Communication Arts

St Francis’ Canossian Primary School

2006 -2008

Putting thoughts on paper – the what, how and why in Process

Writing

Communication Arts

You might think …

With ‘good-looking kids with blue-barrette pony tails’, affluent parents who could afford to have their children tutored if they couldn’t catch up in school, what else needs to be done?

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School background

• A well-established primary school• An all-girls’ school• Students are not, on the whole, fluent and

confident English language speakers and writers

• In writing, most of them show a heavy reliance on prescribed questions

• Students have not much room for self-expression.

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• Lessons followed the typical pattern - teacher-led introduction to the topic including vocabulary and grammatical structures needed to complete the task

• Students wrote their compositions within a time limit and passed them to the teachers for correction and comments

Looking into the routines …

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• Questions were provided, which meant that students were very restricted in terms of possible responses to the task (in fact, many of the students’ compositions produced from these outputs were extremely similar to one another ~ penmanship?)

• Focus on students’ products as displays of language rather than on the process of writing in teaching

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What that leads to is…

students withholding personal views as they very much want to write accurately the language rather than spending time on ideas development

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And what this might lead to further is …

affect students’ motivation to write because of the limited strategies

Teachers can work actively to improve students’ motivation provided there are ways

(Dornyei, 2001, 2003)

What we believe is …

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The beginning …

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Some considerations:External factors:• Socio-cultural and contextual

background of the learners

Internal factors:• Individual learners - learner’s

attitude towards the activities, its intrinsic interests, and the value and relevance of the activities

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Noels (2001)Three psychological needs to be met in

order to enhance motivation:

1. Sense of competency achieved through seeking out and overcoming challenges

2. Autonomy3. Relatedness - being connected to and

esteemed by others belonging to a larger social whole

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• Make strong connections between writing and the students’ own experiences, while encouraging sharing between teacher and students and among the students themselves

• introducing and exploring it with the students through class discussion and through sharing their own ideas

• Help them get a sense that this was a collaborative endeavor

• Technically, forming sentences, paragraphing, grouping and sequencing original ideas – a step by step process

The new approach involves:

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Some necessary details …

Main participants:

• 4 classes of P3• 4 classes of P4 • Aged between 8-9 yrs• Time spanned over one and a

half years• The writing lessons are

planned according to modules, taking into consideration of the text types learned or to be learned

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• Student interviews were conducted in Cantonese, these ranged from about 15-20 minutes each

• The interviews focused on students’ feelings about writing in general and their perceptions and preferences regarding the topics and procedures used during the course of writing

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• This sharing session is NOT intended to be very instructional

• Instead, we will explore the writing process and its essentials, which hopefully, you could apply to any writing courses

Before going deeper, here is a reminder …

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the what, how and why in process writing the importance of feedback students’ voice looking at students’ work development of students’ writing between 2006-2008implications and conclusions

Let’s look at the plan this morning:

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A light dose of literature here …

Process writing – what, how, why

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The teacher needs to move away from being a marker to a reader, responding to the content of student writing more than the form.

The changing roles of teacher and students

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Research also shows that feedback is more useful between

drafts, not when it is done at the end of the task after the students hand in their composition to be marked.

Corrections written on compositions returned to the student after the process has finished seem to do little to improve student writing.

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• Students also need to realize what they put down on paper can be changed: Things can be deleted, added, restructured, reorganized, etc.

• They need to develop the habit of self-evaluation on what they have written.

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Four main stages in process writing:

Pre-writing and brainstorming Drafting and Focusing ideas Revising and editing Publishing and sharing

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Pre-writing and brainstorming

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• St Francis’ teachers invited students to respond to their feedback. This practice ensures that the feedback is received by the student, and that it is attended to, and that is acted on. This practice helps to promote interaction between students and teachers and enhance the feedback process.

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• Pre-writing and brainstorming

Elicits ideas from students instead of teacher doing all the talking

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.

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• Drafting and focusing ideas

On completion of mind mapping exercises, students write their first draft.

Guidance and help are necessary in this stage.

Students are reassured that the first draft will not be perfect.

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• During this stage, students write without much attention to the accuracy of their work or the organization. The most important feature is meaning. Here, the teacher (or other students) should concentrate on the content of the writing.

