Transcript Putting thoughts on paper – the what, how and why in process writing

Putting thoughts on paper –
the what, how and why in Process Writing
St Francis’ Canossian
Primary School
2006 -2008
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 selfexpression.
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Looking into the routines …
• 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
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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
What we believe is …
Teachers can work actively
to improve students’
motivation provided there
are ways
(Dornyei, 2001, 2003)
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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. Autonomy
3. Relatedness - being connected to and
esteemed by others belonging to a
larger social whole
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The new approach involves:
• 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
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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 1520 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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Before going deeper, here is a
reminder …
• 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
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Let’s look at the plan this morning:
the what, how and why in process
writing
the importance of feedback
students’ voice
looking at students’ work
development of students’ writing
between 2006-2008
implications and conclusions
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Process writing – what, how, why
A light dose of literature here …
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The changing roles of teacher
and students
The teacher needs to move away from
being a marker to a reader, responding
to the content of student writing more
than the form.
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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 selfevaluation 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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• Revising and editing
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.
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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Feedback that supports learning

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.
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Feedback that supports learning

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.
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There should be a balance between process
writing (developing composition skills) and
independent writing (e.g. 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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Journal writing
• 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.
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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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Journal writing
• 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.
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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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Potential problems
necessary to provide a supportive environment
Process
writing can lead to learner
for the students
frustration because learners need to
be patient
the
activities
and the objectives clear,
– rework
on are
the varied
same material
then they will usually accept doing so
– spend more time on writing in class
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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Implications and conclusions
• 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
Communication Arts
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.
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