Writing process

Writing Process

Writing is without doubt one of the most difficult skills to develop when learning a second language, since it demands a higher construction at semantic and syntactic level. In the development of writing skills it significant to mention that English writing is essentially similar for both first and second language writers, there are some important differences in what the twogroups bring to the task… Second language proficiency plays a role in writing (Peregogy and Boyle, 2000).

Writing is a process and that is why there is an approach to teach writing called “process writing” that allow students to concentrate in one task at a time to experience the value of peer feedback in developing their ideas for effective written expression (Boyle mentioned by Peregogyand Boyle, 2000) . Likewise, students experience five stages or phases when writing according to this approach: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

Prewriting

These stage students generate and gather ideas to select a topic; students can make a brainstorming that lead them to identify main ideas and supporting details. Some of the strategies that can be applied duringthis phase are clustering, questioning, reading, keeping journals in all content areas.

Drafting
After choose the topic they will write on, there is time to write the first draft, they just have to generate well organized ideas referred to the topic and put them into a piece of paper. Some strategies to foster this phase are fast writing, buddy journals, dialogue journals among others.Revising

Once they have written this preliminary ideas student must read them again and receive feedback from the teacher or from their peers. In this phase they have to reorder, review supporting ideas and arguments. Some strategies to foster this phase are peer response groups, teacher conferences, combining sentences among other.

Editing

This is the phase where students based on thefeedback given must correct spelling, grammar punctuation, mechanism etc. Some strategies that can be implemented are peer editing groups and mini lessons.

Publishing

Finally the paper is ready to be shared, with other students parents etc. there are lots of strategies to share the final product some of them are bulletin boards, school newspaper, it can be published in the School web siteetc.

As we saw, the process of writing in second language is almost the same to the native one, and as well as this phases that can help students to improve this particular skill there is also a matrix that give a general standard for fluency, organization grammar, vocabulary, genre, sentence variety in beginning, intermediate and advance level. I will concentrate in the first level sinceis the one where the participants of this research are located (Boyle mentioned by Peregogy and Boyle, 2000).

What has to do with fluency students in beginning level write one or two short sentence, I organization lack logical sequence or so that organization present no problem, in grammar there basic word order, they use only present tense form; in vocabulary they have limited vocabulary sothey ask frequently for translation; in genre the do not differentiate for to suit purpose; and in sentence variety they use one or two sentence patterns. (Boyle mentioned by Peregogy and Boyle, 2000).

One of the most important interests in this research project is to find a strategy which teacher can use in order to improve writing that as it is known students after many years of beinglearning a second language they have considerably difficulty in this. ¨Writing is one of the four skills, commonly accepted goals of learning a foreign
language, but often a skill that “falls through.” It is not uncommon to see learners with
years of foreign language instruction experience have considerable difficulty when they have to write for communication in the target language¨ (Deqi Zen,...