Second Language WRITING {KEN HYLAND} (ตอนที่ 1)

(ตอนที่ 1)

KENHYLAND
SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING

CAMBRIDGE LANGUAGE EDUCATION
SERIES EDITOR
JACK C. RICHAKDS

Second Language Writing
i

CAMBRIDGE LANGUAGE EDUCATION Series Editor: Jack C. Richards
This series draws on the best available research, theory, and educational practice to help clarify issues and resolve problems in language teaching, language teacher education, and related areas. Books in the series focus on a wide range of issues and are written in a style that is accessible to classroom teachers, teachers-in-training, and teacher educators.
In this series:
Agendas for Second Language Literacy by Sandra Lee McKay
Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms by Jack C. Richards and Charles Lockhart
Educating Second Language Children: The Whole Child, the Whole Curriculum, the Whole Community edited by Fred Genesee
Understanding Communication in Second Language Classrooms by
Karen E. Johnson
The Self-Directed Teacher: Managing the Learning Process by David Nunan and Clarice Lamb
Functional English Grammar: An Introduction for Second Language Teachers by Graham Lock
Teachers as Course Developers edited by Kathleen Graves
Classroom-Based Evaluation in Second Language Education by Fred Genesee and John A. Upshar
From Reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms by Jo Ann Aebersold and Mary Lee Field
Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom by Richard R. Day and Julian Bamford
Language Teaching Awareness: A Guide to Exploring Beliefs and Practices by Jerry G. Gebhard and Robert Oprandy
Vocabulary in Second Language Teaching by Norbert Schmitt
Curriculum Development in Language Teaching by Jack C Richards
Teachers' Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development by Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek



Second Langua Writing
Ken Hyland
City University of Hong Kong

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1,1,1

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
www. Cambridge, org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521534307
© Ken Hyland 2003
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2003 3rd printing 2007
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hyland, Ken.
Second Language Writing / Ken Hyland.
p. cm. (Cambridge language education)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-82705-1; ISBN 0-521-53430-5 (pb.)
1. Language and languages - Study and teaching. 2. Rhetoric - Study and teaching.
3. Second language acquisition. I. Title. II. Series.
P53.27.H95 2003
808' .042-dc21 2003041957
ISBN 978-0-521-53430-7 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLS for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents
Series Editor's Preface xiii Preface xv Acknowledgments xvii
1 Writing and teaching writing 1
Guiding concepts in L2 writing teaching 2
Focus on language structures 3
Focus on text functions 6
Focus on creative expression 8
Focus on the writing process 10
Focus on content 14
Focus on genre 18
Toward a synthesis: Process, purpose, and context
Summary and conclusion 27
Discussion questions and activities 28
2 Second language writers 31
Potential LI and L2 writer differences 32 Cultural schemata and writing 37 Expectations about teaching and learning 40 Teaching and learning styles 42 Cultural differences in written texts 45 Summary and conclusion 50 Discussion questions and activities 51 Appendix 2.1 Perceptual learning style preference questionnaire 53
3 Syllabus design and lesson planning 54
Elements of a writing syllabus 55 Analyzing student needs 58

viii Contents
Analyzing the learning context 64
Setting course goals and objectives 67
Developing the syllabus 70
Sample approaches to syllabus organization 73
Planning units of work 76
Planning lessons 19
Summary and conclusion 81
Discussion questions and activities 82
Appendix 3.1 Lesson plan for a writing class 84
4 Texts and materials in the writing class 85
The roles of materials in the writing class 86
Materials and authenticity 92
Selecting and assessing textbooks 95
Modifying writing textbooks 98
Designing materials for the writing class 100
Selecting and locating texts 104
Finding and selecting language and practice materials
Summary and conclusion 109
Discussion questions and activities 110
5 Tasks in the L2 writing class 112
Types of writing tasks 113
Task components 116
Graphological tasks 120
Language scaffolding 122
Language scaffolding tasks 124
Composing tasks 130
Sequencing writing tasks: The teaching-writing cycle
Summary and conclusion 139
Discussion questions and activities 141
6 New technologies in writing instruction 143
Computers, writing, and language learning 144
Word processing and writing teaching 146
Online writing 150
Internet resources for writing 158
CALL resources for writing 162
Corpora and concordancing 167
Summary and conclusion 172

Contents ix
Discussion questions and activities 172
Appendix 6.1 Some useful websites for writing teachers 174
7 Responding to student writing 177
Teacher written feedback 178
Teacher-student conferencing 192
Peer feedback 198
Summary and conclusion 207
Discussion questions and activities 208
Appendix 7.1 A rubric for the first draft of a university expository
essay assignment 210
Appendix 7.2 A peer response sheet 211
8 Assessing student writing 212
Purposes of assessment 213 Validity and reliability issues 215 Designing assessment tasks 220 Approaches to scoring 226 Reducing assessment anxiety 232 Portfolio assessments 233 Summary and conclusion 239 Discussion questions and activities 240 Appendix 8.1 Holistic marking scheme 241 Appendix 8.2 An analytic scoring rubric 243
9 Researching writing and writers 245
Some preliminaries and key steps 246
Generating research: Formulating and focusing a question 247
Designing research 249
Collecting data 252
Analyzing writing data 264
Reporting research 270
Summary and conclusion 272
Discussion questions and activities 272
Appendix 9.1 Some topics and issues in writmg research 275
References 277 Index 295

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publishers and I are grateful to authors, publishers, and software developers who have given permission to reproduce copyright material.
Example tasks on pages 4, 29 and 134 from Hamp-Lyons, L., & B. Heasley. (1987). Study Writing. Pages 23 and 52. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Example tasks on page 10 from O'Keefe, X (2000). Invitation to reading and writing. Pages 99 and 141. Reproduced with the permission of Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle River, NX
Diagrams on pages 15 and 135 from White, R., & Arndt, V (1991). Process writing. Pages 32 and 63. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Ltd.
Example task on page 16 from Blass, L., & Pike-Baky, M. (1985). Mosaic: a content-based writing book. Page 121. Reprinted with the permission of McGraw-Hill Education.
Example task on page 30 from Bhatia, VK. (1997). Applied genre analysis and ESP. In Miller, T. (ed) Functional approaches to written text. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Diagram on page 39 from Ballard, B., & Clanchy, X (1991). Assessment by misconception: cultural influences and intellectual traditions. In L. Hamp-Lyons (Ed.) Assessing second language writing in academic contexts. Page 22. Reproduced with the permission of Greenwood Publishing Group.
Diagrams on pages 56, 60, and 101 from Hutchison, T, & Waters, A. (1987). English for Specific Purposes: a learning-centred approach. Pages 62-3, 74 and 108-9. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Example materials on page 67-8 from Hoist, X (1995) Writ 101: Writing English. page 48. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Example task on page 87 from Jordan, R. (1990). Academic Writing Course. Page 39. Reproduced with the permission of Collins ELT.
Example task on page 88 from Swales, X, & Feak, C. (2000). English in todays research world: a writing guide. Page 17-18. Reproduced with the permission of The University of Michigan Press.
Example task on page 89 from Brown, K., & Hood, S. (1989). Writing matters: writing skills and strategies for students of English. Page 11. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Example tasks on pages 91 and 134 from Grellet, F. (1996). Writing for advanced learners of English, pp. 58, 103, and 109. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Diagram on page 102 from Jolly, D., & Bolitho, R. (1998). A framework for materials writing. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials development in language teaching

(pp. 90-115). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Example task on page 121 from Coe, N., Rycroft, R., & Ernest, P. (1992). Writing: A problem solving approach, pp. 26-7. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Diagram on page 124 from English K-6 Modules page 287. Reproduced with the pennission of the Office of the Board of Studies of New South Wales, Australia. © 1998.
Example tasks on page 126 from Seal, B. (1997). Academic encounters: content focus human behaviour student's book. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press."
Example task on page 126 from Swales, X, & Feak, C. (1994). Academic writing for graduate students: essential tasks and skills. Page 114-6. Reproduced with the permission of The University of Michigan Press.
Example task on page 128 from Rowntree, K. (1991). Writing for success: A practical guide for New Zealand students. Page 164. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Ltd.
Diagram on page 138 reprinted from Text-Based syllabus design by Susan Feez, (1998), p28, based on a concept by Callaghan and Rothery with permission from the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Australia. © Macquarie University.
Screenshot on page 149 of Respond from the Daedalus Writing State. Reproduced with the permission of The Daedalus Group Inc.
Screenshot on page 155 of an on-line conversation in ICQ. Reproduced with the permission of ICQ Inc.
Screenshot on page 156 of the Entrance to Tapped In. Reproduced with the permission of Tapped In and SRI International Ltd.
Example task on page 159 from Windeatt, S., Hardisty, D., & Eastment, D. (2000). Resource book for teachers: The internet, (publisher's website). Reproduced with the pennission of Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press.
Screenshot on page 161, from the Purdue University On-Line Writing Lab (OWL). Reproduced with the permission of Purdue Research Foundation.
Screenshots on pages 163, 164, 165, and 166 from Mindgame, Click into English, Report Writer, and Tense Buster. Reproduced with the permission of Andrew Stokes and Clarity Software.
Screenshots on pages 168, 169, and 171, from WordPilot 2000. Reproduced with the permission of John Milton and Compulang.
Figure on page 234 from Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: developing academic literacies. Page 140-1. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.



