Teaching Productive Skills to the Students: a secondary Level Scenario

a. 
Permanence: 
Oral language is transitory and must be processed in real 
time, while written language is permanent and can be read and reread as often as one 
likes. 
b. 
Production time: Writers generally have more time to plan, review, and 
revise their words before they are finalized, while speakers must plan, formulate and 
deliver their utterances within a few moments if they are to maintain a conversation. 
c. 
Style: Distance between the writer and the reader in both time and space, which 
eliminates much of the shared context that is present between speaker and listener in 
ordinary face-to-face contact thus necessities greater explicitness on the part of the 
writer. 
d. 
Orthography: 
It carries limited amount of information compared to the 
richness of devices available to speakers to enhance a message (e.g. stress, intonation, 
pitch, volume, pausing, etc). 

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e. 
Complexity: Writingtends to have characteristics of longer clauses and 
more subordinators, while spoken language tends to have shorter clauses connected by 
coordinators, as well as more redundancy (e.g. repetition of nouns and verbs). 
f. 
Formality: Because of the social and cultural uses to which writing is ordinarily 
put, writing tends to be more formal than speaking. 
g. 
Vocabulary: Written texts tend to contain a wider variety of words, and more 
lower-frequency words, than oral texts. 
2.7.2 Aspects of Writing Skill 
 
Aspects of writing skill include firstly the micro and macro skills of writing, then 
mechanical components of writing, and finally cohesion and coherence of writing. 
The first aspect of writing skill is its micro and macro components. Brown (2001: 
342-343) mentions a list of micro and macro skills for written communication which 
focuses on both the form of language and the function of language. Firstly, the micro 
skills of writing mentioned by Brown cover several important aspects. They are 
producing graphemes and orthographic pattern of English, producing writing at an 
efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose, producing an acceptable core of words and 
using appropriate word order patterns, using acceptable grammatical systems such as 
tense, subject verb agreement and etc, expressing a particular meaning in different 
grammatical form, using cohesive devices in written discourse and using the rhetorical 
forms and conventions of written discourse. 
Meanwhile, the macro skills of writing cover some other aspects. They are 
accomplishing the communicative functions of written texts according to form and 
purpose, conveying links and connections between events and communicating such 
relations as main idea, supporting ideas, new information, given information, 
generalization, and exemplification, and finally developing a battery of writing strategies 

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that include such as accurately in using prewriting devices, writing with fluency in the 
first drafts, using paraphrases and synonyms, soliciting peer and instructor feedback, 
and using feedback for revising and editing. 
To add Brown‟s ideas on the micro and macro skills of writing, it can be said that 
that writing involves several sub skills. They involve spelling correctly, forming letters 
correctly, writing legibly, punctuating correctly, using correct layouts, choosing the right 
vocabulary, using correct grammar correctly, and using paragraphs correctly. Thus, the 
skills of writing must be introduced in every stage of writing composition. This will 
enable the students to get used to writing more effectively by using and obeying those 
skills of writing. 
Mechanical components are the second important matter of writing. Like other 
skills of English, writing has its own mechanical components, such as handwriting, 
spelling, punctuation, and construction of well-performed sentences, paragraphs and 
texts (Harmer: 2004). He also states that the previous components are the nuts and 
bolts of the writing skill. Therefore, those components need to be introduced in the 
teaching and learning process of writing. 
The last aspect will center on the discussion of the cohesion and coherence of 
writing skill. The two aspects play important role in the process of good paragraph 
compositions and cannot be separated in the process of writing since they are closely 
related to one another. Moreover, Harmer (2004) states that both cohesion and 
coherence are needed to make the writing more accessible. The first thing to know is 
cohesion. Cohesion can be defined as linking relationship of a number of linguistics 
elements that can be seen in the structure of the text surface. According to Harmer, 
there are two types of cohesion. They are lexical (repetition of words) and grammatical 
cohesion (pronoun, possessive reference, and article reference). On the other hand, 
coherence is defined in slightly different way that is whether the writing works can easily 
be read and understood. To be able to have the coherence in writing, a writer needs to 
focus on the sentence movements. The movement of one sentence to the next 

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sentences must be logically and smoothly delivered. In other words, the sentences must 
flow smoothly. 
As summary, the micro and macro skill, the mechanical components and 
cohesion and coherence are important features of writing. Each of them has 
contributions towards the good paragraph compositions. Therefore, they must be 
considered in each stage of the process of writing, especially when the teachers want to 
make their students‟ writing works more accessible.