Our Weaknesses Produce Something New

5th Class Review

Our Weaknesses Produce Something New

“There are some things you can’t learn at any university, except for one, the University of Life...the only college where everyone is a permanent student.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

            No blame. No excuses. Our choices either lead to desired results or they lead to undesired results.  Everyone makes mistakes, but Victims repeat theirs. Over and over. Worse, they often judge themselves for having made the mistake or they judge others for having caused them to make the mistake. We made a hundred weaknesses, even a thousands. And now we think that it will be our direction to move our life in the better  track, better goal exactly. Judge themselves of any weakness is not have to be a burden, because a mistake is a choice that gets us off course from our dreams when a choice existed that could have kept us on course to our dreams.

            Start from the first paragraph that show us about a someone who step by step, over and over repeat a mistake, that is called as a pity victim. He can’t change every single weakness to be a new learning. Exactly on Friday, March, 7^th 2014, PBI-D students fourth semester found a great learning in writing 4 subject. From that assignment weekly, they caught some points of their fault in finishing assignment, especially in critical review. Hopefully from that fault and from some constructing correction from a lecturer (mr.Lala), it can always change our thinking of writing better and better.

A.  The biggest weakness on our Critical Review :

            The clock has take off and stop their breath at 07.05 WIB. A orning fresh wind also came into the class and greet the fifth meeting of writing 4. At that time, ion-ion spirit PBI-D little by little gathered. As opening teaching, mr.Lala gave us some points of weaknesses in critical review as a progress test. Such as :

      Trapped in trivial matters

      Not familiar with the key word called classroom discourse

      Recounting facts on religious conflicts without showing a firm point of view

      The generic structure isnt well constructed

      References pattern is missing

      (one thing that mr.Lala say): there are many rooms for improvement .

Here are an example of writing references :

“In a social interactive model, meaning is created via ‘a unique configuration and interaction of what both reader and writer bring to the text’. “ (Nystrand  et al. , 1993: 299)

            All of those fault above, mr.Lala taught that are common condition for young learner and it called WEAKNESS. But if n the next assignment it find again the same fault, the degree of fault isn’t weakness anymore, it change to be MISTAKE. Tolerance to all of the weakness will not be mistake anymore, but it will be IGNORANCE. From three degrees above, it will  be more fatal it three of them have done by students. So, the last degree they ignorance will change to be INSANE o crazy syndrome because they over repeat the weaknesses.

A.  Little Progress of Us :

            Was founded any weakness of us are not means that we have no progress, even little. As mr.Lala said that PBI-D is not an easy person for warming up spirit. They have to do that for many times, step by step. For fourth meeting, mr.Lala told us that now PBI-D ready to compete the writing subject with other class. They turn on their spirit in the right track now. Mr,Lala saw little progress of few student. PBI-D have showed their capability of writing. And so Evolution has gotten by them or even with (R)evolution and R as Radical.

            Create your Specialty !! Special characteristic should exist day by day, said mr.Lala. That is our weakness and this is our best, we screamed out. From the spirit, PBI-D will show their product of writing as PBI-D creation.

B.  Some Key Issues (General) :

1.      Context

            Context (the classroom and beyond). The Classroom  is the primary and most obvious context for the discourse we will be examining. However, the “context” for classroom discourse analysis also extends beyond the classroom, and within different components of classroom talk, to include any context that affects what is said and how it is interpreted in the classroom.

[Besty Rymes, 2008:14]

           

2.       Literacy

                 Terkait lemahnya kreativitas dalam menulis , menurut chaedar, paradigma pendidikan bahasa seyogianya bergeser dari pendekatan konvensional ke pendekatan literasi. "para guru bahasa harus melakukan hijrah pikir bahwa literasi tidak sekadar kemampuan baca-tulis,"

[Tag Archive | A. Chaedar Alwasilah]

            So, it means that literacy as social practice will not far from shaping history. That because a good writing will create past side and also nowadays. A great writer will always relate incident of today and incident of yesterday.

