Teacher Development Pack

Writing – Part 3
Process writing
Before you read the extract, consider the following question.

The extract you are about to read promotes the concept of process writing. Based on what
you know about process writing what would you expect the authors to say about the
following:

a The value of process writing

b Process writing procedures

c the role of the teacher

d correction

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©2001 Pearson Education Ltd.

 This extract originally
published by

Process writing
by Ron White and Valerie Arndt
Pearson Education Ltd (1991).

Almost two thousand years ago, the great Chinese writer, Lu Chi, reflecting
his essay Wen Fu (The Art of Letters)* upon the process of writing and
being awriter, acknowledged the power of the written word:

'Behold now the utility of letters.

It extends over a thousand miles and nothing can stop its course; It
penetrates a million years, the ferry from one to the other...

It is precisely this capacity of written language to transcend time and space

that makes the teaching and learning of writing such an important
experience. Through writing we are able to share ideas, arouse feelings,
persuade and convince other people. We are able to discover and
articulate ideas in ways that only writing makes possible.
Yet despite the power of writing - as a permanent record, as a form of
expression and as a means of communication - it has tended to be a much
neglected part of the language programme, both in first and foreign or
second language teaching. This book is an attempt to redress that
imbalance, and to provide a stimulus to teachers and students for
collaborating on a series of valuable educational experiences.
Our intention has been to provide a resource book comprising a collection
of procedures and lesson formats - or 'templates' - and, although much
exemplification is provided, you will find that this book does not contain a
large quantity of textual material because it is primarily about writing
activities. Priority is given to the students creating their own texts, rather
than having them analyse finished products of other writers. This does not
mean that we ignore the importance of reading for writing development, or
of becoming familiar with the conventions of text-types. Rather, we try to put
such things in perspective as only some among many ways of developing
writing proficiency.
To give tangible form to the activities we have included two types of
exemplification. One type is authentic student writing, illustrating what might
be anticipated as output from the activity concerned. These examples are
presented 'warts and all', without corrections to language or spelling. The
second type consists of input texts which could be used as they are, as
stimulus material for a lesson or series of lessons, though they are primarily
intended as a guide to the kind of material which could be exploited. The
rationale for this

*Lu Chi's essay also provides the superscriptions for each section of our
book.is that we feel it wrong for us to dictate to your students what they

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should write about. We want you to choose from and adapt the
procedures we have outlined in ways which match your students' needs
and interests. Moreover, the process of composing is highly individualistic,
and writers need to draw upon a variety of techniques which they find
useful for themselves.
Think of this book, if you like, as a collection of 'recipes'. As in a recipe
book, ingredients and procedures are indicated, but the user has to provide,
combine and prepare the actual materials. And, as in cooking, where
individual cooks produce their own variations on a given recipe, so too in
this book we want to encourage you and your students to work out your
own methods of exploiting the formats we have offered. Thus, the way in
which procedures are used will vary from class to class according to the
different ingredients and methods you choose. Indeed, we believe it to be
essential that teachers adapt - or 're-invent' - any teaching procedure in
ways which are appropriate for them and their students. One cannot, as a
teacher, be said to own any teaching procedure until it has been adapted to
one's own style and circumstance, just as any cook adapts a recipe to the
conditions under which a dish is to be prepared.
Clearly, it would be difficult and possibly counterproductive to cover all the
activities outlined here during a typical school writing programme, with its
constraints of time and syllabus. Some activities will prove more useful,
appealing or productive than others. What we hope is that, through
experimentation, teachers and students will be able to develop a broad
repertoire of activities based on the outlines and examples given in this
book.

Our assumptions about teaching writing

The proposals we make in this book are based on the assumption that
teaching and learning are joint enterprises involving both teacher and
students in a partnership where the participants have complementary roles
and similar status. This calls for a change in role relationship between
teacher and taught, and has considerable consequences. It means, for one
thing, that there are greater risks on both sides. The teacher, instead of
being cast merely in the role of linguistic judge, now becomes a reader,
responding to what the students have written; the students, rather than
merely providing evidence of mastery of linguistic forms, proffer
experiences, ideas, attitudes and feelings to be shared with a reader. This
will, inevitably, involve some degree of self-disclosure in which teachers
and students move beyond a conventional, relatively impersonal teacher-
student relationship into territory where different rules apply. This is clearly
the case in responding to the writer of My most unforgettable character,
given as an example of student writing in
6.2 Responding (p.124). Here there is a degree of self-disclosure which the
teacher-reader can hardly ignore, and simply to treat such a piece of
writing as a display of language proficiency would not only constitute a
denial of the trust which the writer had placed in the teacher-reader, but

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©1998 Pearson Education Ltd.

