Definition of process approach to teaching writing

Counter the traditional product-oriented approach to teaching writing; the process approach has been promoted. It is now widely used by English teachers in their classrooms, though there is still some debate among researchers on which P is better: the process approach or the production method.

Due to the lack of a broadly agreed description for the process approach to writing, there has been a lot of debate over what it is and how it works. [1] sees Process-oriented writing as an art form that benefits from practice and constructive criticism. In process writing, the teacher takes a backseat to the students' creative process rather than assigning them a topic and receiving their final drafts for feedback. [2] characterizes the process method as focusing more on the variety of classroom activities that support the development of language use, such as brainstorming, group discussion, and re-writing. There can be no perfect text, but a writer can grow closer to perfection through generating, reflecting, discussing, and revising consecutive drafts of a piece of work using the process writing technique, according to [3,4]  process writing emerged in response to the product approach because it matched the writing processes inherent in writing in one's home tongue and allowed learners to express themselves better individually.

Prewriting or invention activities such as brainstorming, group discussion, and assessing ideas are examples of prewriting or invention activities; writing; seeking feedback from peers or the instructor; revising on the whole-text level (reconsidering organization, deciding whether there is enough evidence, etc.) are examples of whole-text revisions. Rather than stressing the end product, the process approach to writing instruction emphasizes the steps involved in the writing process itself.

Process Approach versus Product Approach

Almost all of today's composition theorists distinguish between writing that is process-oriented and writing that is product-oriented. James McCrimmon sees this as the distinction between writing as a means of knowing and writing as a means of telling (product). The difference between internal and external revision, according to [5], is a matter of perspective (revising to clarify meaning for oneself vs. modifying to clarify meaning for the reader.) According to [4] the difference between writer- and reader-based prose can be summarized as follows: When it comes to this "process" approach, [6] makes it apparent that it is considerably different from the usual product-oriented strategy. The product method focuses on writing activities where the student mimics, duplicates, and alters teacher-supplied modelsIn contrast, the process approach focuses on the steps involved in creating a piece of work. The primary objective of product writing is to produce a text free of errors and cohesive. Allowing for imperfection, process writing encourages the writer to produce, reflect on, discuss, and modify successive iterations of a piece. They all believe that a good product requires a good process, despite differing interpretations of the dichotomy between revolution and product-oriented writing.

Two classroom teaching models by using process approach:

Two teaching models are proposed, namely, the full open process teaching of writing, and close process teaching of writing. They are also called teaching models with minimal control and maximal control. This two teaching models are classified in corresponding to students to two different writing levels, including those of good writing skill, those of average writing skill. Students can also be divided into independent, average groups according to their different learning strategies. And in consideration of the students’ affective factors, they can be classified into groups of extroversive, and fuzzy types.

Using minimal control teaching model to

The first group students with good writing skill, extroversive type, independent characteristics

Topic: News reports

Aims:

To develop students’ abilities to organize information and construct it into a text. To develop students’ abilities to revise, redraft and improve their writing.

To develop students’ abilities to construct questions.

Introduction:

During this lesson students will go through the process of developing ideas and collecting and organizing information. They will then use the information to create the first draft of an imaginary news article. They will then focus on some key areas of good writing and try to redraft their articles with these in mind.

Procedure:

Pre writing tasks

Rationale: This part of the lesson should give students the opportunity to collect information before writing the news report. This should reduce the amount of creativity needed during the actual writing.

Write up the headline:

Mystery Disappearance of English Woman teacher: Students suspected

• Put the students in groups or pairs to try to predict the content of the story and what may have happened to the teacher.

• Get the students to change groups and compare what they think may have happened.

Give out a pile of about 10 to 15 slips of paper. Tell the students to write a question about the story on each slip of paper and give each one to the teacher. (The teacher might want to put up some question words on the board to help promote them. i.e. Who….? What time…? How many…? etc.)

• As the students give the teacher the slips of paper, the teacher should write very brief answers on them and give them back.

Tip: This works best if the students give each question to the teacher as soon as they write it and

The teacher writes his/her answer on the slip of paper and return it immediately. The answers the teacher gives them will help to prompt them to produce more questions.

If the teacher has a very large class this may not be possible and the teacher may want to stage this over more than one lesson so the teacher has time to write all the replies.

• Stop when the students have either used up all their slips of paper or run out of questions.

• Students then collect up the information they have on the slips of paper. Tell them they will use the information to compose a news report to go with the headline. Before they start writing the report it’s better to decide what order they will put the information in.

Tip: A common order for newspaper reports of this kind is:

• Headline

• General information about crime

• More details about what happened

• A description of any suspects or the criminals

• What police have done/are doing to try to solve the crime?

(possible appeal for witnesses)

Writing Tasks

• Once they have grouped the information, tell them to write the report and make sure to include all the information from their questions.

• Once the students have written their reports, ask them to exchange them with another student and give out the Editor’s checklist. The students then use this to check through each other’s work and write on any comments or suggestions for improvement.