3.      Culture

            Kebudayaan dapat berarti simpanan akumulatif dari pengetahuan, pengalaman, kepercayaan, nilai, sikap, makna, hirarki, agama, pilihan waktu, peranan, relasi ruang, konsep yang luas, dan objek material atau kepemilikan yang dimiliki dan dipertahankan oleh sekelompok orang atau suatu generasi.

[larry a. samovar & richard e. porter]

            Kebudayaan adalah sistem pengetahuan yang meliputi sistem ide yang ada dalam pikiran manusia dalam pengalaman sehari hari yang sifatnya abstrak.

[selo soemardjan & soelaiman soemardi].

           

4.      Technology

            Teknologi berkaitan erat dengan sains (science) dan perekayasaan (engineering). Dengan kata lain, teknologi mengandung dua dimensi, yaitu science dan engineering yang saling berkaitan satu sama lainnya. Sains mengacu pada pemahaman kita tentang dunia nyata sekitar kita, artinya mengenai ciri-ciri dasar pada dimensi ruang, tentang materi dan energi dalam interaksinya satu terhadap lainnya.

[Djoyohadikusumo (1994, 222].

C.  What was our Last Discussion

            PBI-D students faced a blank document of Microsoft Word that has opened. The activity in that day have opened also starting of finishing assignment that will we face in the next meeting . That is re-write the second class review which we ave done. About Howard Zinn (in English).

            30 Minutes. Only 30 minutes mr.Lala gave time to us. Almost of PBI-D student just can collect for about 200-300 words. This activity is called “Creativity Class”. And I get one example of first paragraph as introduction :

            “Radical, brutal, strict. Those are what most articles said about Howard Zinn. He found a momentum of life from many books that he read. He read books that can change their life. He copied a portion of great people like Dickens “Just give me a facts, nothing but facts” and also put new paradigm from another great writer about “ don’t always obey the rule in a country, just an innocent people will die” Those statements has Zinn put in his mind are really changed his thinking. He become a comentator for every single incident whole the world…”

….”

           

D.    About Link

1.      Teaching and Researching Writing [Ken Hyland : 2009]

Text-oriented research and teaching

v  Texts as objects

            The dominant model for many years saw writing as a textual product, a coherent arrangement of elements structured according to a system of rules. The idea that texts can function independently of a context carries important ideological implications, and one of the most serious is the mechanistic view that human communication works by transferring ideas from one mind to another via language (Shannon and Weaver, 1963). Writing is disembodied. It is removed from context and the personal experiences of writers and readers because meanings can be encoded in texts and recovered by anyone who speaks the same language as the writer. Writers and readers conform to homogeneous practices so writing is treated like an object, and its rules imposed on passive users.

v  Text as Discourse

            Discourse refers to language in action, and to the purposes and functions linguistic forms serve in communication. The writer has certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his or her readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms of a text are resources used to accomplish these. These factors draw the analyst into a wider perspective which locates texts in a world of communicative purposes and social action, identifying the ways that texts actually work as communication.

            A variety of approaches has considered texts as discourse, but all have tried to discover how writers organise language to produce coherent, purposeful prose. An early contribution was the ‘functional sentence perspective’ of the Prague School which sought to describe how we structure text to represent our assumptions about what is known (given) or new to the reader (e.g. Firbas, 1986). This was taken up and elaborated in the work of Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) in the concept of theme–rheme structure. Roughly, theme is what the writer is talking about and rheme what he or she is saying about it: the part of the message that the writer considers important. Theme and rheme help writers organise clauses into information units that push the communication forward through a text and make it easy for readers to follow.     This is because we expect old information to come first as a context for new, but breaking this pattern can be confusing. For example, the writer establishes a pattern in which the rheme of the first sentence becomes the themes of the next three, clearly signposting

the progression. The theme of the final sentence, however, breaks the sequence, surprising the reader and disturbing processability.

v  Principle of a rhetorical approach to text interpretation

1. Texts both refer to a reality beyond themselves and a relationship to their readers.

2. The meaning of texts is inseparable from surrounding texts, whether footnotes, diagrams or conversations. Intertextuality refers to the extent our texts echo other texts.