 This extract originally
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would also be against the philosophy which lies behind the approach we
advocate.
Indeed, treating any piece of writing primarily as a source of language
errors misses the point of our approach. Grammar is important - but as a
tool, a means, and not as an end in itself. Such research evidence as we
have suggests that focusing on language errors in writing improves neither
grammatical accuracy nor writing fluency. So, the activities in this book are
based on the
assumption that it is through attention to meaning, and not just form, that
language - and writing - improve.
Moving into such uncharted territory can, we realise from our own teaching
experience, be threatening. But we are also convinced that there is much to
be gained from it. If, as in 2.1.1 Brainstorming by the teacher, 3.1.2
Loopwriting by the teacher, and 5.1 Drafting by the teacher (pp.19, 47,100),
a collaborative, workshop atmosphere between teacher and students is
developed, such threat is soon forgotten in the process of joint composing
and responding.
Finally, we believe that writing takes time. In particular, time is needed to
incubate, sift and shape ideas. We also know that time is one of the most
precious resources of both teachers and students and that when, as is often
the case, time is at a premium, writing is one of the first things to be cut
back or relegated to homework. Yet, of all the skills, writing is the one which
most needs and benefits from time. So, we advocate devoting classroom
time to writing. As it happens, many of the activities we have suggested in
this book involve pair and group work, not to mention discussion and
collaboration, so that the writing class becomes, in a very genuine sense, a
communicative experience in which much more than skill in writing is
practised and developed.

Our assumptions about writing

Writing is far from being a simple matter of transcribing language into written
symbols: it is a thinking process in its own right. It demands conscious
intellectual effort, which usually has to be sustained over a considerable
period of time. Furthermore, precisely because cognitive skills are involved,
proficiency in language does not, of itself, make writing easier. People
writing in their native language, though they may have a more extensive
stock of language resources to call upon, frequently confront exactly the
same kinds of writing problems as people writing in a foreign or second
language.
In order to think of effective ways of coming to grips with these problems,
we have to find out what actually goes on when people write. And this is
notoriously difficult. Much of the evidence that we do have has been
obtained from various kinds of observations of writers at work, and
introspections of writers themselves, as in the 'compose aloud' activities
described in
1 Glimpsing the process (pp.11-16). What the transcripts from such

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©1998 Pearson Education Ltd.

 This extract originally
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activities help reveal is that there is much more to writing than a mere
learning and applying of linguistic or rhetorical rules. Rather, writing is a
form of problem-solving which involves such processes as generating
ideas, discovering a 'voice' with which to write, planning, goal-setting,
monitoring and evaluating what is going to be written as well as what has
been written, and searching for language with which to express exact
meanings. Moreover, writers rarely know at the outset exactly what it is
they are going to write because many ideas are only revealed during the
act of writing itself.
We have attempted to visualise our perception of writing processes, as
derived from such research, in Figure 1 on the next page. Here the complex
and recursive nature of writing is displayed. Obviously, this model is a gross
simplification of the highly intricate, dynamic and constantly fluctuating
interplay of activities involved in writing, but it may serve as a framework
into which individual facets of the overall process can be fitted, while also
acting as a guide to the organisation of this book. This model has been
amended fromthe first printing as a result of constructive comments from
our readers. As will be obvious from this model, writers are faced with a
very complex management problem because they are darting back and
forth from one process to another in real time, and at each point they have
to make decisions at all levels, whether at the level of ideas, of planning, of
organising or of expression. Furthermore, there is interaction among the
different processes such that some processes occur simultaneously, with
one influencing another.
A second challenging task which writers face is that they have to organise
an amorphous mass of ideas, information and associations into coherent,
linear text. Moreover, they can neither speak to nor see the person or
persons they are addressing. All they have to convey their message is the
abstract symbol system of written language. With this, they must make
explicit every aspect of their meaning; their text must create its own context.
At the same time, writers have to consider what we might call the 'laws of
communication'. Whenever we engage in any kind of communication which
requires language, we operate within a framework of unspoken rules or
conventions. Thus, readers expect that writers will give them neither more
nor less information than is needed for the message to be understood.
They assume, too, that writers will not give them information which they
know to be false, or for which they lack sufficient evidence, or which is
irrelevant to their purpose in writing. And finally, readers expect writers to
use language which is clear, unambiguous, and appropriate to the context
and type of text concerned. If writers deliberately flout these unwritten laws,
they do so in order to make some kind of extraordinary impact on their
readers. If, however, they simply fail to observe these conventions, they
produce writing which is unsatisfactory and ineffective.
It is easy to neglect these 'laws' when we write, for the nature of writing is
such that it engrosses us in our own thought processes, and carries us off
into a mental world where there is no feedback from a present audience.

