The Contribution of Self-reflection in Portfolio toward Students’ Progress of Essay Writing Class in Department of English Education, Uhamka, Jakarta

prof.dr.h. gunawan suryoputro, m.hum; dr. santi chairani djonhar, ma;

Self-reflection in portfolio gives contribution to student’s writing skill. Writing is
considered to be a sequence of complicated process in which the students need to organize their ideas and develop it into a systematic order. Due to its complexity process, students often find problems in writing such as ideas organization, sentence arrangements, punctuation, and capitalization. However, the students need to improve their writing since they are going to be an academician, and they have to produce an academic paper in order to get their degree. It is also significant for teachers to help and to assist the students in improving their writing.
This study examines the fifth semester of essay writing students in UHAMKA to find
out whether or not self-reflection in portfolio gives contribution in improving students’ writing skill. In this case, questionnaire, observational field notes, and document of students’ self-reflections were used to collect data about the students’ awareness about self-refection, portfolio and writing based on their perspective.
Furthermore, there are three main findings of this research, which are: (1) The students can develop and organize their ideas in portfolio through their previous drafts of narrowing a topic, brainstorming, and outlining process, (2) The students can handle their difficulties in sentence problem by using guided questions in self-reflection, (3) Teacher can assess students’ writing through portfolio scoring rubric which involves aspects of students’ process and progress in writing class.
The findings somehow have proven that self-reflection in portfolio indeed has given
contribution toward students’ writing through a set of guided questions so that the students become more aware of their strength and weakness in every draft of their writing. Knowing their strength and weaknesses will eventually help students to produce better writing on their own that lead them to be autonomous learners. It can be concluded that teaching writing is not just a matter of teaching students to write better; indeed, it is a matter of how teacher helps students in making writing and reading as their habit.