Process writing – benefits and drawbacks

 -There are a lot of benefits to the process approach to writing – but how can this approach fit our teaching context in Vietnam? During the provincial workshops, teachers discussed this issue and came up with a number of practical and realistic ideas.

Benefits

1. Process writing can help focus on what students write rather than how they write it. Paying attention to what students write can lead to an improvement in their writing.

2. Process writing is a move away from students writing to test their language towards the communication of ideas, feelings and experiences.

3. Process writing can help integrate different skills. Students not only write but read each other's writing, and discuss and exchange ideas with their partners.

4. Process writing provides students with constant feedback between drafts. This is more useful to students than doing it when they finish their writing.

5. Process writing helps change the roles of teachers and learners. Teachers move away from being a marker to a reader who responds to the content of students' writing rather than its form. Students are more aware of the content of their writing, and of constantly re-planning, re-writing and re-editing it, which helps develop their writing ability.

Drawbacks and solutions

1. Writing is a complicated process, which may cause frustration among students. Therefore, teachers should set up a supportive environment and be patient.

2. Process writing requires more class time than product writing. Therefore teachers should organize lessons well and manage enough time for students to experience different stages of writing by fitting the stages of writing around more than one lesson. E.g. In one lesson, ideas are generated and students write their first draft and in the following lesson, students edit and redraft.

3. Students may find working again and again on their writing boring, and refuse to do so. Therefore, teachers need to introduce a variety of activities for each stage and set clear objectives for class activities.

Applying process writing to the Vietnamese context – some solutions

1. Combine both process and product writing. Both approaches help students in two different ways. Process writing can help students overcome their writing problems such as lack of ideas, ineffective organization, and lack of constant feedback from teachers or peers while they are still drafting. Product writing can help provide them with examples of relevant language and appropriate structures. (For differences between product and process writing, see English Now Issue 8, May 2004).

2. Build in planning and drafting stages into a writing lesson. This is very important because most writing activities in the new textbook are designed on the basis of product writing, in which students are required to study a model, analyse and imitate it. This will definitely discourage students from being creative and/or using their own experiences to express themselves. Useful pre-writing activities include brainstorming list (thinking quickly and listing as many ideas as possible on a given topic), focused questions (a series of questions used to stimulate thinking, drawing on experiences, & shaping ideas), and free writing (writing about a topic for a fixed period of time to explore the topic and generate ideas). Effective drafting stage activities include peer review( students read each other's writing and give feedback on the form and its content)

3. Encourage and set up collaborative writing. Most writing activities in the new textbook require mainly individual work. For example, sharing ideas about a topic before they write drafts, and peer review after they finish their drafts are important in encouraging students to learn from each other.


4. Consider the teacher's response to writing. The teacher should give feedback many times between drafts, not just one time when students submit their final draft.





Trying a writing activity in Hanoi
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