Teaching Writing - Week 12 - Writing as a Process

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 12 of the course Teaching Writing for the Bachelor's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IIC 2023. Today we will go deeper into the process approach to writing instruction by looking at different pre-writing activities as well as questions that can be used to diagnose students' performance during differnet stages of the process. We will also take time to review your third lesson planning assingment and instructions for your eigth creation.

Today's Goals:

• Demonstrate the design features of your Teaching-Learning Cycle lesson plan.
• Consider key questions that can help you examine students' performance in different stages of process writing.
• Review a number of pre-writing tasks to help students generate and organize their ideas.

Guiding Questions:

• How can the Teaching-Learning Cycle help students develop genre competence?
• What are the benefits and challenges of following a process approach to writing instruction?
• What roles can the teacher play at different stages of the writing process?
• How can you helps students generate and organize their ideas?

Task 1: Lesson Plan Walkthrough - Genre Lesson Plan

This week you were asked to write your third lesson plan. Let's take a moment to review what you created.

• Example: Walk us through your plan.
• Strengths: Tell us what you think are the strengths of using the Teaching-Learning Cycle to teach genre.
• Challenges: Tell us the challenges you faced while creating the plan or potential challenges you foresee for teacher or students who will follow the plan.

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Writing as a Process

Let's take some time to explore the topic of process writing and your teaching roles at different stages.

• Nation's 7 Stages: Although stages in process writing may vary from teacher to teacher, Nation presents seven stages that are commonly associated with this approach to writing instruction. What do you think each of them involves? How many of these stages happen before the first draft is produced?

• Considering the Goals of the Writer

• Having a Model of the Reader

• Gathering Ideas

• Organizing Ideas

• Turning Ideas into Written Text

• Reviewing what has been Written

• Editing

• Quote: “The main idea behind a process approach is that it is not enough to look only at what the learners have produced. In order to imporve their production, it is useful to understand how it was produced (p. 115)."

• More about the Stages: CLICK HERE

• Gathering Ideas: Students can't write if they don't have something to write about. Beyond simply giving students a topic and instructions, we need to devote class time to activities that will help learners generate ideas that they might include in their text. Nation suggests that these kinds of tasks can be divided into three categories.

• Open-Ended Tasks: All ideas are considered and learners follow whatever path their mind takes.

• Brain Storming

• Group Brainstorming

• List Making / Comparing

• Looping

• Systematic Searching: Learners have a specific set of steps to follow to make sure they consider all the important aspects.

• Questioning

• Topic Type Grids

• Cubing

• Reading like a Writer

• Gather and Organizing: Learners arrange ideas into relationships according to importance and level of generality.

• Tree Diagrams

• Concept Mapts

• Expanding Writing

• Organizing Ideas: One way to help students is to have them rank and categorize their ideas in terms of importance and relationships. Then they can develop an outline of their text using a system of headings and subheadings to guide them as they begin writing

• Ideas to Text: Some students have a very hard time articulating their ideas in English and this part of the process can be slow and laborious.

• Reviewing: An important part of the writing process is looking back over what has been written to check what ideas have already been included in the writing, to keep the coherence and flow, to stimulate further ideas, and to look for errors.

• Checklists and Scales
• Peer Feedback

• Editing: Editing can occur at all parts of the writing process, not just at the end. Learners can be encouraged to edit through the feedback that they get from their classmates, teacher and other readers. Such feedback is useful if it occurs several times during the writing process and is expressed in ways that the writer finds acceptable and easy to act on. There is a wide range of aspects of the writing that can be the subject of feedback so teachers need to take care to avoid only focusing on grammar and spelling errors. A marking sheet can be helpful for this. We’ll talk more about this next week.

• Graphing Errors: Count number of words in the text. Count number of errors. Calculate the number of errors out of 100. (100 x #errors / #words). The result is expressed as a percentage which can be placed on a graph. The goal is to have a lower percentage in future assignments and chart their progress. This data should be private, not something shared with the whole class.

• Use a Marking System: Identify the errors and indicate the kind of mistake but don’t fix it for students. This requires the use of a marking system which needs to be clear to students. This is harder than you think. 

• Diagnosing and Guiding Students along the Way: The author argues that one of the teacher’s roles during a process writing assignment is to observe students and their work to diagnose their progress and identify stages in the process where the need more support. He gives a series of questions that can be used at each stage in the process. CLICK HERE to look at this more closely.

Task 3: Creation 8 - Idea Generation and Organization

Let's finish today's class by previewing your next creation. 

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

References:

Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. Routledge.