Editor’s checklist:

Is the information grouped into logical paragraphs? Are the paragraphs in a logical order?

Is there any unnecessary information?

Are there any parts that you can’t understand? Are a lot of the same words repeated?

Can more precise words be used?

Is there too much repetition of linkers like and, but, then etc? Do all the verbs agree with their subjects? (e.g. She are/is ….) Have articles (the, a, an) been used correctly?

Have the correct verb forms been used? Is the punctuation correct?

Have all the words been spelt correctly?

They then give the checked report back to the original writer who makes any corrections or changes and produces a final draft.

Tip: Generally I’ve found that the process of drafting, adding comments and redrafting works best when done on a word processor as it is much easier for students to make changes to their text without having to rewrite the whole thing.

If your students don’t have access to computers then you might consider spreading the redrafting over more than one lesson.

Possible follow up tasks

•Put the reports up on the walls around the class and get the students to look at them all and choose the one they think is best.

Or

Collect up the students’ slips of paper with their questions on and do some error correction work.

Or

Collect some short authentic news articles from either the internet or newspapers and tell the students to compare them with their own:

They should look for:

The way information is organized (how many paragraphs, what is the focus of each paragraph?) The verb forms or structures used (present perfect, present simple, active or passive)

Ways in which the writer has made the writing more exciting (use of adverb, adjectives, variety of lexis)

Or

Give the students the following headline:

Mystery of the Disappearing Women Teacher Solved

Ask them to produce a report for the radio or TV on how the mystery was solved and what happened. They could even include interviews with the teacher and students involved. ( The teacher could record this or video it if he/she has access to a camera. )

Using maximal control teaching model to

The second group students with average writing skill and learning strategies , fuzzy characteristics

• Topic : Why People Take Drugs

• Aims:

• To develop students’ abilities to organize information and construct it into a text.

• To develop students’ abilities to revise, redraft and improve their writing.

• To develop students’ abilities to construct questions.

PROCEDURE

Prewriting tasks:

Rationale: In this part of the lesson, the teacher needs to stimulate students’ creativity, to get them think how to approach a writing topic. In this stage, the most important thing is the flow of ideas, and it is not always necessary that students actually produce more (if any) written work. If they do, then the teacher can contribute with advice on how to improve their initial ideas.

Write up the headline

Why People Take Drugs?

[7] states that assigning tasks that pose real problems to the learner will keep their motivation high and create a sense of achievement. I have found this to be true in my own experience, and that by engaging learners in something that i) they are interested in, and ii) they can give positive input to, can create a truly active and interactive writing environment.

Group brainstorming on the given topic (Why people take drugs?)

As is well-known, getting started can be difficult, so students divided into groups quickly, work cooperatively and write down all the ideas that come to mind in connection with the given topic. According to my teaching experience, as little as 5 minutes can be effective.

Brainstorming involves thinking quickly and without inhibition, which can ultimately lead to an interesting piece of writing.

The teacher should remain in the background during this phase, only supplying language support when students need it, so as not to inhibit students in the production of their ideas.

Evaluating ideas during brainstorming can be intimidating, and can have a negative effect, limiting the creativity the process is designed to promote.

Assessing ideas

Students are encouraged to extend their ideas into a mind map, spidergram or linear form. It is in this stage that students can judge the quality and usefulness of their ideas.

A mind map or spidergram is also an organized display of information, which can be more easily converted into a draft.

Such graphics also make the (hierarchical) relationship of ideas more easily obvious, which will help students with the structure of their texts.

A model text:

To the lower level students in English, I think it is better to combine the process- and product-oriented approach to teaching writing. Of course, I believe that it is of great importance from the process-oriented approach to perform the above discussion stages in writing. Next, I tend to introduce a model text.

The reading of a model text, so important in a product-oriented approach to writing, is not so as to subjugate the students’ ideas to their organization, but so as to make students aware that there is a particular way to express their ideas. In this way, students are given the form in order to enable them to adapt it to carry their own meaning. Ellis found evidence to suggest that “focusing learners’ attention on forms, and the meaning they realize the context of communication activities, results in successful language learning.”

Focus on model text coherence

Coherence refers to the logical development of ideas within a text and it is an important subskill for students to be aware of. The teacher can highlight this in various ways, by focusing on the topic and function of each paragraph for example, or by examining how the writer has chosen to order his arguments. This focus will hopefully show students that if they are to convey their message successfully, they will have to make their text “reader friendly”.

Cohesion

Cohesion refers to the grammatical and lexical connections between individual clauses. The grammatical links can be classified under three broad types:

• Referents (pronouns, the article “the”, demonstratives)

• Ellipsis (leaving out of a words or phrases where they are unnecessary)

• Conjunction (a word which joins phrases or clauses together)

Pronouns, whether subject(he), object(him), possessive(his), relative(who), or reflexive(himself), are often underused or misused by students while performing a writing task, resulting in either confusion as to the reference or tedious repetition of a noun.

One way of raising awareness of the key function that pronouns play within a text is to ask students to circle all the pronouns, then to use arrows to connect them to their referent. This shows students that pronouns can be found by looking back or forwards in the text.

