Writing stages and strategies of attacking writer's blocks taken by the second grade students of SMUK Santa Agnes in writing a narrative position

Language is used as a tool for communication which can direct how and what a person will communicate in different situation. Therefore, it is very important to learn every skill and element of a language. One of the language skills which is important for communication is writing. Writing is considered to be the most difficult skill since it requires the work of the mind in producing a paragraph or a composition. In writing, a person has to be able to find ideas, arrange them and organize those ideas into a good form of composition. He or she needs time to think about what he or she wants to write. It means that writing is a process. This fact is often neglected by writing teachers. They tend to see the final products of the students' work. Actually, in the process of writing, almost all people experience obstacles which are usually called "the writer's blocks". Some "blocks" are caused by the lack of background knowledge and also the fear to start writing. To solve the problems, writers may use different strategies. The writer conducts a study in order to know the stages of the writing process that 10 students pass when they write a narrative composition. Then they are asked to fill in the questionnaires. Moreover, the writer also wants to find out the strategies that the students use when they face the writer's blocks. She interviews every student. The writer uses a song as a means of stimulating the students' ideas. From the result of the analysis, it is known that the students pass almost all steps in the stages of the writing process. The step that is neglected is clustering or branching or diagramming. Moreover, the writer also finds out that all subjects experience the writer's blocks. They have different strategies in avoiding and also in solving the blocks. The strategies are considering the language in arranging ideas, guessing, asking friends, and opening dictionary. Those different strategies are used to avoid and also to solve the writer's blocks. Therefore, teachers should consider them in the teaching of writing