• Students ask themselves: Is it coherent? Is there anything missing? Anything extra?

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Peer edited draft Final draft for teacher Comment

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It is the significant step that helps students reshape their writing. Students can correct any mistakes they might have made on such technical aspects as grammar, spelling and punctuation. They can change some of the ideas in their writings. This can be achieved through self-editing, peer editing and teacher editing.

• Revising and editing

Therefore, students need to realize that what they write initially does not necessarily have to be the final product, but that the form and content can be modified and improved as they go along.

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• Publishing and sharing

•At the end of the process, students produce the

final draft.

•Opportunities are created for students to share their

final products with their classmates.

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Feedback that supports learning

Students receive feedback from their peers and teacher during group discussion.

The initial feedback and discussion focuses on ideas rather than on marks and is provided at a time when the ideas are still fresh in students’ minds.

Lag-time in marking is avoided.

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Feedback that supports learning

Seeing and critiquing other’s work heightens students’ awareness of standards and helps develop their ability to evaluate their own work.

• Student also gained feedback from a wider range of perspectives than just from a teacher, allowing them to have a deeper reflection on their on-going writing. They are able to monitor the quality of their own work when they have critiqued the work of others.

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During the process, we also found that teacher feedback may not necessarily help students learn better or produce better work – students do not often treat teacher feedback seriously and no actions for improvement are taken. Some students do not understand the feedback they receive. However, they seldom initiate to talk to their teachers about this.

Feedback that supports learning

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Oral assessment in the form of class presentations makes students’ work ‘public’. Hearing others’ work helps students develop a sense of standards that should apply to their own work.

Feedback that supports learning

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There should be a balance between

process process writing (developing

composition skills) and independent

writing (e.g. journal journal writing) in your

school-based curriculum planning!

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The Journal Writing of St Francis’ Canossian students from 2006-2008

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I’m a Little writer!

• Through ‘Little writer’ children have the opportunity to explore learning, feelings, experiences and language.

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• Recent research shows that journal writing allows students to express individual thoughts and ideas; to experiment with language for a reason and in a purposeful manner; and to develop critical and creative thinking skills.

Journal writing

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Journal writing• However, the way teachers

respond to students' writing can have a powerful influence on their students' writing development.

• When teachers and students emphasize the importance of writing mechanics, such as correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, writing can be inhibited.

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• Teachers should make a special effort to be encouraging of all student journal entries and should avoid vague one-word responses such as "great"; one or two pointed sentences is more effective.

Journal writing

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Journal writing

• In evaluating the program teachers need to determine whether their journal writing programs have met their instructional goals, and they also need to consider what students think about journal writing.

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Here is a framework for exploring the possibility of including a journal writing program in primary school curriculum:• consider the rationale for the use

of journal writing; • consider learning goals and

objectives that may be met through the use of journal writing;

• consider procedures for establishing and maintaining a dynamic journal writing program;

• consider how student growth can be assessed in journal writing; and

• consider how the effectiveness of journal writing can be evaluated.

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The writing development of St Francis’ Canossian students from 2006-2008

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• These young writers made spontaneous and quite strenuous attempts to relate all writing topics to their past and future life experiences

• Another positive features of the students’ reaction to the new writing approach was that they saw more opportunities to voice their own thoughts and feelings

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Process writing can lead to learner

frustration because learners need to

– rework on the same material – spend more time on writing in class

Potential problems

necessary to provide a supportive environment for the students

be patient

the activities are varied and the objectives clear, then they will usually accept doing so

in the long term, you and your students will start to recognise the value of a process writing approach as their written work improves

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• This presentation reports on a small-scale study in one school’s context, lasting for a period of only 1.5 years

• Further study might examine student writing development over a greater period of time and a variety of different contexts

• An ethnographic study for a longer period of time could uncover richer details and reveal the subtleties of change among students at deeper levels

Implications and conclusions

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Further Reading

• Hedge T. 1988. Writing. Oxford University Press.

• Krashen SD. Writing : Research, theory and applications. Pergamon Press.

• Kroll B. 1990. Second Language Writing : Research insights for the classroom. Cambridge University Press.

• Raimes A. 1983. Techniques in teaching writing. Oxford University Press.

• White R & V Arndt. 1991. Process Writing Longman.