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Date Posted: 07:25:06 10/17/05 Mon
Author: Adriana Alcantara
Subject: Final paper for Evaluation : Writing: Current Perspectives

Writing: Current Perspectives

Although we live in a literate society in which only by writing and reading means educational objectives can be achieved (Scarcella1992), many learners cannot master proficiency in such areas, specially second language apprentices. Much has been said to change teachers' way of working by teaching new strategies that will help students to improve their abilities in these particular tasks. Thus, teachers can improve student's cognitive organization by providing them with unknown strategies that are crucial to this kind of development. (Celce-Murcia&Olshten, 2000).
Understanding writing as a process is a key concept in this new view of writing skills teaching, especially in second language teaching. Such a process requires some specific strategies to become an effectively accomplished task. Competent Writers (1) tend to plan their text before start writing immediately. They start the writing task by gathering ideas. These ideas written together can become the first draft. A second draft can follow this first one, when after reading this first draft, the writer develop these first ideas by gathering information that will be needed or that is relevant to this text-to-be. This is called pre- writing. The apprentice can let this step take as much time as necessary, for developing an idea may be a slow process.
Working collaboratively is also a very important stage in the process of writing a text. Students can work relying on the help of each other, it is, they provide feedback for their peer's work in order to enrich the text. It is also relevant to learn how to work with feedback (taking and providing it). This kind of classmatesī review develops not only audience awareness, but also, skills to analyze your own work (Scarcella 1992).
The final steps of the process should occur right after this last stage. Students have their drafts, already reviewed by peers, and then, they will make their own review. It takes the writer back to a previous stage, in which, reviewing was a tool to improve the text.
Furthermore, competence in writing has a number of features that cannot be ignored. We have four types of competences: grammatical (morphology and syntax), sociolinguistic (considering factors as purpose, topic, target audience...etc), discourse (cohesion and coherence) and finally strategic (the writing process itself) (Scarcella 1992). The connection between these competences provides the necessary skills for a competent writer. Learners should be highly aware of these four kinds of competences when reviewing the texts or providing feedbacks.
In addition to this, when it's said that a writer plays an active role in the process of constructing/producing meaning, we come to realize how important the previous background is in order to allow the reader to understand the message. Developing new strategies in writing and reading makes us (and the students as well) strategic writers, it is, good writers.
In our teaching we can also state that, writing must have a purpose to motivate students to accomplish the task, or else it would be a meaningless activity to them. The more authentic material you have, the more committed students you will have. In addition to this, we can use a number of drafts in the writing process as a strategy. White & Arndt (1991) state that this notion of revising the work is not merely a correction of mistakes, but rather, a part of meaning construction process.
Teachers often do fail to raising in the pupils the necessary motivation to write. In fact, students see no purpose in doing such tasks. Writing is often misguided by teachers and becomes the student īs most hated assignment. When teachers assign meaningless tasks, they donīt do it as a process, to be done along with the student. Strategies like brainstorming in pre-writing, for instance, lead the students to feel like they are really improving their skills in order to write more effectively, and do not give the student the idea of failure or incompetence, which, they might have if they feel helpless in performing these tasks.
In other words, the teacher willingness to work with the student as a partner in strategies development and knowledge growth are much more effective in learning than old techniques that do not share the responsibility of learning process with the pupil.


(1) The term Competent Writer is used by Scarcella (1992) to describe a learner that masters proficiency in writing using the abilities described here.

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