Advantages of planning stage in teaching process writing

Аннотация

A good composition is the product that gets ready only after thinking a lot and artistically putting these thoughts in order to make them have sense. Writing doesn’t include just reading and then putting down some important facts or copying out from different sources, but telling the generally educated adult audience something new, narrate him/her an interesting story, argue with him/her about one or another thing and make him/her change his/her mind. Key words: metadiscourse markers, habitual approach to writing, socio-cognitive approach to writing, cohesion, coherence, connectedness. Students who are determined to improve the quality of their academic writing should be “prepared to change their habitual approach to writing” (Chandrasegaran, 2001, p. vi). In other words, some students would need to move away from the information focused approach to writing (i.e., merely giving information about what they know about the topic without considering the readers). Instead, they need to adopt an alternative approach to writing that emphasizes an awareness of the purpose and audience of the writing. Students would need to learn to become aware of the thinking processes that 117 take place in the writing. Recent research has indicated that the socio-cognitive approach to writing can be effective in enhancing student performance in writing English as a second language. In the following, I will discuss practical strategies that teachers can introduce to students in the writing classroom with an objective to improving the students’ performance in writing. a. Using socio-cognitive approach to writing Cognitive and genre theories are common approaches to teaching academic writing to students at upper primary and secondary schools, and in university-level ESL writing courses. However, the cognitive approach to teaching writing focuses on idea generation and planning strategies. This approach neglects socio-cultural factors, such as the target readers’ possible reaction to texts (Hyland, 2002). The genre approach to teaching writing focuses on rhetorical moves and organization structure (Sawyer & Watson, 1989), rather than the thinking processes that are involved in the enactment of the discourse moves (Chandrasegaran, 2013). The prescriptive nature of a genre approach to writing may inhibit students’ creativity (Hyland, 2002). Motivated by the limitations of cognitive and genre approaches to writing pedagogy, Chandrasegaran (2013) suggests a socio-cognitive approach to writing, which takes into account the socio-cultural contexts, thinking processes in enacting each genre practice, and reader expectations, to overcome the shortcomings of the cognitive and genre approaches. Studies have suggested that the use of a socio- cognitive approach to teaching writing has positive results in improving the students’ writing. For example, Graham, Harris, & Mason (2005) pointed out that third-grade struggling students in the United States, who were explicitly taught the thinking processes and the structure of genres, wrote “longer, more complete, and qualitatively better” narratives and persuasive writing (p. 234). This is a result of the self-regulatory thinking processes embedded in the three-step planning strategies “Pick my ideas; Organize my notes; Write and say more” (p. 217), with peer support and collaboration in the planning stage. With explicit teaching of genre and a socio-cultural approach to writing, Chandrasegaran and Yeo (2006) found that Secondary three (i.e., ninth-grade) students in Singapore showed an improvement in writing narratives in terms of setting the rhetorical goal. In recent studies, Chandrasegaran (2013) and Chandrasegaran, Kong, and Chua (2007) found that secondary three (i.e., ninth-grade) students in a Singapore school improved in expository writing. Specifically, through teachers’ guided class discussions and explicit teaching of thinking processes in the enactment of genre practices, the students raised their awareness of the social context of the texts, as well as reader and writer roles, and they showed improvements in discourse moves such as stating and elaborating claims as well as countering opposing views. Thinking processes, embedded in knowledge transformation, are important in implementing the socio-cognitive approach to writing. These thinking processes refer to how students plan, organize, write, and revise their essays. They help determine what information should be included in the essay in order to fit the macro rhetorical goal. Once the different pieces of information are determined, presenting them in a coherent form is a challenge to many students during the writing process. Understanding the features of a coherent text is the subject of the next section. b. Understanding features that make a text coherent Knowledge of coherence is an important factor in the students’ ability to produce coherent texts (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Research studies have shown that teachers need to h