3. Texts attempt to position readers in specific ways by evoking assumed shared schemata.

4. Schemata are created by relating one text or fact to another through logical links.

5. Schemata reflect the ways of thinking of particular communities or cultures

6. schemata are co-constructed by the writer in dialogue with others.

7. Schemata are rhetorical constructions, representing the choices from other potential meanings.

            Kramsch (1997: 51–2)

v  Intertextuality

           

            Bakhtin’s notion of intertextuality suggests that discourses are always related to other discourses, both as they change over time and in their similarities at any point in time. This connects text-users into a network of prior texts and so provides a system of options for making meanings which can be recognised by other texts-users. Because they help create the meanings available in a culture, the conventions developed in this way close out certain interpretations and make others more likely, and this helps explain how writers make particular rhetorical choices when composing. Fairclough (1992: 117) distinguishes two kinds of intertextuality:

Manifest intertextuality refers to various ways of incorporating or responding to other texts through quotation, paraphrase, irony, and so on.

Interdiscursivity concerns the writer’s use of sets of conventions drawn from a recognisable text type or genre. Texts here then are associated with some institutional and social meanings.

Key issues of Ken Hyland

1.      Writing and context

            The ways we understand writing have developed through increasingly sophisticated understandings of context. We recognize that meaning is not something that resides in the words we write and send to someone else, but is created in the interaction between a writer and reader as they make sense of these words in different ways, each trying to guess the intentions of the other. As a result, analysts and teachers now try to take account of the personal, institutional, and social factors which influence acts of writing.

Cutting (2002: 3) suggests that there are three main aspects of this interpretive context:

• the situational context: what people ‘know about what they can see around them’;

• the background knowledge context: what people ‘know about the world, what they know about aspects of life, and what they know about each other’;

• the co-textual context: what people ‘know about what they have been saying’. These aspects of interpretation have come to be rolled into the idea of community.

            More linguistically oriented analysts understand context in a different way and begin with texts, seeing the properties of a social situation as systematically encoded in a discourse. More than other approaches to language, Systemic Functional Linguistics has attempted to show how contexts leave their traces in (or are expressed in) patterns of language use. Halliday developed an analysis of context based on the idea that any text is the result of the writer’s language choices in a particular context of situation (Malinowski, 1949). That is, language varies according to the situation in which it is used, so that if we examine a text we can make guesses about the situation, or if we are in a particular situation we make certain linguistic choices based on that situation. The context of situation, or register, is the immediate situation in which language use occurs and language varies in such contexts varies with the configuration of field, tenor and mode.

Halliday’s dimensions of context

• Field: Refers to what is happening, the type of social action, or what the text is about (the topic together with the socially expected forms and patterns typically used to express it).

• Tenor: Refers to who is taking part, the roles and relationships of participants (their status and power, for instance, which influences involvement, formality and politeness).

• Mode: Refers to what part the language is playing, what the participants are expecting it to do for them (whether it is spoken or written, how information is structured, and so on).

Halliday (1985).

2.      Literacy and expertise

            This view sees literacy as psychological and textual, something which can be measured and assessed. Literacy is seen as a set of discrete, value-free technical skills which include decoding and encoding meanings, manipulating writing tools, perceiving shape–sound correspondences, etc., which are learnt through formal education. Writing is personal empowerment, but it is also defined in terms of its opposite: the personal stigma attached to illiteracy. You either have it or you don’t. ‘Literacy’ is therefore a loaded term, a deficit label which carries with it the social power to define, categorise and ultimately exclude people from many aspects of life.

