A. Definition of a Diary
Diary is a kind of personal writing written by someone related to their daily activities (Hamayan, 1989). Meanwhile, Charnock (2011: 126) says that diary writing, herein, is a form of sustained silent writing (SSW). SSW requires the student to fill-up a period of time with writing. It is more habit forming and makes students think their everyday lives are important when they write something related to them. Diary writing could be called journal, or simply personal writing for older students. Ueland (1987, in Hayaman, 1989: 2) states, that “writing will be joyful, lively, and satisfying activity if it uses a person’s creative power”. Students are invited to write at their level about topics that interesting for them. In diary, students write about anything in their lives in which important or interesting for them. Diary writing helps the student think through ideas and feelings. It is comfortable, unpressured writing. Hayaman (1989: 8) states that some of the important aspects in teaching writing are intensity and constancy, students need to write every day. In addition, Charnock (2011: 126) says that a daily routine fosters a habit. A diary can be a private between student and teacher (Peachey, 2004). When teacher responds to students’ writing, it can develop a relationship between student and teacher.
B. The Use of a Diary
Similar to other skills in life, writing is learned by writing. Writing daily experiences is a good start to develop students’ writing ability. Students like to write things that happen in their daily lives in a diary. When students are accustomed to write, they might write easily. When the students write in a daily routine, their writing increases rapidly.
Building students’ habit in writing is not easy. Teacher should choose the right writing activity and technique to encourage students to write. A diary is close to students’ lives, it can be effective even for those who do not like writing.
The most effective learning activity of writing skills is likely to take place when students are writing real messages for real audiences, or at least when they are performing tasks which they are likely to have to do in their out of class lives (Harmer: 2004). Students write when they have something to say and it usually related to their daily activities. Byrne (2001: 267) classifies that writing imaginary diary is an activity of writing. When students write their activities on a piece of paper, it stimulates them to write. In addition, Brown (2001 : 546) states that a diary or journal belongs to self-writing. Students keep their own writing that record thoughts, ideas, feelings on a piece of paper and teacher read and responds to. When students write a diary, it means they have to recall their memory about what happened in their daily lives. Hayaman (2001: 7) states that another way to have students writing is through diaries. The students essentially write to themselves. At the student’s discretion the teacher may read the diary entries and respond to them as they do with dialogue journal entries. Thus, students have less opportunity for modeling diaries than they do with dialogue journals. Nevertheless, the act of writing something that can be highly personal and meaningful, with only occasional feedback is still effective for improving language proficiency.
Personally, as well as academically, writing a diary helps the students think through ideas and feelings. It is comfortable, unpressured writing.
C. The Advantages of Writing a Diary
A diary is one way to help students to write their daily experiences. Writing a diary encourages students to write about their inspirations, thoughts, and keep them to focus on writing even to young learners.
Leong (2008) explains five benefits of writing a diary. First, organizing an activity, writing diary gives a clearer activities on what someone do on that day and aware a wasted of time. Second, discipline, writing a diary as a routine exercise makes someone focus on their writing, especially, when they are telling about feeling, thought, experience on a piece of paper. Third, relieving the stress, expressing the problem or worries on a piece of paper makes someone feel better and comfortable. Fourth, sharpening the memory, the words can tell the events completely rather than the pictures. Writing an event in detail needs memory to memorizes name, place or time correctly. Fifth, improving writing skill by associating words or thoughts on a piece of paper such as writing a diary can be a good exercise to be a good writer.
D . The Relation of Recount and Diary
Diaries, portfolios are containers for writing that is recorded over a period of time (Moon, 2003: 2); related as much as possible to the experiences and interests of the students (Charnock, 2011: 126); Bailey (1990:215), states that diary study is a first personal account of a language learning or teacher experience, documented through regular, candid entries in a personal journal and then analyzed for recurring patterns or salient events.
Thus, diary is similar to recount because diary contents recount inside. That teaching recount text through diary is appropriate to be applied. Both recount and diary are related item and can be used in teaching and learning process.
For detail, The description of a diary writing strategy application in teaching recount text can be seen in the table below :
Table 1
Overview of Lesson Structure with The Application of Diary Writing
No.
Action
Out-put
1.
Giving an orientation test
Basic knowledge of the students
2.
Building Knowledge of the field:
Reviewing of past tense and the adverb of time. Completing sentences with adverbs of time and past tense be used as the exercise
Knowledge of the field
3.
Modeling of the text:
Showing the students few written text of recount such as: letter, diary, and imaginative recount and emphasizing the schematic structure and language feature so that the students become familiar with it.
Ability to write a recount text
4.
Joint Construction of Text :
Asking students to work in group by discussing and identifying the generic structure and language feature of a diary and Assigning the students to write their experiences in each day in the form of diary. In this stage, teacher should walk around the classroom to give students help if there are difficulties in sentence correction, vocabulary, or paragraph organization.
The teacher gives some correction to students’ diary.
Collected Ideas ( Diary) and group work
5
Analyzing ideas to get the conclusion:
Students have conclusions from all the notes they had written individually
Conclusion Ideas
6
Independent Construction of The Text:
Asking the students to rewrite their diary
(draft personal recount) into a final recount text.
Recount text
