There are some issues in teaching of writing.

The writing skill includes competence in writing, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, and studying, making sound letter correspondences knowing the alphabet and distinguishing one letter

from another. In schools, the writing skill usually begins in kindergarten or first grade. Written expression reflects a persons level of comprehension, concept development, and abstraction. It is how we organize our ideas to convey a point. Written expression requires skills in three major areas such as handwriting, misspelling, grammatical inaccuracies, and reorganization can make it difficult for a reader to understand the meaning of writing. Thus, and effective writers are skilled enough in these three major areas of written expression to communicate with minimal misunderstanding. (Ravi.R2002)

Problem In Hand Writing Problem with handwriting are known as dysgraphia, which refers to partial ability (or inability) to remember how to make certain alphabet or arithmetic symbols (Cicci, 1983) Handwriting problems include misformation of letters, poor spacing both vertically and horizontally, and extremely slow writing everyone occasionally produces some illegible letters, but some children do so frequently enough that understanding what they have written is difficult. So the readers could not understand what they write. In such cases, handwriting would be considered a problem.also, most children write quite slowly when they are first learning to print or write is cursive. Slow handwriting should be considered a problem, since a childs writing speed interferes with his /her work. So this will disturb to teachers teaching on the writing skill. One of the issue in writing skill is uneven spacing between letters as shown below.

Although children make many different mistakes in handwriting, most of their mistakes are made on a very few letters. Anderson, (1968) observed that the letters on which errors are most common are a,e.r and t. Children with disabilities may form these letters or connecting strokes in correctly, and as a result the letters look like other letters. For example, if a cursived is misformed in one way, it looks like cl. All of these problems may interfere with other aspects of writing performance.

Many learning disabled students are deficient in writing skills. Moran (1981) found that learning disabled and low achieving children in primary schools are

performed similarly on formal features of writing; however, the low achievers made fewer spelling errors. Smith (1981) notes that learning disabled children need direct, concentrated instruction to become proficient in written communication. Hence, writing problems of the children have to be considered by the teachers as well as parents, since the writing problems affect their Learning process and academic achievements.

Poor Vocabulary On the other hand, another issue on teaching of writing skill is student lacks of vocabulary. This is because most of the students did not know the terms to be used in their writing. From that, it will disturb of teaching writing to the students. As we all know, by reading students can improve their vocabulary and they can use the words in their writing properly. So, when they do not know the word on the spot, they will make direct translate from Malay to English. This will make some grammatical errors which the structure of sentence is false. For example, students maybe want to say blue colour instead they write colour blue. So that, it will make the writing is in error and disturbing the teaching and learning process.

The main cause of poor vocabulary is lack of reading any reading materials. Besides, students also will do not have enough time to think the right term in writing especially in examination session. It will pressure student to think more about the right term and its vocabulary. Plus the student is not really interest in writing. Furthermore, the surroundings of students are using their mother tongue which is Malay. So, student do not exposed to English vocabulary and they thinks that all of them are less important to them. From that, they will lack of vocabulary and they cannot perform on their writing very well. From that, student is not really interest in writing activity, this is because they have to brainstorm the idea with right term and right vocabulary.

Moreover, poor of vocabulary comes from lack of exercises given to the students. When student do not given exercises to be done, so, they do not alert about the vocabulary.

Reflection By : Siti Noor Fadhilah bt Yakub I/C number: 910110-11-5208

Alhamdulillah praise to Allah because finally I had done this assignment successfully with my friend. Along finishing this assignment, I faced many problems and obstacles. First and foremost, I got blurred about what are the approaches used in teaching writing skills and I am also do not really know about what issues are in the teaching of writing skill. Moreover, my friend and I also have to design a lesson plan with interesting activity on teaching this writing skill. The problem that I must face is I have to search and explore about the approaches of teaching writing skill and some issues in writing skill. Because I have a problem of difficult to get internet from my rent house which is not in network area for broadband, it gives me quite challenges to find the information about them. So, I have to go to restaurant which has wireless facility.

Furthermore, in this assignment we have to design an activity and write a lesson plan to be taught to year 2. Based on this task, I have found that to make a lesson plan, we must make sure that the Learning Objective is related each other with the curriculum specification. So, I am also alert about that. When designing the activity, I and my friend discuss together before teaching year 2 student. This is because I have to make sure that my activity is really about the writing skill and I have to avoid from misconception of writing skill. So, based on our discussion, I had made decision to use some teaching aids to attract the attention from student. Our activity is about the topic On the Farm. So, I designed activity mostly about cut and paste then write back. Along teaching this topic for year 2 at stage pre writing, I had shown to student flashcards about the animals. In this stage, the lesson is achieved very well as the student can pronounce well the word of animals. Besides that, this activity can attract students attention towards the lesson.

Besides that, at stage 3 which is while writing stage, I used a big book about animal to be taught at this stage. This stage also can achieve the learning object very well as the student can match the animals and its name and the most important thing is the student can rewrite the words of animals very well. Furthermore, by using the big book as my teaching aids, it attracts student to pay attention in the class. This is because, by using the big book, students can see the visualization of the colourful picture and they can recognize the animal with the word of it. Then, the student can write the name of the animal by themselves without the teaching aids support. This is shown that this lesson which is using the teaching aids can develop students thinking about the topic and they can write it well.

In addition, while finishing this coursework, I found some strengths and weaknesses. Some of the strength that I identified was this task was much related to future teacher who will be facing many problems in teaching writing skill. For me, I got some benefits as this assignment give me more information about approaches and issues in teaching the writing skill. From this task, I can practice myself to handle my student in future like a say practices make perfect . Besides that, I can apply the process, product approaches when I am a real teacher in future time. For the issues that I made research, I can improve the difficulties and cope the problems that exist in writing skill. Alhamdulillah, I feel so glad to finish this assignment.

Nevertheless, doing this assignment also has the weaknesses. One of them is wrong managing time from me. I was really upset to myself when I could not manage time well to settle down my assignment and my practicum work. So, I have to be aware on managing my time and make schedule to make sure that my works went smoothly. That was the lesson I got when I realized that my time management to settle down all my works were not as good as before. The entire lessons and information can I applied in the future.

(670 words)