Advanced Writing for Student's of Malay and Indonesian comprises 12 lessons which help a student develop a variety of writing skills. These include: writing chronological sequences, indicating spatial relations, classifying, comparing and contrasting, generalising, showing cause and effect, expressing opinion, defining, predicting, hypothesising, proposing and refuting.
A set of terms and sentence structures accompanies each lesson, followed by a set of exercises. These are both guided and free. For the guided exercises, students use data from Malaysian and Indonesian newspapers.
Students write paragraphs or essays on a variety of topics which include: detailing the causes of unemployment or the effect of heavy rain in Jakarta, classifying TV programmes, comparing rates of exchange or qualifications for different jobs, generalising about freedom of the press or the effect of automation on airline safety, expressing opinions about tobacco sponsorship of sport or predicting the potential for flooding or the successes of a film.
Suggested topics are given for the free exercises. Both guided and free exercises are of varying levels of difficulty. These range from an autobiographical statement of one's early life, or a chronological account of one's studies at high school or university, to drafting proposals as the head of company or making predictions about future developments in medicine. Also presented are sample outlines and paragraphs, sample letter formats, and models for writing definitions.
The terms and sentence structures presented for writing are equally useful in facilitating classroom discussion.
The Malay and Indonesian texts are presented in a parallel format, enabling immediate comparison between the two. This allows students to develop a dominant competence in one version of the language, and a general familiarity with the other.
Books bought in Australia or distributed from Australia come with a 12 page supplement and a 32 page Malay/Indonesian - English glossary containing all the words in the text and supplement. The supplement and glossary are also available on the web.
LEVEL: ADVANCED BEGINNER to ADVANCED INTERMEDIATE
Best introduced between 120 and 360 hours or 6 - 18 months of language study depending on the sections and exercises chosen.