7 – UpWriting Workshop

My Objective of Basic Writing Course

• Help students develop basic writing skills• Help students understand writing as a

process• Help students build a solid foundation for

becoming confident, independent writers in English

• Lead students to read model paragraphs in order to see exactly where they are headed.

The writing process

• Student engage in their writing tasks through a cyclical approach rather than through a single-shot approach. They are not expected to produce and submit complete and polished responses to their writing assignments without going through stages of drafting and receiving feedback on their drafts, be it from peers and/or from the teacher, followed by revision of their evolving texts.

Emig’s (1971) five stages of writing process

• Process approach focus on the writer, on the content-based instruction and on the reader-dominated approach.

• Emig (1971,quoted in Danielson, L, 2000) identified five stages of the composing process as followed and also noted that writers move back and forth among the first four stages as they recognize a need to rework their written thoughts. This model has been useful in aiding teachers in the instruction of writing and in assisting students in the production of it :

• Prewriting (generation of ideas, mental rehearsal for writing)

• Drafting (writing in progress)

• Revision (re-see ideas)

• Editing / Proofreading (cosmetics/error detection)

• Publication (public sharing of product

• As students gain facility in fitting the stages into their thinking and employing them in their composing processes, they become more skillful in generating meaningful written discourse.

Piolat & Pélissier (1998) five main types of composing processes

• According to Piolat and Pélissier (1998) there are five main types of composing processes: Planning, Translating, Executing, Evaluating and Revising, a description of each process is provided below:

• PLANNING: This stage is said to occur when the writer generates ideas in order to know what to write. Planning is also referred to when the writer thinks about the best way to organize ideas and this organization is made as a function of the topic and the audience.

• TRANSLATING: Writing translation of ideas means that ideas are converted into words, into sentences, into paragraphs and text. Mental translation of ideas into a linguistic form means selecting syntactic forms, words, and spelling.

• EXECUTING: Executing is to write down on the paper the content to which the writer refers. In other words, executing means a concrete transcription of the referred words and sentences that were translated into a linguistic form.

• EVALUATING: Evaluating means that the writer will judge what he / she thought about and what he / she translated. The writer can ask himself / herself if ideas or projects are satisfying. The writer examines if the written output is appropriate in terms of content, organization, sentences, words, and spelling.

• REVISING: Revising means transformation for the purpose of correction that follows the detection by the writer of inadequacy in his/her ideas or in his/her writing. Thus the writer will change his ideas or his / her writing in terms of content, organization, sentences, words, and spelling.

• Students had to learn about each stage and develop skills in moving through them, thus, they understood the features of each phase in order to gradually improve their production of argumentative texts.

• Flower and Hayes (1981) identified composing as a complex problem-solving activity, responding to a rhetorical situation in the form of a text. Their work, largely known as cognitive process model, represented the internal process of the writer's mind and looks at composing as a complex problem-solving activity.

The relationship between reading and writing

• Reading provide models of what English language texts look like and even if not used for the purpose of imitation, they provide input that helps students develop awareness of English language prose style.

• Reading can be done to draw students’ attention to particular stylistic choices, grammatical features, methods of development, markers of cohesion and coherence, and so on.

• Reading help to raise student awareness of the choices writers make and the consequences of those choices for the achievement of their communicative goals.

• Reading also help students develop and refine genre awareness, an important criterion for being able to produce a wide range of text types.

• Using reading classes as a basis to practice skills such as summarizing, paraphrasing, interpreting and synthesizing concepts.

Strategies Instruction

• Research has shown that all students can benefit from instruction in learning strategies. Chamot & O’Malley’s (1994) work with second language learners reinforces the notion that students who learn to consciously monitor their own learning, and who have a storehouse of strategies to use when learning becomes difficult,, fare better than students who do not have such strategies.

• .

• The most effective strategy instruction appears to include demonstrating when a given strategy might be useful, as well as how to use related tasks and situations

• When teaching a learning strategy, teachers should identify the strategy, explain why it is useful, demonstrate its use, give students practice in applying it to a learning situation, and show them how to evaluate its effectiveness and what to do if it does not work. (Duffy et al., 1986)

Cognitive strategies

• Cognitive strategies enable the learners to manipulate the language material in direct ways, e.g., through reasoning, analysis, notetaking, summarizing, synthesizing, outlining, reorganizing information to develop stronger shemas (knowledge structures). Schemas are interpretive frames that help individuals make sense of information by relating it to previous experiences.

Metacognitive strategies

• Metacognition is knowing about knowing, and it is most broadly defined as awareness and control of one’s cognition. (What you know, how you think, and when and why to apply knowledge and strategies)

• Identifying one’s own learning style preference and needs

• Planning for an L2 task• Gathering and organizing materials • Arranging a study space and a schedule• Monitoring mistakes (peer reviewing)• Evaluating task success

Differences in composing between L1 and l2

• Translating

• Punctuations

• Sentence structures

• Organization

• Grammar

Basic writing skills

• What is a sentence ?

• What are independent clause and dependent clause?

• What are simple sentence, compound sentence and complex sentence?

• (please see your handout)

What is a paragraph?

• A group of 6-12 sentences about one topic• Every sentence in a strong paragraph is about

the same topic• A paragraph includes a topic sentence (directly

tell reader the controlling idea of this paragraph), several supporting sentences (giving more information about the topic and the controlling idea), and a concluding sentence (restatement, summary, suggestion and prediction).

• see handout P. 5

The writing test of GEPT & The common styles of writing

• Descriptive paragraph (Ex: The Person I Admire most, My best Friend)

• Narrative paragraph (chronological order,看圖作文 )

• Expository paragraph (process, cause and effect, comparison and contrast)

Coherence

• A coherence paragraph is made up of sentences that are ordered according to a principle. The principle changes depending on the type of paragraph that you are writing. The three types of ordering are chronological ordering, spatial ordering, and logical ordering.

Cohesion

• When a paragraph has cohesion, all the supporting sentences stick together in their support of the topic sentence. The methods of connecting sentences art to use linking words, personal pronouns, definite articles, demonstrative pronouns, and synonyms.

• Personal Pronouns

• The Definite Article

• Demonstrative Pronoun

• Linking Words (transitions)

• Synonyms

Unity

• When a paragraph has unity, all the supporting sentences relate to the topic sentence.

The Writing Process

• Writing consists of steps that we may need to repeat as we write, rethink, and rewrite:

• 1. Getting ideas (such as free writing, making an outline or a list, word maps)

• Organizing your ideas• Writing your first draft• Revising to improve content and

organization• Editing for language errors

Reference

• Boardman, C. A. & Frydenberg, J. (2002). Writing to Communicate. Pearson Education, Inc.

• Duffy, J. L. et al.,(1986) The relationship between explicit verbal explanation during reading skill instruction and student awareness and achievement: A study of reading teacher effects. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 237-252.

• ,Emig J. (1971) The composing processes of twelfth graders’/ Urbana, IL: National Council off Teachers of English

• Fellag, L. R. (2004). Write ahead---Skills for academic success. Pearson Education, Inc.

• Hogue, A. (1996). First steps in academic writing. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

• Ruetten, M. K. (2003). Developing composition skills. Thomson & Heinle.

• Zemach, D. & Islam, D. (2005). Paragraph writing---From sentence to paragraph. Macmillan Education.