Professional Documents
Culture Documents
teaching writing
Richard Badger and Goodith White
Introduction
Product
approaches
153
Pincas (1982a: 24) sees learning as 'assisted imitation', and adopts many
techniques (e.g. substitution tables ibid.: 94), where learners respond to
a stimulus provided by the teacher. However, her comment that, at the
stage of free writing, 'students should feel as if they are creating
something of their own' (ibid.: 110) suggests a view of learners as being
ready to show rather more initiative.
Process
approaches
154
Like product approaches, genre approaches regard writing as predominantly linguistic but, unlike product approaches, they emphasize
that writing varies with the social context in which it is produced. So, we
have a range of kinds of writingsuch as sales letters, research articles,
and reportslinked with different situations (Flowerdew 1993: 307). As
not all learners need to operate in all social contexts, this view of texts
has implications for the writing syllabus.
For genre analysts, the central aspect of the situation is purpose.
Different kinds of writing, or genres, such as letters of apology, recipes,
or law reports, are used to carry out different purposes. Indeed, Swales
defines a genre
. . . as a class of communicative events, the members of which share
some set of communicative purposes. (1990: 58)
Genres are also influenced by other features of the situation, such as the
subject matter, the relationships between the writer and the audience,
and the pattern of organization. This parallels Hedge's (1988) approach,
described above. Martin (1993: 120) offers a diagrammatic explanation
of genre.
In terms of writing development, genre approaches have many
similarities with product approaches. Cope and Kalantzis (1993: 11)
talk of a wheel model of genre literacy. This wheel has three phases:
Figure 1: Martin's
models of genre
Purpose
[Genre)
Channel
[Mode]
Subject matter
Interlocutor Relationship
[Field]
[Tenor]
Text
155
Genre approaches Genre approaches are relative newcomers to ELT. However, there are
strong similarities with product approaches and, in some ways, genre
approaches can be regarded as an extension of product approaches.
The process writing teacher, waiting while the child struggles for
control and ownership... actually favours white, middle-class
students. (Cope and Kalantzis 1993: 57).
Similarly, Kamler (1995: 9) criticizes the genre approach because of
. . . its narrow focus on language and text and its lack of attention to
the instructional and disciplinary contexts in which texts are
constructed.
156
The disadvantages of process approaches are that they often regard all
writing as being produced by the same set of processes; that they give
insufficient importance to the kind of texts writers produce and why such
texts are produced; and that they offer learners insufficient input,
particularly in terms of linguistic knowledge, to write successfully. The
main advantages are that they understand the importance of the skills
involved in writing, and recognize that what learners bring to the writing
classroom contributes to the development of writing ability.
The negative side of genre approaches is that they undervalue the skills
needed to produce a text and see learners as largely passive. More
positively, they acknowledge that writing takes place in a social
situation, and is a reflection of a particular purpose, and understand
that learning can happen consciously through imitation and analysis.
An effective methodology for writing needs to incorporate the insights of
product, process, and genre approaches. One way of doing this is to start
with one approach and adapt it. For example, one problem in the process
approach is the lack of input. White and Arndt (1991) suggest techniques
such as group work, where input is provided by other learners, and
conferencing, where input is provided on a one-to-one basis by the teacher.
Also, some process writing material makes use of sample texts, usually
after the learners have produced afirstdraft (see for example White 1987).
Adapting an approach has led to important developments in the writing
classroom. However, we feel that it is also possible to identify an approach
which is a synthesis of the three approaches, which we term the process
genre approach. An outline of this is presented in the next section.
Towards a
synthesis: writing
in the process
genre approach
157
especially the purpose for the writing (as in genre approaches), and
skills in using language (as in process approaches)
writing development happens by drawing out the learners' potential
(as in process approaches) and by providing input to which the
learners respond (as in product and genre approaches).
