Using Students’ Authentic Writings to Teach an Apprenticeship Report

Abstract

An Apprenticeship Report as one of the obligatory products that students of Business English of Politeknik Ubaya have to produce becomes an important requirement since, during the writing process, it also involves the company where the students undergo the apprenticeship in their last semester. Having examined their writings, I found quite troublesome linguistic accuracy in their writings. Due to these most frequently occurring errors, I was finally triggered to make use their authentic writings as my teaching sources. Then, to follow up, I intentionally collected their works to be selected to be the teaching sources as I believed that bringing authenticity in the classroom produce positive feedback and substantial language learning (Reid, 1993: 177). Therefore, in this paper, I discussed further about the use of authentic materials and approaches in teaching writing using authentic materials. To obtain information whether authentic materials gave positive responses from the students or not, a set of questionnaire was distributed to them in all stages; pre-, whilst-, and post-writing. Overall results have shown positive responses from the students as they were exposed to their seniors’ authentic writings and experienced authentic-materials-based activities which I designed purposely for them.

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