            How texts are produced and used in different events is a key aspect of studying literacy. The assumption that writing is always associated with particular domains of cultural activity means we need to study literacy in a new way, using detailed ethnographic accounts of how writing is put to use by real people in their schools, homes, neighbourhoods and workplaces.

Writing and culture

            Culture is generally understood as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world (Lantolf, 1999). As a result, language and learning are inextricably bound up with culture (Kramsch, 1993). This is partly because our cultural values are reflected in and carried through language, but also because cultures make available to us certain taken-for-granted ways of organising our perceptions and expectations, including those we use to learn and communicate in writing. In writing research and teaching, this is the territory of contrastive rhetoric.

3.      Writing and technology

            To be a literate person today means having control over a range of print and electronic media. Many of the latter have had a major impact on the ways we write, the genres we create, the authorial identities we assume, the forms of our finished products, and the ways we engage

with readers. Some of the most significant of these are listed in Concept 2.6 below.

Effects of electronic technologies on writing

• Change creating, editing, proofreading and formatting processes

• Combine written texts with visual and audio media more easily

• Encourage non-linear writing and reading processes through hypertext links

• Challenge traditional notions of authorship, authority and intellectual property

• Allow writers access to more information and to connect that information in new ways

• Change the relationships between writers and readers as readers can often ‘write back’

• Expand the range of genres and opportunities to reach wider audiences

• Blur traditional oral and written channel distinctions

• Introduce possibilities for constructing and projecting new social identities

• Facilitate entry to new on-line discourse communities

• Increase the marginalisation of writers who are isolated from new writing technologies

• Offer writing teachers new challenges and opportunities for classroom practice

            Perhaps the most immediately obvious, and by now very familiar, feature of computer-based writing is the way that electronic text facilitates composing, dramatically changing our writing habits.

4.      Writing and genre

            Genres, as discussed in Chapter 1, are recognised types of communicative actions, which means that to participate in any social event, individuals must be familiar with the genres they encounter there. Because of this, genre is now one of the most important concepts in language education today.

            Genre is a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations. Every genre has a number of features which make it different to other genres: each has a specific purpose, an overall structure, specific linguistic features, and is shared by members of the culture. For many people it is an intuitively attractive concept which helps to organise the common-sense labels we use to categorise texts and the situations in which they occur.

           

5.      Writing and Identity

             identity refers to ‘the ways  that people display who they are to each other’ (Benwell and Stokoe,2006: 6): a social performance achieved by drawing on appropriate linguistic resources. Identity is therefore seen as constructed by both the texts we engage in and the linguistic choices we make, thus moving identity from the private to the public sphere, and from hidden processes of cognition to its social and dynamic construction in discourse.

2.      Cultural Analysis of Texts

[Mikko Lehtonen : 2000]

1.      The World of Context

            Each text always has its context which surrounds and penetrates it both temporally and locally and links it with other texts, as well as with other human practices. As much as the meanings of linguistic signs depend on their position in relation to other signs, the meanings of texts are ultimately impossible to study detached from their contexts, since texts as semiotic beings do not exist without the readers, intertexts, situations and functions that at all times are connected to them. In traditional notions of texts and contexts, contexts are seen as separate ‘backgrounds’ of texts, which in the role of a certain kind of additional information can be an aid in understanding the texts themselves. In this kind of notion of contexts, it falls to the reader’s lot to be a passive recipient. S/he is the decoder of notions included in the text who exploits his/her possible contextual knowledge to reveal the meanings that are fixed and final already in advance. Text resembles a crossword puzzle with one and only one solution, and context in turn is a number of reference books that the solver of the puzzle consults in order to find the right solution.

            Those explanation of components in writing will we called as something new in this subject. We know text as subject or even discourse. And some key issues from Ken Hyland and Mikko Lehtonen have built up our correction writing. We can see that analysis and apply them to our written. We conclude reading and writing skills that are considered natural are totally dependent on intentional training and conscious learning.