There are many other activities that can be used to focus on cohesion. For example, asking students to replace a sentence which is missing from each paragraph, or to replace the first sentence of each paragraph, matching clauses which have been separated or gapping conjunctions which students must replace from a selection.

Questioning:

In the process of group discussion, there must generate lots of questions about the topic. The teacher should try his/her best to give proper answers immediately which can help students focus upon audience as they consider what the reader needs to know. The answers to these questions will form the basis to the composition. At the same time, the teacher had better provide more guidance in student’s developing ideas in a positive and encouraging way.

All of the above activities work best if carried out in groups as groupings make the tasks livelier and more enjoyable. Moreover, if students can work together, assisting each other, then the atmosphere of the writing class may be less intimidating, and perhaps students will not be afraid of the complexity of writing tasks.

Writing Production

This stage involves the learners in writing the first draft of their texts with a partner. This pair work will help students see that writing really is co-operative, a relationship between writer and reader. Usually, the writer has to imagine a reader, but co-operative writing provides each writer with a reader and makes the task more realistic and interactive.

Fast and collaborative writing:

The students write quickly on a topic for five or ten minutes without worrying about correct language or punctuation. Writing as quickly as possible, if they can’t think of a word, they leave a space or write it in their own language. The important thing is to keep writing. Later this text is revised. At the same time, I find collaborative writing can be quite motivating. It enables the stronger students to help the weaker ones.

Whole class text construction, composing on the blackboard and parallel writing

These techniques have their foundation in product writing but are effective in providing a framework for lower level students to work from. These techniques can develop a sense of collective achievement, while eliminating the fear of being left to “go it alone”, completely unguided.

Students consult each other and co-construct texts

During such an activity, the teacher should move around listening to their comments, providing feedback or answering questions on structure, lexical items, the validity of an argument, the order of presentation of the information, etc. therefore, I can keep track of their progress and work out a record of most frequent questions, doubts and inaccuracies for a future’s error analysis’ session.

Revision

Self-editing

A good writer must learn how to evaluate their own language, how to improve through checking their own text, looking for errors. This way students will become better writers.

Peer Editing

Students exchange their first drafts of a text and point out changes which are needed to help the reader(e.g. better organization, paragraph divisions, sentence variety, vocabulary choice). They can also act as each other’s editors (spotting vocabulary repetitions, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, etc). At the same time, students are required to provide written feedback to the student authors.

Peer editing is a useful tool for any level of learner, for example, to the intermediate level students, this can be used to assess how effectively an essay question has been answered.

Whole class discussion of how a particular text might need adjustment according to the audience it is addressed to.

One technique I regularly employ is to ask my students to imagine that I am a small child, and to explain what they consider to be a straightforward topic (for example, Why People Take Drugs?) in words that a child would understand. I then ask them to explain the same topic to me, only this time they imagine I am a university professor, and ask them to adjust their language appropriately.

Evaluation:

It takes a lot of time and efforts to write, and so it is only fair that student writing is responded to suitably. Positive comments can help build student confidence and create good feeling for the next writing class. Through my experience I’ve found that evaluation is most useful if it is given on the basis of what the learner has asked for. In my experience, learners still favor comments on the grammatical and lexical correctness of their work. In order to make this interactive activity, I use an error correction code, which serves to highlight the error but still requires the learners to reflect on what the error actually is. Sometimes I use some questions like “What do you mean here?” or, “Can you tell me more about this?”.

Final draft

Drafts are returned and improvement are made based upon peer feedback. Then the final draft is written. In addition, students can also exchange and read each others’ work and perhaps even write a response or reply.

Compared to a control group, which has taught using a completely open process model, the two groups of students who received two distinct methods of teaching writing all showed considerable improvement in their writing skills. In contrast, the control group has taught using the full open process model.

The process approach to teaching writing may be best utilized in multiple teaching models. When we use the same process approach but different models of teaching writing to teach other students, it can achieve an optimal teaching effect. 

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest

No funding sources

The study was approved by the AL-Mustaqbal University College, Iraq

1. Graham Stanley. (1993). Process Writing, British Council, Barcelona. James McCrimmon, (1994). Writing with a Purpose. Houghton Mifflin co.

2. Vanessa Steele. (1992). Product and Process Writing: A Comparison. Rowley: Newbury House. Xinying Hu. (2003). Application of Process Teaching. Journal of the Foreign Language World.

3. Nunan, David. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology. A Textbook for Teachers. Prentice Hall.

4. Flower, L. (1985). Problem-solving strategies for writing. Second Edition. San Diego, Harcourt: Brace Jovanich. Fowler W.S. (1989). Progressive Writing Skills. Surry: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd.

5. Murray, D. (1980). Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning. In T.R. Donovan and B.W.MecClelland(eds), English Approach in Teaching Writing.

6. Nunan, David. (2001). Second English Teaching and Learning. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

7. Tribble, C. Writing. (1996). Oxford: Oxford University Press.