Series Editor's Preface
Learning how to write in a second language is one of the most challenging aspects of second language learning. Perhaps this is not surprising in view of the fact that even for those who speak English as a first language, the abil¬ity to write effectively is something that requires extensive and specialized instruction and which has consequently spawned a vast freshman compo¬sition industry in American colleges and universities. Within the field of second and foreign language teaching, the teaching of writing has come to assume a much more central position than it occupied twenty or thirty years ago. This is perhaps the result of two factors.
On the one hand, command of good writing skills is increasingly seen as vital to equip learners for success in the twenty-first century. The ability to communicate ideas and information effectively through the global digital network is crucially dependent on good writing skills. Writing has been identified as one of the essential process skills in a world that is more than ever driven by text and numerical data. A further strengthening of the status of writing within applied linguistics has come from the expanded knowledge base on the nature of written texts and writing processes that has been developed by scholars in such fields as composition studies, second language writing, genre theory, and contrastive rhetoric. As a result there is an active interest today in new theoretical approaches to the study of written texts as well as approaches to the teaching of second language writing that incorporate current theory and research findings.
This book is therefore quite timely. It provides a comprehensive and extremely readable overview of the field of second language writing, exam¬ining how theories of writing and the teaching of writing have evolved, the nature of good writing, the nature of texts and genres and how they reflect their use in particular discourse communities, the relationship between writ¬ing in the first and second language, how a curriculum can be developed for a writing course, the development of instructional materials for a writing class, the uses of the computer in writing instruction, and approaches to feedback and assessment. The book also examines approaches to research on second language writing and shows how teachers can investigate their
xiii

xiv Series Editor's Preface
students' writing problems and explore their own practices in the teaching of writing.
The book reflects Professor Hyland's dual role as a leading researcher in the field of second language writing and an experienced teacher of second language writing. Theory and research are hence used throughout to illu¬minate some of the pedagogical issues and decisions that are involved in teaching second language writing. The insights presented both through the text as well as through the tasks readers are invited to carry out will provide an invaluable source of ideas and principles to inform teachers' and student teachers' classroom decision making.

f

Preface
Writing is among the most important skills that second language students need to develop, and the ability to teach writing is central to the expertise of a well-trained language teacher. But while interest in second language writing and approaches to teaching it have increased dramatically over the last decade, teachers are often left to their own resources in the classroom as much of the relevant theory and research fails to reach them. This book addresses this problem by providing a synthesis of theory, research, and practice to help teachers of language become teachers of writing.
This book is written for practicing teachers and teachers in training who have little or no experience teaching writing to students from non-English-speaking backgrounds. More specifically, it attempts to meet the needs of those who are or will be teaching students who speak English as a second or foreign language in colleges, universities, workplaces, language institutes, and senior secondary schools. Those who teach children or teach basic literacy skills to adults will also find much of value. The book pulls together the theory and practice of teaching writing to present an accessible and practical introduction to the subject without assuming any prior theoretical knowledge or teaching experience.
This text is founded on the premise that an effective teacher is one who can make informed choices about the methods, materials, and procedures to use in the classroom based on a clear understanding of the current attitudes and practices in his or her profession. A strong teacher is a reflective teacher, and reflection requires the knowledge to relate classroom activities to relevant research and theory. The book's practical approach toward second language writing attempts to provide a basis for this kind of reflection and under¬standing. In the text the reader will find a clear stance toward teaching writ¬ing which emphasizes the view that writing involves composing skills and knowledge about texts, contexts, and readers. It helps to develop the idea that writers need realistic strategies for drafting and revising, but they also must have a clear understanding of genre to structure their writing experiences ac¬cording to the demands and constraints of particular contexts. I incorporate this emphasis on strategy, language, and context throughout the book.
xv

xvi Preface
The book also recognizes that teachers work in a range of situations - in schools, colleges, universities, corporate training divisions, and language institutes - and with students of different motivations, proficiencies, lan¬guage backgrounds, and needs. They also work in contexts where English is taught as a Second Language (ESL) or as a Foreign Language (EFL), a distinction based on the language spoken by the community in which En¬glish is being studied. An ESL situation exists when the local community is largely English speaking, such as Australia, the United States, or the United Kingdom, while EFL contexts are those in which English is not the host language. Like most polarizations, however, this distinction obscures more complicated realities. For instance, ESL contexts can be further dis¬tinguished between learners who are migrants and who may therefore need occupational and survival writing skills, and those who plan to return to their own countries once they complete their courses. EFL contexts may include those where an indigenized variety has emerged (Singapore, India) or where colonization has afforded English a prominent role in local life (Hong Kong, Philippines), and those where English is rafely encountered (Korea, Japan).
These differences will have an impact on the kind of language students need and their motivation to acquire it, the cultural and linguistic homo¬geneity of the students, and the resources available to teachers. There are, however, sufficient similarities between these diverse types of context to fo¬cus on issues that concern all those who teach writing to non-native English speakers. In recognition of these similarities I shall use the acronym L2 as a generic form to refer to all users of English from non-English-speaking backgrounds and ESL as shorthand for all contexts in which such students are learning English. (Likewise, I use LI to refer to those for whom English is their primary language.) The text also treats these students and contexts as similar by systematically setting out the key issues of classroom teach¬ing in both contexts, addressing topics such as assessing needs, designing syllabuses, writing materials, developing tasks, using technology, giving feedback, and evaluating writing. In this way I hope to provide teachers with the resources to plan, implement, and evaluate a program of writing instruction for any teaching situation in which they may find themselves.
The book provides opportunities for you to engage with the ideas pre¬sented. Reflection tasks occur regularly through the chapters, encouraging readers to think about their own views on a topic and their potential needs as writing teachers. Each chapter concludes with a series of Discussion questions and activities which ask readers to consider ideas, examples of lesson plans, questionnaires, tasks or materials and so on, or to devise those of their own.

Acknowledgments
Textbooks cannot be written in a vacuum and I am grateful to the stu¬dents, colleagues, and friends who have encouraged me, discussed ideas, and provided insights which have contributed to this book. I am particularly indebted to friends in Hong Kong, Australia, Britain, and the United States, especially Sue Hood, Chris Candlin, Malcolm Coulthard, John Swales, and Ann Johns, whose conversations and texts over many years have stimulated and sustained my long interest in writing, in both first and second languages.
I also want to acknowledge the ESL teachers studying the Master of Arts in English for Specific Purposes course at City University of Hong Kong for their feedback on many of the ideas and approaches discussed in these pages, and to my research assistant, Polly Tse, for her good humor and help in tracking down elusive items on the reference list. I am also grateful to Jack Richards, the series editor, who gave me the encouragement to write this book.
My thanks, as ever, go to Fiona Hyland, not only for allowing me to make use of her data, her valuable feedback on draft chapters, and her stimulating ideas on teaching writing, but for her constant support and encouragement.
xvii



1 Writing and teaching writing
Aims: This chapter will explore some of the ways that writing is viewed and the implications this has for teaching. It outlines the kinds of knowledge and skills involved in writing and develops some general principles for L2 writing teaching through a critical analysis of the main classroom orientations.
As EFL/ESL writing teachers, our main activities involve conceptualizing, planning, and delivering courses. At first sight, this seems to be mainly an application of practical professional knowledge, gained through hands-on classroom experience. To some extent this is true of course, for like any craft, teaching improves with practice. But there is more to it than this. Experience can only be a part of the picture, as our classroom decisions are always informed by our theories and beliefs about what writing is and how people learn to write. Everything we do in the classroom, the methods and materials we adopt, the teaching styles we assume, the tasks we assign, are guided by both practical and theoretical knowledge, and our decisions can be more effective if that knowledge is explicit. A familiarity with what is known about wilting, and about teaching writing, can therefore help us to reflect on our assumptions and enable us to approach current teaching methods with an informed and critical eye.
This chapter provides an overview of how different conceptions of writ¬ing and learning influence teaching practices in L2 classrooms. For clarity I will present these conceptions under different headings, but it would be wrong to understand them as core dichotomies. The approaches discussed represent available options which can be translated into classroom practices in many different ways and combinations. Together they offer a picture of current L2 writing instruction.
1

2 Writing and teaching writing
Reflection 1.1
Spend a few minutes to reflect on your own experiences as a writing teacher. (a) What are the most important things you want students to learn from your classes? (b) What kinds of activities do you use? (c) Do you think an under¬standing of different ideas about writing and teaching could help you to become a better teacher? (d) Why?
Guiding concepts in L2 writing teaching
A number of theories supporting teachers' efforts to understand L2 writing and learning have developed since EFL/ESL writing first emerged as a distinctive area of scholarship in the 1980s. In most cases each has been enthusiastically taken up, translated into appropriate methodologies, and put to work in classrooms. Yet each also has typically been seen as another piece in the jigsaw, an additional perspective to illuminate what learners need to learn and what teachers need to provide for effective writing instruction. So, while often treated as historically evolving movements (e.g., Raimes, 1991), it would be wrong to see each theory growing out of and replacing the last. They are more accurately seen as complementary and overlapping perspectives, representing potentially compatible means of understanding the complex reality of writing. It is helpful therefore to understand these theories as curriculum options, each organizing L2 writing teaching around a different focus:
• language structures
• text functions
• themes or topics
• creative expression
• composing processes
• content
• genre and contexts of writing
Few teachers adopt and strictly follow just one of these orientations in their classrooms. Instead, they tend to adopt an eclectic range of methods that represent several perspectives, accommodating their practices to the con¬straints of their teaching situations and their beliefs about how students learn to write. But although the "pure" application of a particular theory is quite rare, it is common for one to predominate in how teachers conceptualize their work and organize what they do in their classrooms (Cumming, 2003).

Focus on language structures 3
Teachers therefore tend to recognize and draw on a number of approaches but typically show a preference for one of them. So, even though they rarely constitute distinct classroom approaches, it is helpful to examine each con¬ception separately to discover more clearly what each tells us about writing and how it can support our teaching.
Reflection 1.2
Which of the curriculum orientations previously listed are you most familiar with? Can you identify one that best fits your own experience of teaching or learning to write in a second language? Might some orientations be more appropriate for some teaching-learning situations than others?
Focus on language structures
One way to look at writing is to see it as marks on a page or a screen, a coherent arrangement of words, clauses, and sentences, structured according to a system of rules. Conceptualizing L2 writing in this way directs attention to writing as a product and encourages a focus on formal text units or grammatical features of texts. In this view, learning to write in a foreign or second language mainly involves linguistic knowledge and the vocabulary choices, syntactic patterns, and cohesive devices that comprise the essential building blocks of texts.
This orientation was born from the marriage of structural linguistics and the behaviorist learning theories of second language teaching that were dominant in the 1960s (Silva, 1990). Essentially, writing is seen as a product constructed from the writer's command of grammatical and lexical knowl¬edge, and writing development is considered to be the result of imitating and manipulating models provided by the teacher. For many who adopt this view, writing is regarded as an extension of grammar - a means of reinforc¬ing language patterns through habit formation and testing learners' ability to produce well-formed sentences. For others, writing is an intricate struc¬ture that can only be learned by developing the ability to manipulate lexis and grammar.
An emphasis on language structure as a basis for writing teaching is typically a four-stage process:
1. Familiarization: Learners are taught certain grammar and vocabulary, usually through a text.