Writing in the One of the central insights of genre analysis is that writing is embedded
process genre in a social situation, so that a piece of writing is meant to achieve a
approach particular purpose which comes out of a particular situation. An
example might be an estate agent writing a description of a house in
order to sell it. This purpose has implications for the subject matter, the
writer/audience relationship and organization, channel, or mode (see
Hedge 1988: 15, and Martin 1993: 23). While genre analysis focuses on
the language used in a particular text, we would want to include
processes by which writers produce a text reflecting these elements
under the term 'process genre'. This would cover the process by which
writers decide what aspects of the house should be highlighted, as well as
the knowledge of the appropriate language.
In the writing classroom, teachers need to replicate the situation as
closely as possible and then provide sufficient support for learners to
identify the purpose and other aspects of the social context. So learners
who wanted to be estate agents would need to consider that their
description is meant to sell the house (purpose), that it must appeal to a
certain group of people (tenor), that it must include certain information
(field), and that there are ways in which house descriptions are
presented (mode). Then, drawing on their knowledge of things such as
vocabulary, grammar, and organization, our writers would use the skills
appropriate to the genre, such as redrafting and proof-reading, to
produce a description of a house which reflects the situation from which
it arises. We have attempted to illustrate this in the left-hand column of
Figure 2 (on the next page).
Different genres require different kinds of knowledge and different sets
of skills, and our knowledge of both the knowledge and skill involved in
different genres is limited. However, teachers are expert writers of many
genres, and a key feature of this approach is that they should draw on
their own knowledge of, and skills in, particular process genres.
The development of The development of writing will vary between different groups of
writing in a process learners because they are at different stages of their writing developgenre approach ment. Learners who know a lot about the production of a particular
genre, and are skilled in it, may need little or no input. Some groups of
learners will have a good awareness of how the potential audience may
constrain what is written. Other groups may lack knowledge of what
language is appropriate to a particular audience. In this case, the
learners need some kind of input in terms of, say, the language
appropriate to a particular audience, or the skills in deciding whom the
potential audience may be. What input is needed will depend on their
particular group of learners.
158
Figure 2: A genre
process model of
teaching writing
Possible input
Situation '
Purpose
^ Teacher
Publishing
Text
, i ' _
'
'
_ 2 Learners
2i
,"
Texts
' - '
In many cases, the teacher is not able to find out what the learners know
or can do before the class. In this case, a deep-end approach modelled
on Willis (1996: 100) may be appropriate. Learners try to carry out one
element in a process genre, and then compare their texts or skills in text
production with some expert's (possibly the teacher's) version of this.
On the basis of this comparison, they or the teacher can then decide if
they need further input of knowledge or skills.
Where learners lack knowledge, we can draw on three potential sources:
the teacher, other learners, and examples of the target genre. Teachers
may provide input in terms of instruction (mention the number of
rooms), other learners may do the same in the less threatening context
of group work, but perhaps the most distinctive source of input about
contextual and linguistic knowledge in a genre process approach is
language awareness activities. Genre analysis attempts to reveal the
similarities between texts written for the same reason, and so it is likely
that these language awareness activities will be based on a corpus of the
relevant genre. Key materials for genre process teachers are sets of
corpora of the kinds of texts their learners want to write. In our house
description exercise, learners might investigate the kind of sentence
structure used in estate agents' descriptions of a house, the kind of
vocabulary used to make the position sound attractive and where the
price appears. Flowerdew (1993) and Dudley-Evans (1997) also suggest
activities such as using flow charts to illustrate the organization of
particular genres and translation.
Learners may also require input about the skills needed for writing. A
rich source here comes from observing other students and the teacher.
Teachers may find direct instruction on skills effectivethink about why
you are writing the descriptionbut an alternative is a demonstration by
the teacher or other skilled writer, possibly accompanied by a commentary
A process genre approach to teaching writing
159
Planning ^ T
Drafting
Drafting
>N
attempting to explain the mental processes that underlie the exercise of the
skill. For example, teachers might explain why they chose to include
certain information about a house and leave out other information.
Figure 2 illustrates the possible input in the process genre. The use of
dashes is intended to indicate that input is not always required.
Summary
160