Essay On Second Language Writing

One of the most important skills that second language learners are required to develop is writing. A student when learning a language apart from the L1 needs to be able to write in that particular language. Therefore it is crucial that the teacher will establish the main elements of the writing. Second language learners need to understand an amount of grammar and vocabulary before learning to write but once they have grasped them, teaching can begin. The teacher’s role is to provide the students with all the properties needed in order to write. However, the different approaches to teach second language writing have developed and increased drastically over the past years. There are four major approaches: the product, the process, the ‘post-process’, and genre approach. In this essay, I will develop a writing lesson consulting published materials using two of the above approaches: the product and process approach. As part of the writing lesson I will be explaining the approaches used, why I chose these particular ones and the teaching context.

According to (Benesch, 1996; Johns & Price-Machado, 2001; Spack, 1997b) cited in Ferris and Hedgcock (2005:73) “particular expertise is required to teach writing to non-native speakers of English, therefore we need a systematic way of inquiring into the diverse background features, skills, schemata, and expectations of ESL writers so we can take this information into account when planning instruction”. After having collected the profile of the students it is important to set the goals and objectives of the lesson. Graves (2000:79) cited in Ferris and Hedgcock (2005:87) claimed that “clear goals help to make teaching purposeful because what you do in class is related to your ...

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...The teacher at the end taught writing applying both product and process approaches.

To conclude, when I was taught second language writing, the teacher used both product and process approaches. She usually combined approaches together to design a lesson plan; she would not rely solely on one. As we seen from the literature, writing classrooms consists of a combination of approaches, adopting them in ways which would be interesting and pedagogical. Even though the process approach is a more recent method than the product approach, many teachers and textbook writers combine components of product and process to teach writing. In this writing lesson the process approach was used in order to get students to brainstorm ideas, revise, edit and give peer feedback and the product approach was used to give model texts to the learners to help them with their writing.