ACTIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES: A MODEL OF TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING

for many, writing activities can be frustrating and boring. Students may find themselves struggling hard but to no avail. It is the task of the writing teachers to make the class lively and encourage students to be spirited in the classroom. One of the strategies that teachers can apply in order to awaken students’ spirit in writing classes is by applying active learning strategies. According to the Center of Teaching and Learning, at University of Minnesota (2013), engaging students in small groups or trios can be a low-risk strategy that can ensure the participation of all students. Some examples of how the teaching-learning activities can be conducted will be discussed in the following section. This paper tries to present the possibility of applying active learning strategy in teaching Academic Writing, which is the the highest writing class before students go to thesis proposal writing. The course is worth four (4) credits, and offered for the fifth semester students at the English Study Program, Faculty of Language and Learning, Satya Wacana Christian University Salatiga. One central question to be answered in this paper is: “How can active learning strategies be applied in teaching Academic Writing?” The following section deals with the theoretical foundation for the study. In summary, this paper is a proposal to a teaching syllabus for Academic Writing course. Opinions from three Academic Writing lecturers from the Faculty of Language and Literature from Satya Wacana Christian University were also gathered in order to perfect the syllabus that I proposed. They were of different levels of seniority: one lecturer was relatively new with four-year experience of teaching, the second was of middle seniority who, by the time of the interview in the end of June, had been teaching for fourteen years, and the last lecturer was a senior one, who had got his professorship, and had taught in tertiary level for about 30 years. This paper will hopefully give new insights to lecturers of writing n general, in particular, of Academic Writing