The Role Of Prewriting Activities To The Senior Grade Three Students Of English Writing

In the practice of English language teaching, great importance is attached to writing ability of language learners. There are many difficulties existing in language writing, and a variety of writing approaches aim to help students solve these problems. The process approach has now attracted most attention. This research suggests the need for writing instruction by which students can experience writing as a creative process in exploring and communicating meaning. The writing process consists of three stages:Prewriting, writing and rewriting. The first stage of writing process is prewriting. According to Doust (1986:7), prewriting activities generate ideas, they encourage a free flow of thoughts and help students to discover both what they want to say and how to say it on paper.Most of students have experienced 'writer' block, they don't know what to say and how to say. The author wondered whether prewriting activities help to find something to say. So the purpose of my research is to explore the following questions: 1. Will prewriting activities mainly help to improve the Senior Grade Three students' writing? 2. Which prewriting activities are more effective than the others? And also there are several prewriting activities training as well. To answer the questions mentioned above, the author carried out the present research.The first questionnaire was designed to find whether students have difficulties when writing, what the difficulties are, whether they need some help and what kinds of help they need. The finding is that most students often get stuck at a point in the writing process and can not go on and easily fall into" writer's block", therefore, they probably need prewriting activities.Then the prewriting activity training was under going, which lasted three months. After that, the final writing test, according to the composition assessment, we can know that there are some differences between classes in their ability of getting ideas as seen from the content of their articles. However, there are not much difference in terms of complexity and accuracy. All the classes with prewriting activities did better than those classes without preparation in terms of content development. The classes with cube as their prewriting activity produced more words and idea units than the other three classes. The classes that did freewriting rank the second in terms of content development. And the classes that did brainstorming rank the third. It has also been found out that these invention activities provide students with a real need to express and communicate their ideas to others. Students benefit from prewriting activities.However, there are some limitations in my research. Such as the small sample size, time limitation, the ways of prewriting training and prewriting activities themselves.This research is just the beginning of my own action research in my own teaching. There is still something that we are not so sure and need to do more research.