prefer to group together ideas about traffic and then compare traffic in the city and in
the country in the same paragraph.
At the end of this stage, students will have a plan or mind map that they can use for
writing.
(4) Students write the first draft of their piece of work. Tell your students that they
should think about the content and how it relates to the title, organising their ideas into
paragraphs and about how the paragraphs hang together.
(5)
In the same lesson, in later lessons, or for homework, students can revise their
first drafts, improving on the content and organisation.
(6) When they have a good second draft, i.e. the content, relevance and organisation
satisfies them, they can move onto improving the language. I suggest that they
approach language improvement in stages. For example, they could start by focusing
on vocabulary, the correct choice of word. Then they could look at aspects of
grammar: tenses, verb agreement, use of pronouns etc. Then move onto spelling and
punctuation. You can, of course, organise this language work differently. During this
stage, students can review their own work or the work of their classmates.
(7) Finally, students can copy out their essays, in a clean, final version.
There are various ways to organise the work; initially it is best if you do the stages
together as a whole class. Later and when the students are used to process writing,
you can start work as a whole class and then the students can work together in pairs
or groups. Some stages can also be done for homework. The teacher’s role throughout
is to provide ideas, guidance and feedback. You will also need to encourage students
to edit their own work and to incorporate your feedback.
One advantage of the process approach to writing is that it helps students see that a
piece of writing goes through a number of stages including revision and editing. By
breaking down these stages and working on each one individually, you can help
students see the importance of them. They can see that writing does not have to be
perfect from the outset and this will make it easier for them to tackle any writing task. It
will also help alleviate writer’s block that sometimes occurs when students are faced
with a blank piece of paper! If students are writing in pairs or groups, there will also be
a lot of interaction when they’re discussing their revisions.
However, there are drawbacks. Initially, students will find this a novel way to approach
a piece of writing and they might not see the importance of the initial stages and try to
skip to writing the final product immediately. However, the effort and time invested will
pay off as this approach often generates lengthier pieces of writing.
Process writing
takes longer than other approaches to writing. If you have access to computers, do
use them. Computers lend themselves very well to this sort of activity.
To help students see the benefits, you could give them a writing task at the beginning
of the course. When they’ve completed it, ask them to note how they approached the
task. Take in their work and keep it without marking it. At the end of the course and
52
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after various process-writing activities, ask students to do the same writing task as at
the beginning. Return the students’ initial work to them
and ask them to compare the
two final products as well as their approaches to the task. You can also conduct a
class discussion on the results, the benefits and the drawbacks.
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