AS A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUE ( CoLT ) FOR TEACHING WRITING

Learning writing is useful not only for developing students’ writing skill but also for improving their English skills. This study was intended to know that Dialogue Journal is effective to teach writing. This study is a quasi-experimental. Based on the data analysis, it was found that in pre-test, there were 20 % students who active in group activity and 23 % got excellent to very good score. Meanwhile, in posttest, the students who got excellent to very good score were 43%, and 73% students were active in group activity. It indicates that Dialogue Journal is effective to teach writing.


INTRODUCTION
In countries where English is not widely used, the curriculum of English departments normally begins with some cempetence skills, including writing/ composition.Writing as a part of the language skills besides listening, speaking, and reading, must be taught maximally by the teacher.Through writing, students can develop their capability in communicating with people in written form.Rozimela (2004), argues that learning to write is useful not only for the sake of developing students' writing skill but also for improving their English skills.Johnson (2008) classifies five steps of writing process; prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and then publishing and sharing.Prewriting identifies everything the writers need to do before they start the rough draft, such as finding the idea, building on the idea, and then planning and structuring.
Drafting is the activity where the writer starts to write.In this stage, fogetting about word count and grammar is needed.In revising stage, many writers naturally adopt the A.R.R.R. (Add, Rearrange, Remove, Replace) approach.
Then, editing is the stage where grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors are corrected, because a word of caution is the quickest way to ruin a good writing project, and it is because if writers are editing or worrying about mechanics used in the prewriting, drafting, and revising stages, it means that the flow of ideas and the quality of writing suffers.
Writing in English has for many years, occupied a large portion in teaching and learning procedures.
Teaching writing in a foreign language does not mean teaching how to transfer sentences from students' mother tongue into English.According to Richards (2003), learning how to write in a second language is one of the most challenging aspects of second language learning.It is the same as what many teachers of English as a Foreign Languge (EFL) around the world have agreed that the process of teaching and learning writing skill seems to be more difficult and demanding than learning the other skills.The difficulties lie not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable text.
As Richard (2003) says that writing skills are specific abilities which help writers put their thoughts into words in a meaningful form and mentally interact with the message.
However, the problem is the second language writers have to pay attention more to a higher level of skills of planning and organizing as well as the lower level of skills of spelling, punctuation, word choice, language use, and others.So, many students still get difficulty in writing, and as Harmer (2004) states, for many years the teaching of writing focused on the written product rather than on the writing process.In other words, the students' attention was directed to the what rather than the how of text construction.
One of teacher's roles in teaching is as a facilitator who facilitates learners to have effective, and meaningful learning.About this facilitator, Brown (2001) points out that as a facilitator, the teacher offers guidance in helping students to engage in the thinking process of composing but, in a spirit of respect for students' opinion, must not impose his or her own thoughts on students' writing.Brown There is no excellent writer.
Writing is not an easy matter.Writing is not a single act of getting words down on paper.Writing skill is not the same as speaking skill where speaking skill can be acquired naturally as a result of hearing to the spoken language continuously, while writing skill has to be learned.Harmer (2004) says that some students interpret that it is not easy to write English sentences, paragraphs, moreover texts or essays.
When writing, students frequently spend more time to think rather than when speaking.However, Errors still happen, particularly for beginner students.Prihantoro (2016) argues that for students whose L1 is not English, the evaluation of the writing is mostly on grammar; which is how the students can express their ideas logically through grammatically correct sentences.He adds that one of the reasons for these errors to take place is L1 influence (interference or negative transfer).
Besides, Harmer (2009) also states that some students are extremely unconfident and unenthusiastic writers.
There may be some reasons for this: perhaps they have never written much in their first language.Perhaps they think that they do not have anything to say and cannot come up with ideas.
Whereas, the first need of students to write is motivation.Motivation is a feeling of interest and enthusiasm in doing something.In fact, many students now lack of motivation in wriitng.
It is like Hidi & Boscolo (2007) who says that a major problem in writing instruction is students' lack of motivation to write.This problem may be due to both the difficulty and the limited attractiveness of certain demanding academic genres and writing tasks.Motivation is such a broad a research field that it is difficult to analyze its various aspects.
In response to the fact that students lack of familiarity and confidence in writing (or indeed enthusiasm for it), Harmer (2009) states that the teacher needs to give students interesting and enjoyable tasks to do.
The teachers need to be ready with enough suggestions to make sure the students can never say "I can't think of anything to write".Thus, teachers are demanded to be able choose the technique or strategy that can help students learn more easily to improve their writing skill.Sokolik (2016)  To do this, the teachers can do several activities, such as brainstorming, listing, clustering, and free-writing.Third, there should be assignment design.
Assignment is needed because to make a good writing, practice has an important role.Practice helps students to learn how to make a good writing and it includes some criteria of effective writing learning process.Sova (2004) adds that the writers should do a role- 2) The writer enters comments or questions after reading an assignment, hearing a lecture, performing a task, engaging in an activity, or listening to the discussion, and dating and signing the entry.
3) The writer gives the journal to the responder, who reads the entries and responds with comments, suggestions, answers, questions, and so forth, also dating and signing the entry.

4)
The instructor may read the journals to clarify points, answer questions, and comment on or evaluate the quality of observations and responses.
This research was intended to know the effectiveness of using Dialogue Journal to teach writing.By using this technique, students were expected to have good motivation in learning writing to gain good result in their study.The data of this study had been

DISCUSSION
The data analysis showed that there was significant improvement of

(
2001) also adds that as a teacher, guide, and facilitator to help students to revise and refine their work before final Miftahul Janah.................................. submission, he or she will help give them confidence in their work.Nevertheless, English teachers, in teaching writing, face complicated problem, such as finding the appropriate technique or strategy to teach writing, and also the complexity of writing that causes difficulties to write for the students themselves.Therefore, English teachers, cannot be passive.An English teacher should consider many things in teaching writing as one of the skills to be mastered by students in learning a foreign language.They should try to find, adapt, or even adopt the appropriate method, technique, or strategy to teach writing skill.As Mahfudz (2012) says, all teachers should vary and upgrade the way they teach to have a better and successful teaching and learning.
play and pretend to be their reader when placing words on paper.If they find the Miftahul Janah.................................. Dialogue Journals......................................... addition to organization, writing in English must also have the characteristics of coherence, cohesion, and unity.Muschla (2011:1) also gives statement of good writing that good writing begins with a good idea.Without an interesting idea, even the most skillful writing will be resulted in a weak piece.Being a good writer, one must be aware of the importance of ideas.Then, to make students able to write, or even to make a good writing, teachers must have a capability to teach with the best strategy or technique for the student.Because the method used by teachers has often been said to be the cause of success or failure in language teaching and one of the supporters to achieve the success of learning process is Dialogue Journals.As the information cited in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_journal) that a Dialogue Journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, or reflections.It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels.Dialogue Journal is one of the Collaborative Learning Techniques (CoLT) focusing on writing.In this CoLT, individuals keep a journal in which they write about a readingassignment, lecture, task, or experience.Each student then exchanges journals with a peer who reads and responds to the entry with comments and questions.a fresh page in the journal, students draw a vertical line about one-third of the page from the right margin.The writer writes in the left; the responder writes in the right.