! 4 Writing and teaching writing
Table 1.1: A substitution table

There are Y types kinds classes ofX : A, B, and C.
. These are A, B, and C.
are A, B, and C.
The categories
X Consists of
Can be divided
into
classes Y categories classes kinds types . These are A, B, and C. : A, B, and C.
A, B, and C are kinds types categories ofX.
Source: Hamp-Lyons and Heasley, 1987: 23
2. Controlled writing: Learners manipulate fixed patterns, often from substitution tables.
3. Guided writing: Learners imitate model texts.
4. Free writing: Learners use the patterns they have developed to write an essay, letter, and so forth.
Texts are often regarded as a series of appropriate grammatical struc¬tures, and so instruction may employ "slot and filler" frameworks in which sentences with different meanings can be generated by varying the words in the slots. Writing is rigidly controlled through guided compositions where learners are given short texts and asked to fill in gaps, complete sentences, transform tenses or personal pronouns, and complete other exercises that focus students on achieving accuracy and avoiding errors. A common ap-plication of this is the substitution table (Table 1.1) which provides models for students and allows them to generate risk-free sentences.
The structural orientation thus emphasizes writing as combinations of lexical and syntactic forms and good writing as the demonstration of knowl¬edge of these forms and of the rules used to create texts. Accuracy and clear exposition are considered the main criteria of good writing, while the actual communicative content, the meaning, is left to be dealt with later. Teach¬ing writing predominantly involves developing learners' skills in producing fixed patterns, and responding to writing means identifying and correcting problems in the student's control of the language system. Many of these tech-niques are widely used today in writing classes at lower levels of language proficiency for building vocabulary, scaffolding writing development, and increasing the confidence of novice writers.

!
Focus on language structures 5
Reflection 1.3
Consider your own writing teaching practices or your experiences of writing as a student. Do they include elements of approaches that emphasize language structures? Can such approaches be effective in developing writing? In what situations might they be a useful response to student needs?
Although many L2 students learn to write in this way, a structural orien¬tation can create serious problems. One drawback is that formal patterns are often presented as short fragments which tend to be based on the intuitions of materials writers rather than the analyses of real texts. This not only hin¬ders students from developing their writing beyond a few sentences, but can also mislead or confuse them when they have to write in other situations. Nor is it easy to see how a focus restricted to grammar can lead to bet¬ter writing. Research has tried to measure students' writing improvement through their increased use of formal features such as relative clauses or the "syntactic complexity" of their texts (e.g., Hunt, 1983). Syntactic complex¬ity and grammatical accuracy, however, are not the only features of writing improvement and may not even be the best measures of good writing. Most teachers are familiar with students who can construct accurate sentences and yet are unable to produce appropriate written texts, while fewer errors in an essay may simply reveal a reluctance to take risks, rather than indicate progress.
More seriously, the goal of writing instruction can never be just training in explicitness and accuracy because written texts are always a response to a particular communicative setting. No feature can be a universal marker of good writing because good writing is always contextually variable. Writers always draw on their knowledge of their readers and similar texts to decide both what to say and how to say it, aware that different forms express differ¬ent relationships and meanings. Conversely, readers always draw on their linguistic and contextual assumptions to recover these meanings from texts, and this is confirmed in the large literature on knowledge-based inferencing in reading comprehension (e.g., Barnett, 1989).
For these reasons, few L2 writing teachers now see writing only as surface forms. But it is equally unhelpful to see language as irrelevant to learning to write. Control over surface features is crucial, and students need an understanding of how words, sentences, and larger discourse structures can shape and express the meanings they want to convey. Most teachers therefore include formal elements in their courses, but they also look beyond language

6 Writing and teaching writing
structures to ensure that students don't just know how to write grammatically correct texts, but also how to apply this knowledge for particular purposes and contexts.
Reflection 1.4
Can you imagine any circumstances when you might focus on language struc-tures in a writing class? Are there ways you might be able to adapt this focus to help students express their meanings?
Focus on text functions
While L2 students obviously need an understanding of appropriate grammar and vocabulary when learning to write in English, writing is obviously not only these things. If language structures are to be part of a writmg course, then we need principled reasons for choosing which patterns to teach and how they can be used effectively. An important principle here is to relate structures to meanings, making language use a criteria for teaching materi¬als. This introduces the idea that particular language forms perform certain communicative functions and that students can be taught the functions most relevant to their needs. Functions are the means for achieving the ends (or purposes) of writing. This orientation is sometimes labeled "current-traditional rhetoric" or simply a "functional approach" and is influential where L2 students are being prepared for academic writing at college or university.
One aim of this focus is to help students develop effective paragraphs through the creation of topic sentences, supporting sentences, and transi¬tions, and to develop different types of paragraphs. Students are guided to produce connected sentences according to prescribed formulas and tasks which tend to focus on form to positively reinforce model writing patterns. As with sentence-level activities, composing tasks often include so-called free writing methods, which largely involve learners reordering sentences in scrambled paragraphs, selecting appropriate sentences to complete gapped paragraphs and write paragraphs from provided information.
Clearly, this orientation is heavily influenced by the structural model described above, as paragraphs are seen almost as syntactic units like sentences, in which writers can fit particular functional units into given slots. From this it is a short step to apply the same principles to entire essays. Texts can then be seen as composed of structural entities such as

r

Focus on text functions 7

Unit 1 Structure and cohesion
Unit 2 Description: Process and procedure
Unit 3 Description: Physical
Unit 4 Narrative
Unit 5 Definitions
Unit 6 Exemplification
Unit 7 Classification
Unit 8 Comparison and contrast
Unit 9 Cause and effect
Unit 10 Generalization, qualification, and certainty
Unit 11 Interpretation of data
Unit 12 Discussion
Unit 13 Drawing conclusions
Unit 14 Reports: studies and research
Unit 15 Surveys and questionnaires
Source: Adapted from Jordan, 1990.
Figure 1.1: A contents page from a functionally oriented textbook.
Introduction-Body-Conclusion, and particular organizational patterns such as narration, description, and exposition are described and taught. Typically, courses are organized according to common functions of written English, such as the example from a popular academic writing textbook shown in Figure 1.1.
Each unit typically contains comprehension checks on a model text. These are followed by exercises that draw attention to the language used to express the target function and that develop students' abilities to use them in their writing. Such tasks include developing an outline into an essay, or imitating the patterns of a parallel text in their own essay. Again, these offer good scaffolding for writing by supporting L2 learners' development. An example is shown in Figure 1.2.
While meaning is involved in these tasks and instructional strategies, they are essentially concerned with disembodied patterns rather than writ¬ing activities that have any meaning or purpose for students. An exclusive focus on form or function means that writing is detached from the practical purposes and personal experiences of the writer. Methods such as guided compositions are based on the assumption that texts are objects that can be taught independently of particular contexts, writers, or readers, and that by following certain rules, writers can fully represent their intended meanings. Writing, however, is more than a matter of arranging elements in the best or-der, and writing instruction is more than assisting learners to remember and execute these patterns. An awareness of this has led teachers to make efforts to introduce the writer into their models of writing and writing teaching,

8 Writing and teaching writing
There are basically two main ways to organise a cause and effect essay: "block" organization and "chain" organization. In block organization, you first discuss ail of the causes as a block (in one, two, three or more paragraphs, depending on the number of causes). Then you discuss ail of the effects together as a block. In chain organization, you discuss a first cause and its effect, a second cause and its effect, a third cause and its effect. Usually, each new cause is the result of the preceding effect. Discussion of each new cause and its effect begins with a new paragraph. Ail the paragraphs are linked in a "chain."

BLOCK CHAIN
Introduction Introduction
First cause First cause
Second cause Effect
Transition paragraph Second Cause
First effect Effect
Second effect Third Cause
Third effect Effect
Conclusion Conclusion
Source: Adapted from Oshima and Hogue, 1999:130-1.
Figure 1.2: A paragraph organization description.
and it is to orientations that highlight writers to which we turn in the next section.
Reflection 1.5
What arguments would persuade you to adopt a Functional orientation to your teaching?
Focus on creative expression
The third teaching orientation takes the writer, rather than form, as the point of departure. Following LI composition theorists such as Elbow (1998) and Murray (1985), many writing teachers from liberal arts backgrounds see their classroom goals as fostering L2 students' expressive abilities, en¬couraging them to find their own voices to produce writing that is fresh and spontaneous. These classrooms are organized around students' per¬sonal experiences and opinions, and writing is considered a creative act of self-discovery. This can help generate self-awareness of the writer's so¬cial position and literate possibilities (Friere, 1974) as well as facilitate "clear thinking, effective relating, and satisfying self-expression" (Moffett,

Focus on creative expression 9
1982: 235). A writing teacher in Japan characterized his approach like this:
I try to challenge the students to be creative in expressing themselves. Students learn to express their feelings and opinions so that others can understand what they think and like to do. I've heard that prospective employers sometimes ask students what they have learned at university, and that some students have showed them their poems, [quoted in Gumming, 2003]
Refiection 1.6
Can you recall an experience when you wrote a creative text, perhaps a poem or short story? Do you feel that this was helpful in developing your skills as a writer more generally? In what ways?
From this perspective, writing is learned, not taught, so writing instruction is nondirective and personal. Writing is a way of sharing personal meanings and writing courses emphasize the power of the individual to construct his or her own views on a topic. Teachers see their role as simply to provide students with the space to make their own meanings within a positive and cooperative environment. Because writing is a developmental process, they try to avoid imposing their views, offering models, or suggesting responses to topics beforehand. Instead, they seek to stimulate the writer's ideas through pre-writing tasks, such as journal writing and parallel texts. Because writing is an act of discovering meaning, a willingness to engage with students' assertions is crucial, and response is a central means to initiate and guide ideas (e.g., Straub, 2000). This orientation further urges teachers to respond to the ideas that learners produce, rather than dwell on formal errors (Murray, 1985). Students have considerable opportunities for writing and exercises may attend to features such as style, wordiness, cliches, active versus passive voice, and so on. In contrast to the rigid practice of a more form-oriented approach, writers are urged to be creative and to take chances through free writing.
Figure 1.3 shows typical writing rubrics in this approach. Both rubrics ask students to read personal writing extracts, respond to them as readers, and then to use them as a stimulus to write about their own experiences.
Expressivism is an important approach as it encourages writers to explore their beliefs, engage with the ideas of others, and connect with readers. Yet it leans heavily on an asocial view of the writer, and its ideology of individualism may disadvantage second language students from cultures that place a different value on self-expression (see Chapter 2). In addition,

10 Writing and teaching writing
In his article, Green tells us that Bob Love was saved because "some kind and caring people" helped him to get speech therapy. Is there any example of "kind and caring people" you have witnessed in your life or in the lives of those around you? Tell who these people are and exactly what they did that showed their kindness.
Violet's aunt died for her country even though she never wore a uniform or fired a bullet. Write about what values or people you would sacrifice your life for if you were pushed to do so.
Figure 1,3: Essay topics from an expressivist textbook.
it is difficult to extract from the approach any clear principles from which to teach and evaluate "good writing." It simply assumes that all writers have a similar innate creative potential and can learn to express themselves through writing if their originality and spontaneity are allowed to flourish. Writing is seen as springing from self-discovery guided by writing on topics of potential interest to writers and, as a result, the approach is likely to be most successful in the hands of teachers who themselves write creatively. Murray's (1985) A writer teaches writing, for instance, provides a good account of expressivist methods, but also suggests the importance of the teacher's own personal insights in the process.
So despite its influence in LI writing classrooms, expressivism has been treated cautiously in L2 contexts. Although many L2 students have learned successfully through this approach, others may experience difficulties, as it tends to neglect the cultural backgrounds of learners, the social conse¬quences of writing, and the purposes of communication in the real world, where writing matters.
Focus on the writing process
Like the expressive orientation, the process approach to writing teaching emphasizes the writer as an independent producer of texts, but it goes further to address the issue of what teachers should do to help learners perform a writing task. The numerous incarnations of this perspective are consistent in recognizing basic cognitive processes as central to writing activity and in stressing the need to develop students' abilities to plan, define a rhetorical problem, and propose and evaluate solutions.
Reflection 1.7
What cognitive skills might be involved in the writing process? What methods may help students to develop their abilities to carry out a writing task?

