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| Revising. Once the first draft is ready there is more work left for the students. Next comes the stage of revising what one has written. This will draw a full circle to the practice of teaching writing as a process. It is a crucial stage where a lot of language learning is likely to happen. But for this to take place, teacher preparation is very important: students need to be provided with sustained help post the first draft is over.
Revising is not merely checking for language errors. It is rather a look at the overall content and organization of ideas. Learners have the opportunity to look back at their texts and reorganize ideas, add, change or remove sentences and adapt their choice of words to make sure the ideas are being conveyed clearly. Feedback has an essential role in this stage. It can be provided by the teacher or by peers: learners can exchange drafts and comment on each other's work. Using the feedback from their peers or the teacher, the learners check whether their writing communicates meaning effectively to the intended audience (for example, some ideas may be discarded while others may be improved). The structure of paragraphs might also be affected during revision and the overall organization may be refined to convey coherent content. The role of a teacher is to read their drafts carefully and address ONLY the content. They should not correct for spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Show your student you are interested in what they wrote. Laugh at things that are funny and make positive comments when you spot anything interest and well-worded. After revising, students write another draft. That means they go back to the «writing» stage. This essential part of process writing allows learners to write different drafts as they focus on the process, rather than on the result. Teachers should ask to ask children to read their own writing and remind them if there is anything they want to add, take out or change. Editing. Once the learners have finished revising, they start tidying up their drafts. This can be done by the learners themselves (i.e. self-editing) or with the help of their peers (i.e. peer editing). Again, encouraging peer help and getting students to read each other's work might be useful. The focus is on elements like: diction (choice of words) grammar (tense, sentence structure, prepositions…) mechanics (punctuation, punctuation) At this stage, we can provide them with an editing checklist. We need to train our students to use the checklist and make them understand that they can improve the output on their own by using the checklist methodically. The self-correction activity is very important as it would better their output and in turn, may give rise to intrinsic motivation in them. The activity in other words helps students to ‘monitor’ their work. Though it would require sustained attention, it is likely to urge them to attend to the details of the writing process with more care. A checklist may include these questions: Is the choice of vocabulary items appropriate? Are the verbs in the correct tense? Are the verb correctly formed? Have you checked the subject-verb agreement? Have you used correct sentence structures? Are the prepositions correctly used? Have you checked the use of articles? For the self-editing activity to work well, we need to identify which aspects of writing they can tackle. This would depend on their current level of L2 proficiency. For instance, for students in grades seven to eleven, we can start by creating a checklist with three components: Vocabulary: To improve vocabulary usage, we can ask them to refer to the bank created in the planning stage and check how much of it is present in the output and make necessary changes. Discourse Grammar: To check for sentential grammar we can ask them to look at concords (subject-verb, noun-adjective) while for discourse grammar we can instruct them to check tense (a letter of request will require them to use the future tense and modal verbs) and voice of the text. Cohesion: To help them notice whether all the sentences are linked to each other, and the text has progression, we need to ask them to look for referential markers and the use of ‘the definite article. Coherence: To better the macrostructure can remind them to look at the idea map (see Figure 1.1) created during the planning stage and check whether all the parts are incorporated and if a transition between ideas is created. To check for the transition we can draw their attention to linkers/connectors according to the relationship between ideas like that of addition (and ), contrast (but ), causal (as…so) and chronological markers (then). Some considerations when adopting a process approach to writing It fosters creativity. Unlike product writing, process writing does not have a model text as the starting point. That means that learners have the chance to use their previous knowledge and start thinking about a text based on the ideas that they come up with. When planning to use a process approach to writing, however, it is important to think about what type of text - or textual genre - the students will be asked to produce. If learners need to write a narrative, an article or an essay, focusing on ideas first might be a good choice. However, if the genre conventions are very fixed, like in e-mails, formal letters, or reports, a product approach to writing might be more suitable. It encourages collaborative work. Most stages of process writing allow for group work and peer collaboration. Learners can work together while they generate and select ideas - they might end up with many more ideas in the pre-writing phase if this is done collaboratively. Feedback is of paramount importance when writing is seen as a process. As learners can (and should!) write multiple drafts when this approach is adopted, feedback is present throughout. Instead of being provided by the teacher only, there is room for peer feedback and peer correction. For peer feedback to be effective, however, the teacher must provide the tools for learners to give feedback to each other. Some ideas might involve asking students to focus on one aspect of the text at a time (e.g.: giving feedback on content first, then helping each other revise the organization of the text, etc.) One of the greatest advantages of teaching learners to collaborate with each other when writing is that it resembles how writing takes place in most real-life situations: when we write texts, before submitting it to the final reader, we usually ask somebody to read them and give us feedback. Why not try this in the classroom as well? Time constraints Writing takes time - and this is even more true with process writing. In order to enable learners to focus on the process, it is important to give them time to go through the stages, write multiple drafts, and incorporate the feedback they receive on their work. Students will spend a lot of time not writing, so it is important to help them keep their final objective in mind during the process. It requires support As mentioned previously, feedback is key for a successful process writing lesson. In addition to that, staging the lesson coherently and providing the necessary amount of support in each phase may help learners reach their objectives more efficiently. For example, if learners are asked to proofread, it would be a good idea to give them tools that will enable them to proofread effectively. To conclude, teaching writing as a process is task specific. Therefore, teachers need to prepare cues or aids - verbal and non-verbal - as required by each writing task. Note that the tasks may differ according to language functions to be used (inform, instruct, reason), genre or text type (letters vs. essays vs. narratives) and the communicative intent of the writer (information gap, respond, evaluate). But the good news is that such detailed instructional plans and their real-time implementation can show positive results not only in improving students’ writing abilities but also in developing in them a sense of ‘what constitutes writing knowledge. The second one is a metalinguistic skill that all ESL students need but are rarely taught. However, a word of caution - the gains might not be quick but may need anything from a few months to a year to show effects. жүктеу/скачать 0.79 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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