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©1998 Pearson Education Ltd.

 This extract originally
published by

Thus, as writers, we need to make a constant and conscious effort to

imagine our intended readers and anticipate their reactions to the symbols
we have put on the page. We have to evaluate, for instance, how much
knowledge we share with our readers, and how much is exclusive to us; we
must decide how to 'package' our information to achieve our purpose in
writing; we have to judge whether the language we have chosen conveys
the whole of our meaning; and we need to make sure that readers will be
able to follow the train of thought underpinning the whole text.

Our focus on process writing

Essentially, we see a process-focused approach to writing as an enabling
approach. In this, we have been influenced by the work of many other
researchers and teachers, amongst them Peter Elbow, Donald Graves,
Linda Flower and John Hayes, Vivien Zamel, Ann Raimes, and Carl
Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, to mention just a few (See Bibliography
(pp.186). As we see it, the goal of this approach is to nurture the skills with
which writers work out their own solutions to the problems they set
themselves, with which they shape their raw material into a coherent
message, and with which they work towards an acceptable and appropriate
form for expressing it.
Such an approach views all writing even the most mundane and routine -as
creative. The writer, and the writer alone, is responsible for the text which
eventually evolves from the raw material, no matter whether that material is
generated almost entirely from the writer's imagination (as in, say, writing a
short story), or whether, at the other extreme, it is provided almost entirely
from external sources (as in, for instance, writing a report).
What is important for us as teachers of writing is to engage our students in
that creative process; to excite them about how their texts are coming into
being; to give them insights into how they operate as they create their work;
to alter their concepts of what writing involves. What we have to get across
is the notion that writing is re-writing; that re-vision - seeing with new eyes -
has a central role to play in the act of creating a text, and is not merely a
boring error-checking exercise; and above all, that evaluation is not just the
province of the teacher alone at the final stage of the process, but that it is
equally the concern and responsibility of the writer at every stage.
What we most certainly do not mean to imply by advocating such an
approach, however, is a repudiation of all interest in the product (i.e. the
final draft). On the contrary, the main aim is to arrive at the best product
possible. What differentiates a process-focused approach from a product-
centred one, though, is that the outcome of writing - that is, the product - is
not preconceived. Writing in a process approach is divergent, with as many
different outcomes as there are writers. In a typical product-centred
approach, on the other hand, writing will converge towards a pre-defined
goal, with a model text being presented to form the focus of comprehension
and text manipulation activities. What will not be obvious in this latter
approach, either from the model text, or from the activities based on it, is

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©1998 Pearson Education Ltd.

 This extract originally
published by

how the writer actually composed it. By contrast, process-focused lessons

may introduce texts written by other people, but only after the students have
written something of their own, so that the text is now a resource for further
ideas rather than a model for mimicry.
It is as well to remember, though, that whatever the enthusiasm and
commitment generated by a process approach, neither teachers nor
students should expect sudden miracles to occur, such that elementary
students suddenly become intermediate level writers as a result of the
activities they have engaged in. Indeed, it would be unreasonable to expect
such transformations to occur. What process-focused activities will do is
help students develop in ways which are appropriate to and fulfilling for their
level of language proficiency. More than that cannot be expected.
Disorder, imprecision, recursiveness, complexity, individual variation -this is
the very stuff of a process-oriented approach to writing. And the more we
find out about what writers actually do when they write, the more
comprehensive a specification of writing skills we shall be able to develop,
and in turn, a more flexible and adaptable range of teaching techniques.
This is especially important in the context of foreign or second language
teaching, where writing has often tended to be used as a vehicle for little
more than either language-learning reinforcement or for the display of
linguistic proficiency. What we, as teachers, should be aiming at is creating
an environment in which our students, rather than being intimidated and
frustrated by the complexity of writing, are engaged in and enthused by it,
and where they feel that credit is given for every aspect of the effort which
goes into the writing process. Our goal is to present writing as a stimulating
process centred upon, as Lu Chi put it, the 'matching of matter and manner'
such that it becomes 'the ferry' between the writer and the reader.

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 ©1998 Pearson Education Ltd.

 Teacher Development Pack

Now that you have read Assumptions about teaching writing.

What do the authors have to say about the following concepts?

joint enterprises

readers and responders

self-disclosure

meaning, not just form

time

A thinking process

The Recursive nature of language

a framework of unspoken rules and

conventions

creative writing

Seeing with new eyes

The best product possible

Do you share the authors’ assumptions? Is there any doubt in your mind about the value of
process writing?

ELT Forum – Writing – Part 3 © 2001 Pearson Education Ltd