Effective Writing: Profiles, Teaching, and Approaches
The Good Writer vs. The Apprentice
Profile of a Good Writer:
- Reading: Good writers are avid readers. Reading is a primary means of understanding written code.
- Audience Awareness: They consider their audience, spending more time thinking about their message and the recipient’s existing knowledge.
- Planning: They mentally outline the text, visualizing the content and objectives.
- Rereading: They reread written fragments to ensure they align with their intended meaning.
- Revising: They revise the text, making changes and improvements that affect the meaning.
- Recursive Writing Process: Their process is flexible and cyclical, allowing for continuous changes based on new ideas.
- Support Strategies: They use strategies to solve unforeseen challenges.
Profile of an Apprentice Writer:
Apprentice writers compose their writings in a poorer and less rapid manner. They reflect less, ignore the future reader, do not reread what they write, are too lazy to revise and redo the text, and are obsessed with grammatical correctness and filling the blank sheet.
Teaching Written Expression
Writing encompasses diverse content and requires various activities. Writing is essential because it clarifies concrete thinking and is crucial in all areas.
Objective:
The student will discover the interest, pleasure, and benefits of written expression and acquire the necessary microskills to master it. Developing this capability requires appropriate activities and exercises.
Activities include all skills: linguistic codes, psychomotor, and cognitive skills.
Four Basic Approaches to Teaching Written Expression:
Cassany distinguishes four basic approaches to the didactics of written expression, based on learning objectives, types of exercises, programming, etc.
Characteristics of the Four Basic Approaches:
- Grammar Focus: Learning to write by mastering the grammar of the language system.
- Functional Approach: Learning to write through the comprehension and production of various types of text.
- Process-Based Approach: Developing composition processes to write good copy.
- Content-Based Approach: Using written language as a tool to learn in other subjects, while developing expression.
These approaches are complementary. While one may serve as a guide, it should be supplemented with the others. It’s important to teach grammar, the writing process, text types, and content.
The grammatical approach is the most widespread in schools, emphasizing grammar, spelling, and syntax. It is related to regulatory and structural studies of grammar and has a long pedagogical tradition. The functional communicative approach to written expression has emerged with the boom in second language learning. It is based on texts used in social work practice, real or credible, where students learn to use texts as communicative tools to achieve various objectives. In contrast, the process-based and content-based approaches are still relatively unknown, except in the USA. To renovate and improve language classes, the functional and processual approaches offer the most potential because they provide an overall work-rate and procedural text.