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TEACHING WRITING (Chapter 18) Meybeline Acosta - Coggle Diagram
TEACHING WRITING (Chapter 18)
Meybeline Acosta
CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE:
A WRITER’S VIEW
Permanence
Whatever you can do as a teacher, guide, and facilitator to help your students to revise and refine their work before final submission will help give them confidence in their work.
Production Time
Distance
Orthography
If students are nonliterate in their L1, you must begin at the very beginning with fundamentals of reading and writing. For literate students, if their L1 system is not alphabetic, new symbols have to be produced (or keyboarded) that may differ from their familiar system.
Complexity
Writers must learn the discourse features of the written L2, how to create syntactic and lexical variety, how to combine sentences, and more.
Vocabulary
Good writers will learn to take advantage of the richness added in a wide variety of word choices.
Formality
For L2 students, the most complex conventions occur in academic writing where students have to learn how to describe, explain, compare, contrast, illustrate, defend, criticize, and argue, all within certain prescribed styles.
The distance factor requires what might be termed “cognitive” empathy, in that good writers can “read” their own writing from the perspective of the mind of the targeted audience.
With sufficient training in process writing, combined with practice in display writing, you can help your students deal with time limitations.
RESEARCH ON SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING
Composing
The process of writing requires an entirely different set of competencies. The permanence and distance of writing, coupled with its unique rhetorical conventions, indeed make writing as different from speaking as swimming is from walking.
One major theme in pedagogical research on writing is the nature of the composing process of writing.
The upshot of the compositional nature of writing has produced writing pedagogy that focuses students on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently, how to revise text for clearer meaning, how to edit text for appropriate grammar, and how to produce a final product.
Process and Product
Writing teachers were mostly concerned with the final product of writing: the essay, the report, the story, and what that product should “look” like.
We became better attuned to the advantage given to learners when they were seen as composers of language, when they were allowed to focus on content and message. We began to develop what is now termed the process approach to writing instruction.
Intercultural Rhetoric
The issue of contrastive rhetoric has re-emerged in the redefined form of intercultural rhetoric to more appropriately “account for the richness of rhetorical variation of written texts and the varying contexts in which they are constructed”.
Differences Between L1 and L2 Writing
L2 writers do less planning, are less fluent (used fewer words), less accurate (made more errors), and less effective in stating goals and organizing material.
Pedagogical Principles for L2 writing
• Factor in the L1 sociocultural context of your students as you enable them to participate in one or more discourse communities.
• Focus on the ultimate purposes of your students in learning to write (in some cases, these could specific purposes (occupational, professional, academic) that have marked L1–L2 contrasts.
• As much as possible, embed writing instruction into content-based and genre-based approaches, which may have significant cultural ramifications.
• In assessing writing, students may need to be gently persuaded to adopt a process approach that differs markedly from their L1 cultural norms.
• Consider L1 rhetorical conventions as an important factor in determining what and how you teach.
Authenticity
In adult education and survival English classes, authenticity may be found in filling out simple forms and questionnaires
Another way to look at the authenticity issue in classroom writing is to distinguish between real writing and display writing.
Content- and Genre-Based Writing Pedagogy
Genre-based writing, besides its natural fit with integrated approaches, offers an opportunity to focus on the discourse features of various writing genres.
Responding to Student Writing
As students are encouraged (in reading) to bring their own schemata to bear on understanding texts, and (in writing) to develop their own ideas, offer their own critical analysis, and find their own voice, the role of teacher must be one of facilitator and coach, not an authoritative director and arbiter.
Form-Focused Feedback
Researchers have also looked at the efficacy of providing feedback on content as opposed to form, on how to stimulate revisions, on particular grammatical and rhetorical features, and on students’ preferences for feedback.
Identity and Voice
As course designers and instructors must attend to “the socially and politically situated contexts of writing and how these contexts influence both how writing gets done and the end products of writing”
Writing can be as personal as speaking, and when L2 writers demonstrate a unique idiolect, it may not be your place to try to change that voice.
PRINCIPLES FOR TEACHING WRITING SKILLS
Incorporate Practices of “Good” Writers
Good writers . . .
• carefully attend to the specific, assigned writing task.
• spend some time (but not too much!) planning to write
• focus on a goal or main idea.
• perceptively gauge their audience.
Balance Process and Product
Make sure that students are carefully led
through appropriate stages in the process of composing.
Account for Cultural/Literary Backgrounds
Make sure that your techniques do not assume that your students know English rhetorical conventions.
Connect Reading and Writing
By reading and studying a variety of relevant types of text, students can gain important insights both about how they should write and about subject matter that may become the topic of their writing.
Provide as Much Authentic Writing as Possible
Design Prewriting, Drafting, and Revising Stages of Writing
The first prewriting stage encourages the generation of ideas.
The drafting and revising stages are the core of process writing.
Strive to Offer Techniques That Are as Interactive as Possible
Group collaboration, brainstorming, and critiquing are as easily and successfully a part of many writing-focused techniques.
Be a Facilitator, Not a Judge, in Responding to Students’ Writing
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Sharing writing with other students in the class is one way to add authenticity. Publishing a class newsletter, writing letters to people outside of class, writing a script or dramatic presentation, writing a resume, writing advertisements.
Micro- and Macroskills for Writing
Microskills
Produce graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
Produce writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
Produce an acceptable core of words and use appropriate word order patterns.
Use acceptable grammatical systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, and rules.
Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
Macroskills
Use cohesive devices in written discourse.
Use the rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse.
Appropriately accomplish the communicative functions of written texts according to form and purpose.
Convey links and connections between events and communicate relations.
Distinguish between literal and implied meanings when writing.
Correctly convey culturally specific references in the context of the written text.
Develop and use a battery of writing strategies.
TYPES OF CLASSROOM WRITING PERFORMANCE
Imitative or Mechanical Writing
Recognition Techniques
Copying
Sound-Spelling Practice
Dictation
Intensive or Controlled Writing
Controlled writing
is to present a paragraph to students in which they have to alter a given structure throughout.
Guided writing
loosens the teacher’s control but still offers a series of stimulators.
Dictocomp writing
is read at normal speed, usually two or three times; then the teacher asks students to rewrite the paragraph to the best of their recollection of the reading.
Self-Writing
Note-taking
Diary or journal writing
Display Writing
Short answer exercises, essay examinations, and even research reports will involve an element of display.
Real Writing
Academic
Vocational/Technical
Personal