Focus on the writing process 11

4-

Selection of topic: by teacher and/or students Prewriting: brainstorming, collecting data, note taking, outlining, etc. ->- Composing: getting ideas down on paper
Response to draft: teacher/peers respond to ideas, organization, and style -► Revising: reorganizing, style, adjusting to readers, refining ideas Response to revisions: teacher/peers respond to ideas, organization, and style — Proofreading and editing: checking and correcting form, layout, evidence, etc. Evaluation; teacher evaluates progress over the process Publishing: by ciass circulation or presentation, noticeboards,
Website, etc. Follow-up tasks: to address weaknesses

Figure 1.4: A process model of writing instruction.
Probably the model of writing processes most widely accepted by L2 writing teachers is the original planning-writing-reviewing framework es-tablishedby Flower and Hayes (Flower, 1989; Flower and Hayes, 1981). This sees writing as a "non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning" (Zamel, 1983: 165). As Figure 1.4 shows, planning, drafting, re¬vising, and editing do not occur in a neat linear sequence, but are recursive, interactive, and potentially simultaneous, and all work can be reviewed, evaluated, and revised, even before any text has been produced at all. At any point the writer can jump backward or forward to any of these activities: returning to the library for more data, revising the plan to accommodate new ideas, or rewriting for readability after peer feedback.
Reflection 1.8
Consider the last longish piece of writing that you did. It may have been an assignment for a course, a report, or a piece of personal writing. Can you identify the stages you went through to get the text to "publishable" or public standard? Was the process similar to that sketched in Figure 1.4?
This basic model of writing has been elaborated to further describe what goes on at each stage of the process and to integrate cognitive with social factors more centrally (Flower, 1994). Building on this work, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) have argued that we need at least two process models to account for the differences in processing complexity of skilled and novice

12 Writing and teaching writing
writers. They label these as knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming models. The first addresses the fact that novice writers plan less than ex¬perts, revise less often and less extensively, have limited goals, and are mainly concerned with generating content. The latter shows how skilled writers use the writing task to analyze problems, reflect on the task, and set goals to actively rework thoughts to change both their text and ideas. For writing teachers the model helps explain the difficulties their L2 students sometimes experience because of task complexity and lack of topic knowl¬edge. Its emphasis on reflective thought also stresses the need for students to participate in a variety of cognitively challenging writing tasks to develop their skills and the importance of feedback and revision in the process of transforming both content and expression.
A significant number of writing teachers adopt a process orientation as the main focus of their courses and the approach has had a major impact on writing research and teaching in North America. The teacher's role is to guide students through the writing process, avoiding an emphasis on form to help them develop strategies for generating, drafting, and refining ideas. This is achieved through setting pre-writing activities to generate ideas about content and structure, encouraging brainstorming and outlin¬ing, requiring multiple drafts, giving extensive feedback, seeking text level revisions, facilitating peer responses, and delaying surface corrections until the final editing (Raimes, 1992). The teaching strategies developed to fa¬cilitate process goals have extended to most teaching contexts and there are few who have not employed teacher-student conferences, problem-based assignments, journal writing, group discussions, or portfolio assessments in their classes.
A priority of teachers in this orientation therefore is to develop their students' metacognitive awareness of their processes, that is, their ability to reflect on the strategies they use to write. In addition to composing and revising strategies, such an orientation places great emphasis on responses to writing. A response is potentially one of the most influential texts in a pro¬cess writing class, and the point at which the teacher's intervention is most obvious and perhaps most crucial. Not only does this individual attention play an important part in motivating learners, it is also the point at which overt correction and explicit language teaching are most likely to occur. Response is crucial in assisting learners to move through the stages of the writing process and various means of providing feedback are used, includ¬ing teacher-student conferences, peer response, audiotaped feedback, and reformulation (see Chapter 7). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of error cor¬rection and grammar teaching in assisting learners to improve their writing remains controversial in this model (Ferris, 1997; Truscott, 1996).

Focus on the writing process 13
Reflection 1.9
How might you persuade a process adherent of the potential advantages of providing students with grammatical and text information about the texts they are asked to write? Are you persuaded by these reasons? At what stages and in what ways might grammar best be introduced?
Despite considerable research into writing processes, however, we still do not have a comprehensive idea of how learners go about a writing task or how they learn to write. It is clear that cognition is a central element of the process, and researchers are now more aware of the complexity of planning and editing activities, the influence of task, and the value of examining what writers actually do when they write. But although these understandings can contribute to the ways we teach, process models are hampered by small-scale, often contradictory studies and the difficulties of getting inside writers' heads to report unconscious processing. They are currently unable to tell us why writers make certain choices or how they actually make the cognitive transition to a knowledge-transforming model, nor do they spell out what occurs in the intervening stages or whether the process is the same for all learners. While Berieter and Scardalamaia's idea of multiple processing models opens the door to a clearer understand¬ing of the writing process, no complete model exists yet that allows us to predict the relative difficulty for students of particular writing tasks or topics or their likely progress given certain kinds of instruction (Grabbe, 2003).
It also remains unclear whether an exclusive emphasis on psychologi¬cal factors in writing will provide the whole picture, either theoretically or pedagogically. Forces outside the individual that help guide the writer to define problems, frame solutions, and shape the text also need to be con¬sidered (Bizzell, 1992; Faigley, 1986). As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, each orientation illuminates just one aspect of writing; the process of writing is a rich amalgam of elements of which cognition is only one. Process approaches overemphasize "the cognitive relationship between the writer and the writer's internal world" (Swales, 1990: 220) and as a result they fail to offer any clear perspective on the social nature of writing or on the role of language and text structure in effective written communication. Encouraging students to make their own meanings and find their own text forms does not provide them with clear guidelines on how to construct the different kinds of texts they have to write.

14 Writing and teaching writing
I have devoted a great deal of attention to process teaching methods and the theories that underpin them as these represent the dominant approach in L2 writing teaching today. Once again, however, it is necessary to look be¬yond a single approach. Process theories alone cannot help us to confidently advise students on their writing, and this is perhaps one reason why there is little evidence to show that process methods alone lead to significantly better writing. Quite simply, equipping novice writers with the strategies of good writers does not necessarily lead to improvement (Polio, 2001). Students not only need help in learning how to write, but also in understanding how texts are shaped by topic, audience, purpose, and cultural norms (Hyland, 2002).
Reflection 1.10
How do you think the "social factors" that influence writing might be incor¬porated into a process orientation? Think of a writing task that might achieve this.
Focus on content
A fifth way of conceptualizing EFL/ESL writing teaching is in reference to substantive content: what students are required to write about. Typically this involves a set of themes or topics of interest that establish a coherence and purpose for the course or that set out the sequence of key areas of subject matter that students will address (see Mohan, 1986). Students will have some personal knowledge of these themes and will be able to write meaningfully about them. This is a popular organizing principle for L2 writing courses and textbooks for students of all ages and abilities, and many teachers base their courses on topics students select themselves. In most cases such courses rarely focus exclusively on content and, in fact, represent interesting ways teachers can integrate and combine different conceptualizations of writing.
Reflection 1.11
Think of a set of topics or themes that might provide the basis of a writing course for a group of L2 students you are familiar with. What writing tasks and research issues do these topics suggest? What functions might students find useful to complete these writing activities?

Focus on content 15


actions
reactions-A personal
, ,. / involvement feelings
characters involved

actions/sequence of happenings
place?
background-
- time?
\
^ social setting? personal _^^ reflection \ wny was jt significant?
effect on characters
why was it interesting?

Source: White and Arndt, 1991: 63.
Figure 1.5: A spidergram for brainstorming a writing task.
Themes and topics frequently form the basis of process courses, where writing activities are often organized around social issues such as pollution, relationships, stress, juvenile crime, smoking, and so on. L2 students may be disadvantaged in such classrooms as they do not typically have a strong familiarity with either the topics or the types of texts they have to write. But these integrated writing activities may be useful to new migrants or students in academic preparation programs and can be important in encour¬aging learners to think about issues in new ways. Teachers may need to help learners acquire the appropriate cognitive schema (pi. schemata) or knowl¬edge of topics and vocabulary they will need to create an effective text. Schema development exercises usually include reading for ideas in parallel texts, reacting to photographs, and various brainstorming tasks to generate ideas for writing and organizing texts. Figure 1.5 shows a spidergram or mind map used to stimulate ideas for an account of a personal experience. This kind of activity is useful for building a list of issues, and also for identi¬fying relationships between them and prioritizing what it will be important to write about.
Clearly content-oriented courses can be tailored to students at differ¬ent proficiency levels by varying the amount of information provided. At lower levels, much of the content can be supplied to reduce students' dif¬ficulties in generating and organizing material, while at more advanced levels students are often required to collaborate in collecting and sharing information as a basis for composing. Students may be asked to conduct research of some kind, either in the library, on the Internet, or through the use of interviews and questionnaires, so teachers may find themselves providing assistance with data collection techniques. Group work is fre¬quently a key element of these classes and cooperation among students in

16 Writing and teaching writing
generating ideas, collecting information, focusing priorities, and structuring the way they will organize their texts provides practical purposes for genuine communication.
A content orientation can also form the basis of courses that focus more on language structures and functions. Such courses help students to gen¬erate, develop, and organize their ideas on a given topic in ways similar to those discussed above for courses with process leanings. Students are then typically presented with language structures and vocabulary items directly relevant to the topic, which they then practice through a series of exercises. There may follow an introduction and explanation of the rhetorical pat¬terns, which may be useful to students as a framework for expressing their ideas, developing learners' awareness of functions such as explanation and cause and effect described earlier. The two tasks shown in Figure 1.6 illus¬trate the different kinds of approaches to texts in the process and structural orientations to L2 writing instruction.
It should be clear that content-oriented methods tend to rely heavily on reading and exploit the close relationship between writing and reading in
Preparing to read and write. Personalizing the topic.
According to this text, young adults have to face many difficult questions. Which of these questions, taken from the text, have you ever seriously asked yourself? Put a check (V) in front of those that apply.
1. Should I get married?
2. Should I live with someone?
3. Should I get a job?
4. To what sort of career should I devote my life?
L5. DO I need more education?
6. Where should I go to get more education?
7. Should I have children?
8. When should I have children?
' Source: Seal, 1997:70.
1. What is the topic of the first sentence?
How many parts does it have?
Are these parts the same or different in terms of their level of generality?
2. What is the topic of Sentence 2?
Is it more general or more specific than Sentence 1?
3. What is the topic of Sentence 5?
How does this sentence relate to Sentence 1 ?
Source; Biass and Pike-Baky, 1985:121.
Figure 1.6: Exercises exploiting a reading text in topic-oriented process and structural materials.

