TEACHING EFL PROCESS WRITING TO TEENS IN A

PRODUCT-ORIENTED CONTEXT: CHALLENGES AND

SUCCESSES

Isabela Villas Boas Casa Thomas Jefferson, Brasília

www.thomas.org.br

CONTEMPORARY L2 WRITING

Writing as a social act of communication

Balance between process and product (Reid, 2001)Classroom community and participation of students in the construction of their writing and that of others (Reid, 2001)

Genre-based approaches as a complement to process writing (Hyland, 2003)

Post-process era: recognition of the multiplicity

of L2 writing theories and pedagogies (Matsuda, 2003).

Writing involves the mediation between the writer and the reader.

Audience and discourse community determine

knowledge.(Atkinson, 2003)

Process writing

Generating ideas

planning

drafting

revising

assessing

Giving and receiving feedback

Process writing principles adopted by ELT Institute:

Process approach without losing sight of the final product

Models can and should be used for analysis: linking literacies textual features genres

Students should be taught rhetorical patterns and conventions (noticing).

Topic related to students’ lives

One or two model texts: genre and

rhetorical features

Pe-writing: planning

Pre-writing:

generating ideas

Peer review

Teacher feedback on content and

form

Customized scoring rubrics

TYPICAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT IN THE EFL INSTITUTE

EFL institute

School A

School BSchool C

Educational Context Contemporary studies tend to consider in more detail contextual factors in their effort to understand complex phenomena such as the learning of a language. (Van Lier, 2005)

The study Type of study: Case study with strong features of educational

ethnography

“Ethnography seeks to explain, describe, and provide insight into human behavior in context.” (Purcell-Gates, 2004, p. 93)

Setting:

ELT Institute in Brasília – one year, all classes that involved writing

3 private regular schools in Brasília, 9th grade: 2 classes each, all around the argumentative text

Participants: Class of 16 teenagers aged 13 to 19 – last year of intermediate level (3 A and 3 B); 6 of whom studying in the 9th grade of the selected schools (2 in each school) ; their EFL teacher and their Portuguese teacher

The studyQuestions:

How is the teaching of L1 writing in the students’ regular schools? In what ways do the teaching principles converge with those of the ELT Institute and in what ways do they diverge?

Taking into account the findings in Q1, how do the students respond and react to the basic stages of process writing informed by the principles previously stated?

Writing in the schools focuses more on the product than on the process.

The different stages of writing, such as pre-writing, rewriting, and peer revision are rarely focused on in the schools.

The regular schools in general value the writing tests more than classroom assignments. Even though students produce texts in class or at home to practice writing, great part of of their grade is composed of the timed writing test grade, even in the ninth grade, with a view to preparing students for the university entrance examination exam.

WRITING IN STUDENTS’ REGULAR SCHOOLS

To show that the focus is on the product rather than the process, we analyzed how the stages of writing are dealt with:

Planning:

• In no writing activity was there a moment for the students to reflect specifically about the topic they were going to write about and to engage in any kind of activity that involved planning.

• The pre-writing emphasis was on the reading and analysis of texts of the same genre and the study of the characteristics of that genre.

(J) I don’t work with planning in class. She gives an example and we follow it.

( JO) At school they only give the topic and we write.

(ME) We have a writing class with exercises. Then, at the end of the class, they assign the writing and we have to bring it the next class.

(Researcher) Tell me what you think is similar and what you think is different about the teaching of writing in your EFL school and in your regular school?

(M) The topics that the teacher proposes, the questions she asks us to answer. At school there is no such thing. The teacher assigns a topic and we write.

(LD) I always divide what I’m going to write about into paragraphs, the way I learned here in the EFL Institute. It helps me at school.

Drafting and revising:

o School A: rewriting occurs only when there is a need to.

o School B: rewriting is not a common practice; according to the teacher, this is the stage in the process that the school has the least conditions to include.

o School C: the student has to take at least one text per unit to the writing center; only the unsatisfactory texts are rewritten; this rewriting seems to be restricted to “cleaning up”.

• School D (included later): teacher would like to include this stage but hasn’t yet.

Who is the student’s interlocutor?

• School A: the student who wrote the text with him/her and the teacher.

• School B: the student who read the text and provided feedback.

• School C: the writing aide; the teacher only reads the test essays.

• In the students’ notebooks, only checkmarks were registered; only in one of the students’ writing notebook was there a generic comment provided by the teacher (School D, not originaly included in the research).

Assessment of the final product:

• Schools B and C: The greatest weight of the assessment system lies on the writing tests.

( T): What really counts are the tests.

(teacher School C): Because on the test they have a writing task that is worth a lot of points. If they don’t submit their writings to the writing center aide, they won’t see the mistakes they are making.

• School A: There aren’t any writing tests. The assessment is based on all the writings produced throughout the year.

• School D (added later): The writing test is 40% of the grade.

• Schools do not use customized scoring rubrics for the assignments.

