

essay but also organize the topic sentence with its supporting sentences and

concluding sentence to be the unite and coherence text as suggested by Oshima &

Hogue (2006:18-22).With regard to qualified writing aforementioned, the beginner writer or the

students must learn and practice from the simple writing up to the complex one.

The simple writing here means from practicing how to write a topic sentence,

some supporting sentences, and concluding sentence into a good paragraph. Then

after they are able to write it, it continues to write an essay. Writing both a

paragraph and an essay are not easy, it needs practice more and revise more. The

appropriate technique to train the students in writing a paragraph or an essay is

using peer editing technique. Referring to this technique, many experts tried to

explain that peer editing is a collaborative technique between student and student

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by showing each others work in order to assess and giving the feedback to each

other to produce the better writing result (Zemach & Rumisek, 2003:21; Galvis,

2010:3). With the concept of peer editing expressed by the experts above, it is

quite clear that peer editing technique can help the students difficulties in writing

an Essay in English. Dealing with the background above, the writer conducted theresearch and entitled Teaching Writing an Essay Article through Peer Editing

Technique.

In relation to the present study, the writer took some previous studies

conducted by some researchers to support it. The first researcher is Galvis (2010),

in her research she focused on the implementation of peer editing as a pedagogical

tool to promote collaborative assessment in the EFL writing process. She

conducted the research at a ninth grade in a public school in Bogota, Colombia.

The main aims of her study were to determine the role of peer editing in the

writing process and to characterize the relationships built when the students

corrected each others writings. She also thought that peer editing is a technique

which showed a phenomenon that often occurs naturally within the classroom,therefore the teacher has to guide systematically in implementing the technique of

peer editing as a solution to solve the students problems in writing course. The

results of her research showed that when the students were engaged in peer editing

sessions they created zones of proximal development in which high achiever

students provided linguistic scaffolding and empowered low achievers. It was also

found that the students used thinking strategies such as noticing and explaining

when they identified errors related to the formal aspects of the language.

Then, the second researcher is Siew (2001), he focused on assessing the

effectiveness and meaningfulness of cooperative learning in the process of peer

editing in improving students quality of writing. He conducted an action research

project in a group of five Singaporean education officers such as school principal

and teachers from four different secondary schools. The aim of the study was to

assess and effort on a certain well-used pedagogical practice in the teaching of

English Writing. Then the result of his study reported that the audience found the

usefulness of peer editing to the process of teaching English writing.

In particular, this study was aimed at investigating the students learning

process of writing an essay article through peer editing technique. The

investigation was focused on the subject of writing four during the fourth semester

in 2012. In the present study, the writer tried to answer the following questions:

(1). What are the main difficulties faced by the students in writing an essay

article? (2). Does peer editing technique give the effective result to the studentsin writing an essay article?

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