朱晓斌　肖青芝

Abstract: Writing classes being held rather routinely results in students major problem of not knowing what to write when being assigned a writing task. With a review of the development of writing teaching in the United States, this article suggests that the process writing approach be integrated into college English writing in order to train students writing strategies. It also offers a new understanding of the teaching objectives of college English writing and some ideas about how to organize writing lessons under the suggested approach are provided for teachers.

Keywords: Instructional Objective, Process Approach, College English Writing

中图分类号： H319 文献标识码: A 文章编号：1672-1578（2009)5-0023-02

1 Introduction

For the time being, college English writing classes in China were held rather routinely. Usually, at the beginning of a class period the teacher announces the type of writing that they will focus on. Then some ways of developing paragraphs will be explained to the students. The teacher collects students essays and comments, usually on grammatical mistakes. Students learn from their mistakes and try to avoid similar mistakes afterwards. Repeated this way, the writing class is usually not interesting at all. Consequently, there are a large number of students, when being assigned a writing task, do not know how to start and would give up too readily. To change this situation, a new approach to writing lessons needs to be introduced.

2 A Review of the Writing Teaching Development in the US

The current approach to teaching English writing is just like the approach that pervaded in the USA before the 1950s. As early as in the 1960s, teachers, researchers, and evaluators in the USA began to reassess the nature of writing and tried to replace the above approach by the process approach, because they thought that although the traditional approach did teach students some strategies such as the developing of a paragraph, it did not put enough emphasis on writing strategies. The result was that students major problem of not knowing what to write still remained. They usually did not know where to start and were bored with English writing. While it never is claimed that the process approach could solve all those problems with students writing, it may be safe to admit that the process approach has some positive effects on exploration of ideas and on raising students interest in writing, which is also suggested by the current investigation into students writing strategy use. Therefore, it may be worthwhile to have a try and introduce the process approach into our English writing classes.

3 Integration of Process Approach into College English Writing Teaching

Due to its indifferences to students writing processes or writing strategies, the traditional method of teaching English writing often results in students embarrassment at not knowing how to write and their lack of interest in writing. To overcome this shortcoming, two suggestions can be made.

3.1Reflection on the objectives of writing teaching

Like the teaching of other courses, writing teaching also has its own instructional objectives which are already identified in the course syllabus. Here let us first review the definition of syllabus given by the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics: “also (called) curriculum, (is) a description of the contents of a course of instruction and the order in which they are to be taught.” (Richards, J. C. et al 2002:461) It is useful to think of a course syllabus as a document comprising two main parts. First, it is a contract between the instructor and the students—a summary of course objectives and how they will be met (Tarvers 1993). Second, a syllabus serves as a planning tool: it structures and sequences objectives, units, lessons, assignments, classroom procedures, and assessment procedures for the instructor and students (Nunan 1991).

Judging from the definition of a syllabus, our current College English Syllabus are too general statements to be used satisfyingly; it requires that students should have the ability to write an essay about 120 words within half an hour, but it does not suggest how to instruct the student to obtain that ability. It only states the course objectives to make the students have the ability to write an essay, but does not care about the contents or arrangement of a writing class. This gives some colleges or institutes the opportunity to mistake the course objectives for the number of compositions that students must complete within a semester.

Based on the knowledge of their students, one thing that a teacher should do is to diagnose students style and preference, and set their instructional objectives, one of which should be to raise their students awareness of productive and unproductive strategies, and help their students add new strategies to their existing writing strategies. Some curriculum design experts, language educators, or rhetoricians object to explicit instruction objectives, because they believe objectives can “trivialize classroom teaching by forcing instructors to focus only on narrowly defined skills and written products” (vanLier 1996). Nevertheless, there are others who hold the opinion that instructional objectives will not limit teachers freedom or constrain their decision-making if they are regarded as flexible guidelines instead of rigid and prescriptive targets. It could be assumed that the instructional objective of strategy training should be included in the course syllabus, since harmonious cooperation between teachers and students is likely to occur only when objectives are clear to both.

3.2Organization of the writing lessons

Once the objectives of the course are clear, teachers need to identify the lesson objectives and organize individual class periods. Lesson objectives should be made according to instructional objectives. In the same way that the instructional objectives specified in a syllabus identify what knowledge and skills students will acquire at the end of a course, effective lesson objectives describe the observable behaviors that students will demonstrate at the end of a class period or unit. After writing strategy training is made to be one of our instructional objectives, therefore, in the English writing classes, how to teach students to use the pre-writing, while-writing and revising strategies should be included in our class objectives. To meet the objective of training these strategies, teachers have to make their lessons well sequenced and organized. There are many activities to do in a writing class to instruct and train writing strategies, and teachers need to explain the reason for doing these activities; as Purgason(1991:423) pointed out, “Each activity needs to have a reason. A teacher must think through why that activity is important to the students and what they will be able to do when they finish it.” Teachers should always link these activities to one another and to the instructional objectives so that students can see that lessons are internally coherent and connected to overall educational goals. Activities of all types should have perceivable purpose and should be introduced with clear, easy-to-understand directions and procedures. Otherwise, they will not attract students attention and become unproductive. Of course it will take some time for students to get used to using the writing strategies; reviewing and repeating of some activities are necessary. At the beginning and end of each class meeting, teachers should stimulate students to review what they have practiced and why, and explain to them the purposes that their work will serve.

It is reasonable that teachers allot some time in each class to let the students do some timed writing tasks during a writing class period. Actually, the writing of the first draft in the while-writing stage can be regarded as a timed writing task. Provided that students have already known the while-writing strategies, they will use some in the timed writing task. Preceding the timed writing task, pre-writing strategies can be taught and trained; and following it, some while-writing strategies such as peer editing, and revising strategies can be trained. While it is possible that the three types of stage strategies can be instructed and trained within a class meeting period, it may be more feasible that teachers focus on only one of the three types through a period of time.

4 Conclusion

A brief review of the development of writing teaching in the US makes us realize the need to reassess our teaching objectives and rearrange our class activities. New class activities aimed at the training of students writing strategies can be carried out when the process approach integrate into writing teaching. The integration requires much more efforts of teachers than the traditional teaching approach does. It is more challenging since teachers have to be very careful with the sequencing and organization of their classes. Lesson planning becomes an intellectually demanding task confronting the teaching of English writing.

References:

[1]Ferris, D. & J. S. Hedgcock. Teaching ESL Composition: Purpose, Process, and Practice[M].Mahwah New Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum，

[2]Purgason, K. B. Planning Lessons and Units. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language[M].New York: Newbury House, 1991.

[3]Richards, J. C. et al. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics[M].Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2002.

[4]Tarvers, J. K. Teaching Writing: Theories and Practice[M].New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1993.

[5]vanLier, L. Interaction in the Language Curriculum: Awareness, Autonomy, & Authenticity[M].London: Longman, 1996.

作者简介：朱晓斌，男，青岛农业大学外国语学院，助教，硕士。

肖青芝，女，青岛农业大学外国语学院，助教，硕士。