Focus on content 17
L2 literacy development. Content-oriented courses aim to give students the skills and confidence to read texts efficiently as a basis for producing their own texts, but this relationship is not restricted to content alone. Reading provides input for both content and the appropriate means of its expression -a positive link that reflects the wider role of reading in developing composing skills.
Reflection 1.12
How might reading contribute to the development of L2 writing skills in the classroom setting? List some of the advantages that might accrue to readers.
Research suggests that second language writing skills cannot be acquired successfully by practice in writing alone but also need to be supported with extensive reading (Krashen, 1993). Whether assigned or voluntary, reading has been shown to be a positive influence on composing skills at various stages of proficiency. This is because both processes involve the individual in constructing meaning though the application of complex cognitive and linguistic abilities that draw on problem-solvmg skills and the activation of existing knowledge of both structure and content (Carson and Leki, 1993; Grabe, 2001). Reading may yield for students new knowledge within a sub-ject area, but more importantly it provides them with the rhetorical and structural knowledge they need to develop, modify, and activate schemata which are invaluable when writing. In other words, extensive reading can fur-nish a great deal of tacit knowledge of conventional features of written texts, including, grammar, vocabulary, organizational patterns, interactional de-vices, and so on. Therefore, what students read - particularly the relevance of the specific genres to which they are exposed - are important elements.
This last point draws attention to the fact that literacy acquisition rarely occurs in a vacuum. Writing instruction typically is geared toward some end as students will employ their writing skills for various academic or professional purposes. In fact, although the different types of courses dis-cussed above all draw on content to some extent, "content-based" has come to mean an approach that focuses on the requirements of particular subject areas. In other words, such courses focus on the language, composing skills and specific text conventions associated with a particular domain and its "content" or subject matter. In this way writing instruction seeks to be motivating by focusing on contexts and content relevant and significant to learners.

18 Writing and teaching writing
Such courses may place considerable emphasis on preparing students to engage effectively in their target academic or professional communities, and most involve collaboration with students and/or subj ect teachers to draw on their specialist knowledge. In some cases this collaboration may entail the writing teacher loaning his or her expertise to a subject department to advise staff or instruct students in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) classes (Bazerman and Russell, 1994). In L2 contexts, collaboration more frequently involves a contribution by the subject specialists to the writing class, either through team teaching or advice on content (Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998). Perhaps most often there is a reciprocity between the two specialists in "linked courses" where a specialist writing course is integrated with the activities of a specialist content course by jointly planning tasks and coordinating instruction (Benesch, 2001). Once again, however, although content provides one orientation of the course, teachers typically draw on structural, functional, or process methods in its delivery, and frequently draw on a genre focus to highlighting the rhetorical structure of written texts.
Focus on genre
Teachers who take a genre orientation to writing instruction look beyond subject content, composing processes and textual forms to see writing as attempts to communicate with readers. They are concerned with teaching learners how to use language patterns to accomplish coherent, purposeful prose. The central belief here is that we don't just write, we write something to achieve some purpose: it is a way of getting something done. To get things done, to tell a story, request an overdraft, craft a love letter, describe a technical process and so on, we follow certain social conventions for organizing messages because we want our readers to recognize our purpose. These abstract, socially recognized ways of using language for particular purposes are called genres.
In the classroom, genre teachers focus on texts, but this is not the narrow focus of a disembodied grammar. Instead, linguistic patterns are seen as pointing to contexts beyond the page, implying a range of social constraints and choices that operate on writers in a particular context. The writer is seen as having certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his or her readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms of a text are resources used to accomplish these. In sum, the importance of a genre orien¬tation is that it incorporates discourse and contextual aspects of language use that may be neglected when attending to structures, functions, or processes alone. This means that it can not only address the needs of ESL writers to

Focus on genre 19
compose texts for particular readers, but it can also draw the teacher into considering how texts actually work as communication.
Reflection 1.13
Look at this list of genres, partly taken from Cook (1989: 95). Can you see any similarities and differences between them? Try to group them into categories in different ways, for example, spoken versus written, similar purposes, type of audience, main grammar patterns, key vocabulary, formality, and so on. You will find that genres often have things in common but are distinct in various ways.

sales letter joke anecdote label poem memo
inventory advertisement report note chat seminar
essay manifesto toast argument song novel
notice biography sermon consultation jingle article
warrant ticket lecture manual will conversation
menu prescription telegram editorial sign film review
Classroom perspectives on genre largely draw on the theory of sys¬temic functional linguistics originally developed by Michael Halliday (e.g., Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Hasan, 1989). This theory addresses the re¬lationship between language and its social functions and sets out to show how language is a system from which users make choices to express mean¬ings. Halliday argues that we have developed very specific ways of using language to accomplish our goals, which means that texts are related to so¬cial contexts and to other texts. Broadly, when a set of texts share the same purpose, they will often share the same structure, and thus they belong to the same genre. So genres are resources for getting things done, and we all have a repertoire of appropriate responses we can call on for recurring situations, from shopping lists to job applications.
Most simply, Martin (1992) defines genre as a goal-oriented, staged social process. Genres are social processes because members of a culture interact to achieve them; they are goal-oriented because they have evolved to achieve things; and staged because meanings are made in steps and it usually takes writers more than one step to reach their goals. By setting out the stages, or moves, of valued genres, teachers can provide students with an explicit grammar of linguistic choices, both within and beyond the sentence, to produce texts that seem well-formed and appropriate to readers. All texts

r
20 Writing and teaching writing
Table 1.2: Some Factual genres
Genre Purpose
• recount to reconstruct past experiences by retelling events in original sequence
• procedure to show how processes or events are accomplished - how something
is done
• description to give an account of imagined or factual events and phenomena
• report to present factual information about a class of things, usually by
classifying them and then describing their characteristics
• explanation to give reasons for a state of affairs or a judgment
Source: Butt et al., 2000; Martin, 1989.

Stage An Exposition Example Stage A Recount Example
Thesis A good teacher needs Orientation On Tuesday we went on a
to be understanding harbor cruise.
to ail children.
Argument He or she must be fair Events in We went underneath the
and reasonable. The Chronological harbor bridge and then
teacher must work at Order we went past some
a sensible pace. The submarines. When we got
teacher also needs to to Clifton Gardens we
speak with a clear had a picnic After we had
voice so the children finished we played on
can Understand. the climbings. Then Mr. Robinson came over and said Mr. Moses was giving out frozen oranges. Then after we finished that we went home.
Conclusion That's what I think a Personal It was a nice day out.
good teacher should Comment
be like. (optional)
Source: Board of Studies, 1998b: 287.
Figure 1.7: Some factual genres.
can therefore be described in terms of both form and function, that is, how their elements are organized for making meanings and the purposes this serves. Some core "factual genres" are listed in Table 1.2.
Writing instruction begins with the purposes for communicating, then moves to the stages of a text which can express these purposes. Teachers can help students to distinguish between different genres and to write them more effectively by a careful study of their structures. Figure 1.7 shows how even primary school children can distinguish texts by their structure.

Focus on genre 21

MODELING
Discuss and analyze text structure, context and language

JOINT CONSTRUCTION
Teacher & students construct text together



Redrafting and editing

DEVELOPING CONTROL OF THE GENRE

Learner writes own text

INDEPENDENT CONSTRUCTION OF TEXT
Teacher-learner conferencing
Figure 1.8: The teaching learning cycle.
In the writing classroom, teachers following a genre orientation draw on the work of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1978) and its interpretation by Bruner (1986). This stresses the view that learning occurs best when learners engage in tasks that are within their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), the area between what they can do independently and what they can do with assistance. Learning evolves from verbal interaction and task negotiation with a more knowledgeable person, and the teacher has a central role in "scaffolding" this development.
The methodused to achieve this is a process of contextualizing-modeling-negotiating-constructing, which is usually presented as a cycle (Figure 1.8). At the beginning of this learning cycle direct instruction is crucial, as the learner gradually assimilates the task demands and procedures for construct¬ing the genre effectively. The teacher here adopts a highly interventionist role, ensuring that students are able to understand and reproduce the typi-cal rhetorical patterns they need to express their meanings. At later stages learners require more autonomy. Importantly, writing is the outcome of ac¬tivity, rather than an activity itself. The classroom is characterized by talk, by many kinds of writing, and by the development of a linguistic metalanguage by which students can describe and control the structure and grammatical

22 Writing and teaching writing
features of the texts they write. Grammar is important, but presented as a way of giving learners the language they need to construct central genres and to reflect on how language is used to accomplish this.
Genre pedagogy is underpinned by the belief that learning should be based on explicit awareness of language, rather than through experiment and exploration, so teachers provide students with opportunities to develop their writing through analyzing "expert" texts. Genres are both what stu¬dents actively do with language and how they come to understand the ways it works; however, this "reproductive" element has been criticized as run¬ning the risk of a static, decontextualized pedagogy. This is, of course, a danger of all pedagogies, but untrained or unimaginative teachers may fail to acknowledge variation and choice in writing and so neglect the important step of contextualizing the language so that genre models are presented as rigid templates and forms represented as linguistic abstractions. When this happens, the explicit teaching of genres can impose restrictive formulae which can shackle creativity to prescribed structures (Sawyer and Watson, 1987). Students might then regard genres as sets of rules, a "how-to-do" list, or what Freadman (1994: 46) calls "a recipe theory of genre."
There is therefore a tension between expression and repression in genre teaching that is not fully resolved. It is clear, however, that learners must know how to employ conventional patterns and the circumstances where they can change them as much as they need ways of drafting and editing their work. For teachers it is important to foster creativity while acknowledging the ways language is conventionally used to express meaning.
Toward a synthesis: Process, purpose, and context
The different perspectives outlined above provide teachers with curriculum options, or complementary alternatives for designing courses that have im¬plications for teaching and learning. These orientations are summarized in Table 1.3.
Reflection 1.14
Collect some L2 writing textbooks or in-house materials. Do they follow one of these orientations or do they combine several? Does one predominate in the overall approach or in individual tasks? Which approach currently has the most impact in your country or institution?