Convergences•Focus on genres•Intertextuality•Drafting in school C, but not for all

assignments•Peer review (observed in School B,

but reported by a student to have been the only time it had been carried out)

Divergences•Pre-writing focused on generating

ideas and planning the writing•Drafting•Peer review (except for School B)•Specific rubrics

Eleven of the sixteen students benefitted from all the stages of

the writing process because:

STUDENTS’ REACTIONS TO PROCESS WRITING

• They showed engagement in all the pre-writing activities

• They rewrote all their texts during the two semesters.

• They participated effectively or relatively effectively in the peer review

activities.

√

√√

Planning“What did you learn about the process of producing a

text in English that you can use when you produce texts in Portuguese?”

Vocabulary and the way the text is produced. We learned to organize our ideas better into

introduction, development, and conclusion. I learned to plan before writing my texts. Introduction, development and conclusion; the

introduction is very important, for it is what will catch the reader’s attention (usually).

The organization of a text and of ideas.

Planning, cont. The text narrative; the structure; the development. I think I learned a lot regarding vocabulary. It’s very

important to know how to write in English. It will benefit us for the rest of our lives. Knowing the number of paragraphs, how to write an introduction, a good conclusion, this needs to be learned both in Portuguese and in English.

Text structures. The structure of a text, how to put together a text. Punctuation and coherence. I learned how to organize my ideas to produce a

good text.

- M and JS: Didn’t rewrite all their assignments.-ME: Only corrected language use errors when she rewrote her texts; refused to revise content and organization in all the assignments except the last one. -E: Benefitted from the feedback on first draft but didn’t carry the improvements to subsequent assignments.

DraftingMost students incorporated most of the suggestions offered by the peers and/or the teachers.

Of all the stages of the process writing class, the one most valued by students was the opportunity to rewrite and improve their texts.

√

√

EXCEPT FOR

Peer revision Continued progress in the effectiveness of

the peer reviews; There was a qualitative leap between the

first and the second semester; Advantages of introducing a blog; Students felt more comfortable about

preserving the authorship of their texts when they received suggestions from peers rather than from teachers;

Peer revision gave students the opportunity to know characteristics about each other that they wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Peer revisionAfter a year-long, carefully scaffolded

peer review program, in the final, open-ended, face-to-face conversation with their peers about their texts,most students were able to establish a competent dialogue, providing suggestions for improvement.

• Because you do a self-revision.• Although boring, it helps us to see our own

mistakes.• We could see new ideas.• It’s important for our improvement.• Because we all learn together.• It helps improve our knowledge about writing.• It helps improve our writing.• Yes, because we learn and improve our writing.• It stimulates working in groups, a skill that will

be very important in the future.

Y

E

S

• Because people make a lot of mistakes and it’s not good to learn mistakes.

• It’s boring. • Because I don’t like it.

No

WERE THE PEER REVIEW ACTIVITIES USEFUL?

9

3

HOWEVER

-Resistance in the beginning- Not part of students’ “frames”-Tendency to praise (saving face)- Students appreciated reading their peers’ texts more than they liked having their texts read by a peer-Students felt the need for the suggestions to be “validated by the teacher”.

Though the pedagogical work with process

writing proved to be effective, in the end,

students still demonstrated greater

appreciation of the more teacher-directed

steps in the development of their

writing process:

Steps Important

A little important

It didn’t matter

a) You saw photos of the place where the teacher would like to spend his vacation and wrote a comment in the blog, guessing what place it was. (Purpose: to motivate students for the topic.

2 7 5

b) You read a model text. 9 3 2c) You followed an outline and talked to a peer about the place you chose for your vacation.

6 6 2

d) You had the chance to ask your teacher about vocabulary you didn’t know.

8 5 1

e) You followed an outline to write your text. 11 2 1f) You published your text in the blog. 4 5 5g) You helped the class create a peer review checklist to rate the texts written by students in another class.

4 7 3

h) You revised the text of a student from another class, using the checklist developed collaboratively in class.

2 10 2

i) Your text was revised by a peer from another class;

2 7 5

j) Your text was revised by your teacher. 12 1 1k) You rewrote your text. 12 2l)You received your text back, together with the rating rubrics specifically designed for the assignment, showing how you had done in each trait (ex: content, organization of ideas, language use, etc.)

11 3

JO: The positive points (of the pedagogical work with writing) were the chance to learn by revising

our texts and to know better how to assess our errors and that of our classmates. Another positive

point was posting the writing on the Internet.

MR: It was interesting to revise a student’s text (an anonymous text), but not to revise a

classmate’s text.(...)

Giving feedback on students’ writing is the teacher’s responsibility, not the peers’.

M: Writing for school is a waste of time, especially when we have to make up a story. We should learn

only grammar . (...) By learning grammar, I also learn how to write.

Teacher 2: The writing classes I had at the university focused mainly on structural features of writing, and

the teacher’s feedback was usually on grammar, vocabulary and mechanics. We never worked with

process writing.

JL: Since I don’t write for university, I’m reviewing what I learned in high school and also learning things (in the writing assignments) that will be important for

my future.

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Isabela.villasboas@thomas.org.br