“There is no one ‘process’ for writing, but many, as writers juggle the various responsibilities they have to genre, to the situation, to their roles, to the language, or to themselves as thinking, negotiating participants in the production and revision of texts” (p. 198). I started this reflection with this quote is because I believe that there are many ways of teaching writing and the process of learning a new language should be fun. However, when we introduce different writing genres in the class, it is important to provide guidelines for students to follow and also the purposes of writing in certain genres. When I was learning English in junior and senior high school, there was no such thing as writing a business letter, fiction or poems. Also, in public schools, they did not provide any class specifically for English writing. The only opportunity we had to write were exercises where we had to put sentences together (the sentences we imitated from textbooks) into paragraphs with correct grammar. This kind of formalist writing style is very suitable for exam-based educational systems (like Taiwan) because if we can produce paragraphs with accurate grammar, we are able to enter good schools.
I also like that Johns mentioned about peer editing and revising in The Sydney School system. If we open a space for ESL students to explore their own voices through different genre writing, they can have some fun playing with the language. Also, through peer editing, students can receive critiques from others and generate more ideas and contents. Writing should not only focus on the sentence level, but the richness of the content.
I wonder how genre writing can help students who need to pass English exams to go to high school and college. There is only a certain amount of time for students to finish their writing with a given topic. Also, since the English class is driven by the exam-based system, how do teachers incorporate genre writing into the class and show the transition between genre writing and exam writing?
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First of all, I do agree with you Wan-Nnin that learning a language should be fun. This can lower one’s anxiety and apprehension because language learning is not that easy. Every little achievement that one can do is worth encouraging and we should design manageable and achievable objectives for language learning.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the point you raise as to providing guidelines in the teaching of the different genres in writing is very important. Students need to know the process and the purpose. However, in many EFL contexts, writing as a language skill is not taught at all, and other times when it is taught it’s still done in a product –oriented fashion or just to meet the requirements of standardized or national tests. Yet, from this week’s reading and the researches embedded there, I do believe that a genre-based pedagogy to writing instruction can have promoting results.
With regard to the last question, why not view / present exam-writing as a genre in itself (or a sub-genre of academic writing)? Any writing for an exam has its own rules, rubrics for assessment and 'audience' expectations. ETS, for instance, claims that the Writing Section of iBT TORFL is constructed in such a way as to model American college / academic writing.
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