Toward a synthesis: Process, purpose, context 23
Table 1.3: Summary of the principal orientations to L2 writing teaching

Orientation Emphasis Goals

Main pedagogic techniques



Structure Language form
Function Language
use
Expressivist Writer
Process Writer
Content
Subject matter
Genre
Text and context


• Grammatical accuracy
• Vocabulary building
• L2 proficiency Paragraph and text
organization patterns
• Individual creativity
• Seif-discovery Control of technique
Writing through relevant content and reading
Control of rhetorical structure of specific text-types

Controlled composition, gap-fill, substitution,
error avoidance, indirect assessment,
practice of rhetorical patterns Free writing, reordering, gap-fill, imitation of
parallel texts, writing from tables and
graphs Reading, pre-writing, journal writing,
multiple drafting, and peer critiques Brain-storming, planning, multiple drafting,
peer collaboration, delayed editing,
portfolio assessment Extensive and intensive reading, group
research projects, process or structure
emphasis Modeling-negotiation-construction cycle • Rhetorical consciousness-raising

I have stressed that L2 writing classrooms are typically a mixture of more than one approach and that teachers frequently combine these orientations in imaginative and effective ways. Most commonly, however, these favor either a process or genre orientation and we should not gloss over the protracted -and often bitterly argued - debate on these two positions. This debate boils down to the relative merits of predominantly text-focused pedagogies, which emphasize the social nature of writing, and more writer-centered process methods, which stress its more cognitive aspects. By laying out the main attributes of these two orientations side-by-side, however, it can be seen how the strengths of one might complement the weaknesses of the other (Table 1.4).
Although this stark opposition of the two orientations oversimplifies far more complex classroom situations, it also helps to show how one might complement the other. The conflict between process and product can only be damaging to classroom practice, and the two are more usefully seen as supplementing and rounding each other out. Writing is a sociocognitive activity which involves skills in planning and drafting as well as knowledge of language, contexts, and audiences. An effective methodology for L2 writing teaching should therefore incorporate and extend the insights of the main orientations in the following ways:
• Broaden formal and functional orientations to include the social purposes behind forms

24 Writing and teaching writing
Table 1.4: A comparison of genre and process orientations

Attribute

Process

Genre



Main Idea
Teaching Focus
Advantages
Disadvantages

Writing is a thinking process Concerned with the act of writing Emphasis on creative writer
How to produce and link ideas Makes processes of writing
transparent Provides basis for teaching
Assumes L1 and L2 writing similar Overlooks L2 language difficulties insufficient attention to product Assumes ail writing uses same processes

Writing is a social activity Concerned with the finai product Emphasis on reader expectations and
product How to express social purposes effectively Makes textual conventions transparent
Contextualizes writing for audience and
purpose Requires rhetorical understanding of texts Can result in prescriptive teaching of texts Can lead to overattention to written products Undervalue skills needed to produce texts

• Locate the process concepts of strategy, schema, and metacognition in social contexts
• Respect students' needs for relevant content through stimulating readings and source materials
• Support genre pedagogies with strategies for planning, drafting, and re¬vising texts
• Situate writing in a conception of audience and link it to broader social structures
In practice this means a synthesis to ensure that learners have an adequate understanding of the processes of text creation; thepurposes of writing and how to express these in effective ways through formal and rhetorical text choices; and the contexts within which texts are composed and read and which give them meaning. While I have discussed processes and purposes already, it is worth considering context in a little more detail as it is central to understanding and teaching writing.
The notion of context echoes the belief in genre that writing does not take place outside particular communities and that the genres we teach should be seen as responses to the purposes of those communities, whether profes¬sional, academic, or social (Bruffee, 1986). Skilled writers are able to create successful texts by accurately predicting readers' background knowledge and anticipating what they are likely to expect from a particular piece of writing. In our own domains - our homes, workplaces, or classrooms - we

Toward a synthesis: Process, purpose, context 25
are comfortable with the genres we write because we are familiar with them and have a good idea how to create texts that will connect with our read¬ers. We are able to draw on a shared community schema to structure our writing so that our audience can process it easily. But this knowledge of readers and their needs may be lacking when we try to communicate in an unfamiliar situation, such as a new profession, a new discipline, or a foreign language.
Reflection 1.15
We all belong to several "communities" or groups that share certain commu-nicative purposes and common genres. Note one community to which you belong and list the genres that it uses. Why are these genres important to this community?
Teachers in process classrooms, as mentioned earlier, try to bridge this gap between writer and reader by using pre-writing tasks that develop an understanding of vocabulary and topics. But schema knowledge is far richer than this and includes considerable knowledge of contexts, interpersonal relations, the roles of readers and writers, and how all these influence texts. We don't only know what to write about and how to express ourselves, but what to include and leave out, how formal or informal we can be, and when it is appropriate to use the genre at all. Schemata, in other words, are culturally sensitive; they reflect the ways that members of different communities think. This means teachers should help learners develop these sociocultural schemata by extending their knowledge of form, process, and content to the discourse communities within which they serve particular purposes.
The notion of discourse community is not entirely precise and tends to mean different things to different theorists. However, it tries to capture the idea of like-mindedness among writers and readers, sometimes called membership, which is essential for understanding the specialist background knowledge we use to encode and decode texts appropriately (e.g., Swales, 1990). It is a powerful concept in joining writers, texts, and readers together and suggests that an understanding of target communities is useful to those wishing to become members, including L2 learners. By understanding these communities and their writing, students are better able to "interpret, produce and critique the texts they have to write" (Johns, 1997: 19).

26 Writing and teaching writing
Reflection 1.16
We have all had experiences where our attempts to communicate with someone from another discourse community has failed, perhaps when discussing music with your child's piano teacher, your frozen computer with a technician, or a vague interest of some kind with an enthusiast. Think of a recent occasion when you have had an experience like this. What happened and why did misun¬derstanding arise? Compare it with an experience where communication was effortless. What was different about the two situations?
The notion of context also incorporates ideas from New Literacy Studies that writing (and reading) only make sense within wider social and cul¬tural practices (e.g., Barton and Hamilton, 1998). Context is more than the interactions of particular writers and readers, it refers to how institutions, so-cieties, and cultures themselves influence writing. Such an extended notion of context has four main implications:
1. It recognizes that different communities use different genres, conven-tions, and even varieties of English, and that not all writing has the same standards of acceptability.
2. It takes account of the way English is used as an international lan¬guage between nonnative speakers, and, in many countries, as an in-tranational language with local norms and models.
3. It highlights the fact that because socially powerful institutions, such as education and the professions, support certain genres and conventions, these become dominant and possess greater prestige.
4. It helps learners to guard against devaluing their own writing and to see so-called superior forms of writing simply as other practices that are open, like others, to scrutiny and challenge.
A synthesis of different writing orientations therefore means taking the best of existing approaches and using them to more fully understand writing and learning to write. It suggests that, in the classroom, teachers should focus on increasing students' experiences of texts and reader expectations, as well as providing them with an understanding of writing processes, language forms, and genres. Finally, it means that we need to be sensitive to the practices and perceptions of writing that students bring to the classroom, and build on these so that they come to see writing as relative to particular groups and contexts. In this way students can understand the discourses they have to write, while not devaluing those of their own cultures and communities.

Summary and conclusion 27 Summary and conclusion
While every act of writing is in a sense both personal and individual, it is also interactional and social, expressing a culturally recognized purpose, re¬flecting a particular kind of relationship, and acknowledging an engagement in a given community. This means that writing cannot be distilled down to a set of cognitive or technical abilities or a system of rules, and that learning to write in a second language is not simply a matter of opportunities to com¬pose and revise. This chapter has looked at the main orientations to teaching writing to L2 students and has argued that teachers should draw on the best of what these theories offer. It has stressed that L2 writers bring five kinds of knowledge to create effective texts and these should be acknowledged in teaching:
• Content knowledge - of the ideas and concepts in the topic area the text will address
• System knowledge - of the syntax, lexis, and appropriate formal con¬ventions needed
• Process knowledge - of how to prepare and carry out a writing task
• Genre knowledge - of communicative purposes of the genre and its value in particular contexts
• Context knowledge - of readers' expectations, cultural preferences, and related texts
A number of conclusions for teaching can be drawn from the perspectives presented in this chapter:
• Composing is nonlinear and goal-driven. Therefore, students may ben¬efit from having a range of planning, writing, and revising strategies to draw on.
• Writing seeks to achieve purposes through socially recognized ways of using language called genres. Therefore, teachers should provide learners with a metalanguage for identifying genres and their structures, through analysis of authentic texts and modeling genre stages.
• Writing is a purposeful and communicative activity that responds to other people and other texts. Therefore, writing tasks should not simply emphasize formal accuracy and discrete aspects of language, but be situated in meaningful contexts with authentic purposes.
• Writing is often structured according to the demands and expectations of target discourse communities. Therefore, teachers need to provide tasks that encourage students to consider the reader's perspective by incorporating a range of real and simulated audience sources.

28 Writing and teaching writing
• Writing is differently endowed with authority and prestige, which sustain inequalities. Therefore, instruction should build on students' own lan-guage abilities, backgrounds, and expectations of writing to help them see prestigious discourses simply as other ways of making meanings.
Discussion questions and activities
1 One definition of writing is "the process whereby a person selects, develops, arranges, and expresses ideas in units of discourse." Do you agree with this definition? Does it imply a particular orientation to teaching L2 writing? How would you define writing?
2 Look again at the sections on the Process and Genre approaches. How do you think each might answer these fundamental questions about teaching writing?

• What is involved in the process of becoming a writer?
• What are our criteria for good writing and how do we communicate these to learners?
• How should teachers intervene in students' writing?

