4.4 Teaching Productive Skills: The Process Writing Approach

4.4 Teaching Productive Skills: The Process Writing Approach

Paradigm Shifts in L2 Writing: Product, Process, and Genre Approaches

Second language writing pedagogy has progressed through three major paradigms over the past half-century:

1. The Product Approach (Text-Focused Imitation): Grounded in structural linguistics (e.g., Anita Pincas), this approach treats writing as a linear exercise in grammatical mastery and imitation of model texts. Learners analyze a prestige model, complete syntax drills, compose guided paragraphs imitating the model, and submit a final piece. Writing is assessed summatively on mechanical accuracy, spelling, and grammar, ignoring how ideas originate or evolve.
2. The Process Approach (Writer-Focused Cognition): Emerging through Donald Graves, Linda Flower, and John R. Hayes, this model shifted focus from the finished product to the mental processes writers use while composing. Flower and Hayes showed that writing is recursive and non-linear—writers cycle dynamically between planning, drafting, translating ideas, and revising. The classroom functions as a writing workshop where students compose multiple drafts, receive formative feedback, and refine ideas without premature evaluation of surface mechanics.
3. The Genre Approach (Socially Contextualized Discourse): Originating from Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Sydney School (J. R. Martin, Beverly Derewianka), this approach views writing as a staged, goal-oriented social activity within specific discourse communities (e.g., lab reports, argumentative essays, business proposals). It provides explicit scaffolding regarding rhetorical structures, communicative purposes, and linguistic conventions expected by target audiences.

Contemporary best practice combines these into a Genre-Informed Process Approach, where learners navigate a recursive process writing cycle while addressing genre conventions and social context.

The Recursive Process Writing Cycle

Rather than assigning a topic and grading a single submission, instructors guide students through six recursive stages:

Macro-Revising versus Micro-Editing

A critical pedagogical error is conflating revising with editing. When prompted to "revise," novice writers tend to focus exclusively on surface-level errors: spelling, punctuation, or word choices. Instructors must explicitly teach learners to separate these processes:

• Macro-Revising: Centers on ideas, thesis alignment, logical organization, paragraph unity, and sufficient evidence. If a paragraph is irrelevant to the central thesis, polishing its grammar is pointless; it must be excised or rewritten.
• Micro-Editing: Occurs only after macro-structural integrity is established. Centers on sentence-level accuracy: verb tenses, agreement, articles, prepositions, spelling, and punctuation.

Structured Peer Review Protocols

Unstructured peer review ("Read your partner's essay and tell them what to fix") yields superficial praise or misguided grammar corrections. Structured protocols ensure constructive engagement:

• Praise, Question, Wish (PQW): Reviewers identify one specific strength (Praise), ask one clarifying question about an underdeveloped idea (Question), and offer one actionable suggestion for substantive improvement (Wish).
• Read-Aloud Conferencing: The author reads their draft aloud while the peer partner listens without seeing the text. Reading aloud forces authors to hear awkward phrasing and disjointed transitions that the eyes skip in silent reading.

Formative Feedback and Correction Codes

Comprehensive direct correction of every error—termed red-inking—is pedagogically counterproductive. The research debate is instructive: John Truscott (1996) argued that grammar correction is ineffective and can even be harmful, while Dana Ferris (1999 and later) countered that feedback helps when it is selective, clear, and focused on treatable, recurring errors. Neither position supports marking every error, which can overwhelm and demotivate writers and encourage dependence on the teacher. Effective instructors utilize selective formative feedback by focusing on 2–3 high-priority error categories per draft and placing standardized proofreading symbols in the margin to prompt self-correction.

Standard ELT Correction Code Reference Guide

The Genre-Based Scaffolding Cycle (Sydney School)

To scaffold complex academic and professional genres, the Sydney School developed the Teaching-Learning Cycle (TLC):

1. Building Context (Field): Exploring sociocultural purpose, topic, and audience.
2. Modeling & Deconstruction: Analyzing mentor texts to dissect rhetorical stages and linguistic features.
3. Joint Construction: The teacher and students co-construct a text in the genre with the teacher as scribe.
4. Independent Construction: Students write their own genre texts autonomously.