3 The process and genre approaches are often presented as polar extremes. Can you think of ways that they might be seen as complementary rather than as incompatible?
4 How important is the choice of textbook in influencing the orientation to teaching writing you might adopt in your classroom? Select a textbook and determine which orientation it favors. Could you successfully incorporate this textbook into a course guided by another orientation? Could you use it to support and supplement an orientation that you favor more?
5 Imagine you are designing a new writing course for Upper Intermediate level ESL students preparing for academic study in an English-speaking context. Would you choose one approach to guide your course or select elements from more than one? Which ones would you choose and why?
6 Look again at Reflection 1.13. Select one written genre from the list and find an authentic example of it to analyze. What are it's purposes, audience, formality, main vocabulary items, and grammar patterns? How far does your analysis match the intuitive comparisons that you made earlier? Which features are most useful for identifying the text as an example of the genre you chose? Which features would you choose to emphasize if you were teaching this genre?
7 Consider the following writing exercises, (a) Which orientation is fore-grounded in each? (b) Are there elements of other orientations? (c) What

Discussion questions and activities 29
is the primary teaching objective of each one? (d) Could you adapt any of these exercises to suit a class of your own? How?
(i) In this exercise, you will read five topic sentences. For each of these, predict what you expect to read in the paragraph. Make notes about your predictions and then compare your notes with a partner's.
1 Some very funny things happened to me during my first few days in the United States, but the most comical was our night in a Boston restaurant.
2 I am the product of two cultures, and I have adopted the desirable aspects of each culture without feeling guilt or conflict.
3 Moving to another culture is often a difficult step because you usually do not have family and friends around for emotional support.
4 Although American informality is well known, many people interpret it as a lack of respect.
5 One benefit of foreign travel is the realization that you have a great deal in common with people of other cultures.
(Blass and Pike-Baky, 1985: 20-1)
(ii) With a partner, look again at the text you wrote on the desirable and undesir¬able effects of scientific developments. Discuss how your text can be improved by using suitable grammar techniques and logical connectors to make the in¬formation clearer. Then rewrite your text individually.
(Hamp-Lyons andHeasley, 1987: 52)
(iii) Write a paragraph about your mother.
Before Writing 1. Divide the subject (your mother) into 4-6 "pieces" and
list those topics.
2. Choose two of those topics and write a list of three even more specific topics.
3. Exchange your "even more specific topics" with your partner.
4. Read your partner's topics and choose two that you find most interesting.
5. Write two or three questions about each of those topics.

30 Writing and teaching writing

Writing 6.
7.
8.
9. After Writing 10.
11.

Choose one of the topics for which your partner has
written questions.
Write the paragraph, answering the questions (and any
others that you can ask) with examples and specific
details about your mother.
Reread your paragraph, making any changes that will
improve the paragraph.
Rewrite the paragraph with the changes you made.
Read three of your classmates' paragraphs about their
mothers. Take notes.
Choose the paragraph you liked best and be prepared to
say why: "I like X's paragraph because ..."
(Reid,2000:13)

(iv) Explanation
The writer of a promotional letter can use the Move ESTABLISHING CREDENTIALS not only by (1) referring to the needs of the business world in general or the needs of a customer in particular as in Mr. Huff's letter (not shown here) but by (2) referring to his own company's achievements/speciality as well. In the following example
C & E Hollidays, the name is synonymous with the very best in travel trade with 20 years of professional expertise, will present you with a variety of programs.
the writer ESTABLISHES CREDENTIALS by stating his company's past ex-periences and field of specialization. Either of these two strategies, or both, may realize this Move.
Instructions
Label the following tQXt to indicate how many different strategies the author uses in ESTABLISHING CREDENTIALS of his company.
The next 12 months are going to be difficult ones for Singapore industries as a whole. We, at Marco Polo, are fully aware of the current market situation and are continuously upgrading our facilities and amenities to meet new competition.
(Bhatia, 1997:143)

2 Second language writers
Aims: This chapter focuses on the key issues that distinguish second and first language writers and writing, highlighting the questions this distinction raises for ESL writing teachers.
The overview of writing instruction in the last chapter drew on theories prin¬cipally developed from first language research. However, although there are important similarities between LI and L2 writing, both teachers' intuitions and empirical studies suggest that there are also significant differences that teachers need to address to ensure their classroom expectations, teaching practices, and assessment procedures are fair and effective.
In a review of seventy-two studies comparing research into first and second language writing, Silva (1993: 669) noted that "L2 writing is strate¬gically, rhetorically and linguistically different in important ways from LI writing." Such differences may include the following writing and learning issues:
• Different linguistic proficiencies and intuitions about language
• Different learning experiences and classroom expectations
• . Different sense of audience and writer
• Different preferences for ways of organizing texts
• Different writing processes
• Different understandings of text uses and the social value of different text types
Because an understanding of these various cognitive, social, cultural, and linguistic factors can help us to become better teachers, the follow¬ing sections will explore their sources, nature, and effects and draw some implications for the L2 writing instruction.
31

32 Second language writers
Orientation
From your experiences as a teacher or student, what do you think are the main similarities and differences between writing in a first and in a second language? Brainstorm as many ideas as you can.
Potential L1 and L2 writer differences
In the last chapter we saw that a wide range of knowledge and experience is needed to write successfully in English. Borrowing Canale and Swain's (1980) framework, writers need, at least:
• grammatical competence ~ a knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and the language system
• discourse competence - a knowledge of genre and the rhetorical patterns that create them
• sociolinguistic competence - the ability to use language appropriately in different contexts, understanding readers and adopting appropriate authorial attitudes
• strategic competence - the ability to use a variety of communicative strategies
When we add to this the fact that in the classroom writers may be asked for their opinions and ideas and to draft and edit their work, we begin to realize some of the challenges for students in achieving native-like proficiency.
Individual differences
Many adult second language writers never achieve target language profi¬ciency, either because they reach a level of competence that allows them to communicate to their own satisfaction, or because they "fossilize" at a certain level. Individual learner differences are important reasons for this, with linguistic, social, and psychological factors all playing a role in a stu¬dent's successful acquisition of a second language (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Skehan, 1989). No two learners are the same and their different learning backgrounds and personalities will influence how quickly, and how well, they learn to write in a second language. Students obviously bring to the L2 writing class different writing experiences, different aptitudes and levels of motivation; they have varying metacognitive knowledge of their LI and experience of using it, particularly to write; and they have different characteristics in

Potential L1 and L2 writer differences 33
Table 2.1: Individual factors potentially influencing L2 acquisition

Altman (1980)

Skehan(1989)

Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991)



Age
Motivation and attitude Personality factors Previous language
learning experience Proficiency in the L1 Language aptitude General intelligence (IQ) Gender Learning style
preferences

Language aptitude
Motivation
Cognitive and affective factors
a. extroversion
b. willingness to take risks
c. intelligence
d. anxiety
e. analytic versus experiential
Language learning strategies

Age
Motivation and attitude
to learning Personality factors
a. self-esteem
b. extroversion
c. anxiety
d. willingness to take risks
e. sensitivity to rejection
f. empathy
g. inhibition
h. tolerance of ambiguity Cognitive style
a. Analytic/gestait
b. Reflexivity/impuisivity
c. Aurai/visual
Gender
Learning strategies

terms of age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Table 2.1 summarizes some of the dimensions of learner difference mentioned in three surveys (adapted from Ellis, 1994:472).
Reflection 2.1
Which of these factors do you think is the most important in successfully devel¬oping proficiency in a second language? How do you think it might influence a student's L2 writing improvement?
Obviously a person's goals, attitudes, and abilities are likely to be cru¬cial factors in their successful acquisition of writing skills in an L2 and, although little is known about the effects of many of these factors, our instructional strategies need to take account of them. But while understand¬ing these learner differences is important, students should not be thought of as simply bundles of individual features. They are also members of so¬cial groups whose schemata, practices, and attitudes toward writing and learning may be very different from our own and also from those of LI

34 Second language writers
writers. The special status of our students as L2 writers has much to do with the fact that they draw on bicultural and bilingual understandings, and among the most important factors that distinguish them from LI writers are the prior language and cultural experiences they bring with them to the classroom.
Language and strategy differences
Perhaps the most immediately obvious factor that distinguishes many sec¬ond language writers is the difficulty they have in adequately expressing themselves in English. These writers typically have a different linguistic knowledge base than native English speakers. So while most of us have a vocabulary of several thousand words and an intuitive ability to handle the grammar of the language when we begin to write in our LI, L2 writers often carry the burden of learning to write and learning English at the same time. Largely because of this developmental aspect of language learning, research frequently finds texts written by L2 students to be less effective than those of their native English-speaking peers (Silva, 1997). Numerous studies suggest that tests produced by L2 writers are generally shorter, less cohesive, less fluent, and contain more errors (e.g., Purves, 1988).
Students themselves commonly identify language difficulties, particu¬larly an inadequate grasp of vocabulary or grammar, as their main prob¬lems with writing and frequently express their frustrations at being unable to convey their ideas in appropriate and correct English. These quotes from students taking a writing course for pre-university and pre-graduate courses in New Zealand are representative of many students struggling to make meanings in English. They feel they have good ideas, but lack the linguistic resources to convey them in writing in a foreign language. Their goal is to approximate a native speaker's writing:
I have some ideas and I can't, I can make it in my language or in my opinions, sometimes it's English, but I can't write down correctly. Ah, my essay always don't be academic. It just tend to write personal writing always. Or my ideas don't stay one point always. Still quite unskilful and what I want to say isn't expressed, isn't explained in my essay. (Maho, Japanese student)
I will never reach the advanced stage because another language is not my own language . . . and it takes a long time to know when you describe something you have to choose another word, not just by some simple words. If I have a good idea but I cannot write down my idea and I cannot graduate. (Liang, Taiwanese student)
Right at first I tell you this is what I think in my language and I write in English and native speaker who use English fluently will not understand. But if I give this to my

Potential L1 and L2 writer differences 35
Thai friends to read, they will understand and admire every time. ... In my mind I can think more than I can write. I cannot find the suitable word. I just use simple words and not the ones that show the deep meaning. (Samorn, Thai student)
This is not to suggest a deficit orientation to what L2 writers can achieve. Many adult learners are successful writers in their first language and are able to bring sophisticated cognitive abilities and metacognitive strategies to the task of writing (Leki, 1992). But proficiency in first language oracy and literacy may not necessarily be an advantage. As the quotes above suggest, many intelligent and accomplished learners are unable to express them¬selves as they would like in English. Put simply, linguistic and rhetorical conventions do not always transfer successfully across languages, and may actually interfere with writing in the L2 (Connor, 1996). This comment from a successful Japanese student articulates some of the consequences of these language and strategy differences:
In the beginning I had a very difficult time making myself understood in writing. My sentences tended to be short and direct translation of Japanese sentences. I didn't know that I was supposed to be logical or linear in thinking and choose a position in writing an opinion paper. So I often contradicted myself within a paragraph because I was not sure myself if I would support one position or another. I was merely presenting the flow of my thoughts. The sentences I wrote that seemed very explicit to me were not explicit enough for professors. (Yoshiki Chikuma, in Silva and Reichelt, 2003)
The research on what aspects of literacy transfer from a learner's first language is conflicting and we should not directly attribute all aspects of L2 writing to LI writing abilities. But while the impact of the first language on second language writing will obviously vary, it is a crucial feature distin-guishing LI and L2 writing. In some cases students will be able to draw on an LI that is similar to the L2, with a common ancestry and a long history of contact, but in others the orthography of the writing system itself may pose a considerable barrier. There is also the question of the potentially positive influence of strategy transfer to the L2 context which can greatly facilitate the learner's development (Zamel, 1997). Much of the comparative research is limited by small samples and lack of reliable significance tests and the results are inconclusive and sometimes even contradictory. There do, how-ever, seem to be a number of salient differences in the writing processes of LI and L2 writers and in the fluency and accuracy of their writing. Table 2.2 summarizes this research by drawing on reviews by Silva (1993, 1997), Krapels (1990), and Leki (1992).

36 Second language writers
Table 2.2: Findings of research into L1 and L2 writing
• General composing process patterns seem to be largely similar in L1 and L2.
• Both L1 and L2 skilled writers compose differently from novices.
• Advanced l_2 writers are handicapped more by a lack of composing competence than a lack of linguistic competence. The opposite is true for lower proficiency learners.
• L1 writing strategies may or may not be transferred to L2 contexts.
• L2 writers tend to plan less than L1 writers and produce shorter texts.
• L2 writers have more difficulty setting goals and generating material.
• L2 writers revise more but reflect less on their writing.
• L2 writers are less fluent, and produce less accurate and effective texts.
• L2 writers are less inhibited by teacher-editing and feedback.
Reflection 2.2
Do you agree that difficulties with grammar and vocabulary are likely to cause students the most problems when writing in English? What do you think writing teachers should do about this?
Cultural differences
Another important dimension of difference is culture. Cultural factors help shape students' background understandings, or schema knowledge, and are likely to have a considerable impact on how they write, their responses to classroom contexts, and their writing performance. Culture is generally un¬derstood as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow us to understand, develop, and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world (Lantolf, 1999). This means that language and learning are inextricably bound with culture (Kramsch, 1993). This is partly because our cultural values are reflected in and carried through language, but also because cultures make available to us certain taken-for-granted ways of organizing our perceptions and expectations, including those we use to learn and communicate in writing.
Research shows that differences in expectations, strategies, and beliefs make intercultural contacts highly susceptible to the possibility of miscom-munication, and this is why it is important for teachers to understand the po¬tentially different ways that second language writers might respond to their teaching. However, the effects of the first culture on second and foreign lan¬guage learning have not always been recognized in teaching methodologies,

Cultural schemata and writing 37
and teachers often mistakenly assume that learners have prior knowledge of text genres or share their cultural beliefs about writing.
Before considering these issues in more detail, however, it is important to remember that although linguistic and cultural factors may distinguish first and second language writers, L2 students cannot be lumped together as an undifferentiated group, nor should cultural norms be regarded as de¬cisive. Seeing culture as static and homogeneous runs the risk of taking "a deterministic stance and a deficit orientation as to what students can accom¬plish in English and what their writing instruction should be" (Zamel, 1997: 341). Students have individual identities beyond the language and culture they were born into and we should avoid the tendency to stereotype indi¬viduals according to crude cultural dichotomies. Cultures are fluid, diverse, and nondetermining, and people may resist or ignore cultural patterns. But while we cannot simply read off a set of teaching approaches from students' cultures, neither should we ignore research that might help us understand the ways they may prefer to learn and write. To appreciate linguistic and cultural differences it is necessary to recognize that features in our students' essays may be evidence of alternative patterns and understandings, rather than of individual inability or poor study habits.
Reflection 2.3
In what ways are cultural factors likely to influence the ways students write and learn to write?
Cultural schemata and writing
One way in which different cultural schemata can influence L2 writers is through the conceptions of learning and writing that they make available. It is not always obvious that the ways we understand terms such as learning and teaching can vary across cultures, and neither teachers nor students may realize they are standing on different ground. Because teachers rarely think to spell out the basic ideas that underlie then* expectations and judgments, these may remain inaccessible to students, with serious consequences for how they find their writing performance evaluated. It is important to bear in mind, then, that educational practices are shaped by the cultures in which they operate. The attitudes, approaches, and strategies we encourage and reward in our classes might therefore contrast and even conflict with those that are known and valued by our students.

38 Second language writers
This kind of hidden "cultural curriculum" can be found in the culturally divergent attitudes to knowledge that can seriously interfere in our assess¬ment of L2 students' writing. Ballard and Clanchy (1991) point out that these attitudes spread along a continuum from respecting the conservation of knowledge to valuing its extension. Educational processes in Western contexts tend to reinforce an analytical, questioning, and evaluative stance to knowledge, encouraging students to criticize and recombine existing sources to dispute traditional wisdom and form their own points of view. In writing classes students are often asked to analyze problems, reflect on arguments, and rework their ideas through recursive redrafting. Thus, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) characterize mature writing as "knowledge transforming," where writers actively seek to elaborate and refine available knowledge.
Many Asian cultures, however, have a very different perspective that favors conserving and reproducing existing knowledge, establishing rever¬ence for what is known through strategies such as memorization and im¬itation. Both these strategies demonstrate respect for knowledge, but may seem to the writing teacher like reproducing others' ideas. In Bereiter and Scardamalia's terms, it is "knowledge telling" which represents immature writing, where the writer's goal is simply to say what he or she can re¬member based on the assignment, the topic, or the genre. So by ignoring cultural considerations, teachers may see this as plagiarism or repetition, and be mislead into recasting such respect for knowledge as a developmen¬tal continuum from immaturity to maturity (Silva, Leki, and Carson, 1997). Figure 2.1 summarizes some of the implications of these distinctions.
Reflection 2.4
Look at the activities associated with the different approaches to learning listed in Figure 2.1. Think of a writing task that would require students to engage in an analytical and a speculative approach to learning. Devise the rubric you would give students for these two tasks.
Closely related to these culturally based attitudes to knowledge is the way that the writing classroom reflects conceptions of identity. In a review of cultural conceptions of self, Markus and Kitayama (1991) contrast Western independent views, which emphasize the separateness and uniqueness of persons, with many non-Western cultures, which insist on the interdepen¬dence of human beings to each other.

Cultural schemata and writing 39


summarizing questioning, judging,
describing and recombining
identifying and ideas and
applying formulae information into
and information an argument
Attitude to Knowledge
Learning Approach
Learning Type Strategy
Activities

Conserving <- reproductive <-(telling) i memorization imitation -> analytical <- i critical thinking -> Extending
-^ speculative (transforming)
I
search for new explanations
speculating hypothesizing



Questions What?
Aim
"correctness"

Why? How? How valid? How important?
"simple" originality, reshaping material into different patterns

What if?
"creative" originality, new approach/ knowledge

Source: Adapted from Bailard and Clanchy, 1991: 22.
Figure 2.1: Attitudes to knowledge and approaches to learning.
In the Western classroom, "good writing" is generally seen to involve the writer's individual creativity and critical thinking, and teachers frequently see their role as helping to develop these skills in their students. Teach¬ers often expect writers to voice their judgments, display their knowledge, and give their opinions. Texts must display their author's individuality, and concepts such as voice and textual ownership are familiar in mainstream writing pedagogy. But such concepts can create problems for L2 writers from more collectivist or interdependently oriented cultures (Ramanathan and Atkinson, 1999). In these cultures, students are typically oriented by their education to group membership and to age and gender roles rather than to individual status (Heath, 1991), and writing is done less to express oneself than to pass on the knowledge one has received. The absence of a personal voice is largely irrelevant as the student does not presume to improve on acknowledged truths but to communicate what is socially shared.
So while the uncited inclusion of others' work allows Asian writers to display their knowledge, honor important thinkers, and show respect for the learning of their readers, excellence in the Western writing classroom

40 Second language writers
requires the writer's unique signature and such borrowings are seen as mind¬less regurgitation or as plagiarism. Pennycook (1996) offers an extensive discussion of cross-cultural differences on plagiarism, showing how stu¬dents can be led into trouble through their different cultural and educational backgrounds.
Reflection 2.5
Have you ever observed plagiarism when teaching? In your opinion was it intentional or unintentional? What was your reaction and what did you do about it, if anything? Would you handle it differently now?
Such divergent cultural perspectives with regard to knowledge, texts, and the self are major factors to consider in learning and writing, yet we tend to take our own views for granted as self-evidently universal and can easily fail to recognize their cultural specificity. Teachers frequently see language problems as the main obstacle to effective writing, yet surface errors may actually be less serious than disjunctive perceptions of what "good writing" is. The fact that our students may be operating from fundamentally different positions about texts and authorship means that we should be aware of the effects these can have on their writing, be flexible in our judgments, and be explicit about our expectations and the reasons for our teaching methods.
Expectations about teaching and learning
Cultural variations in assumptions about the nature of knowledge, learn¬ing, and writing are not the only differences between writing in a first and second language. Culture also intrudes into classrooms through the expecta¬tions that students may have about instruction and the meanings they attach to the writing activities they are given. One currently influential theory of learning emphasizes the idea of "situated cognition" (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which holds that the setting and the activity of learning are insepara¬ble from learning itself. In this sense L2 writing instruction should be seen as an expression of culture. Moreover, because of the diversity of educa-tional contexts, we should also anticipate that students' previous learning experiences may not have adequately prepared them for the kinds of tasks and assignments they encounter when learning to write in our classrooms.

Expectations about teaching and learning 41
Time, topic, and language may be important, as Leki and Carson's (1997) ESL students mentioned:
Time is the problem. Each time I write a paper in English I have to spend a lot of time to organize. So if you give me just a limited time, I cannot do very well.
There are sometimes subjects you never think to write about those. For example, they say write about a custom or an important value. I never thought about writing about them.
My principal objective in my English class is my grammar, not the idea, because sometimes the idea,... I made[up] the idea.
Perhaps the most obvious issue, however, is the fact that writing topics are potentially culture-sensitive and may be inappropriate for some groups. All cultures attribute different meanings to events and human relationships and these cultural frames influence what we find comfortable to write about. Religion, politics, status, death, and sex can be taboo topics, while the fact that "privacy" is not a universal concept means that writing about personal or family issues may seem intrusive to some learners. Similarly, not all writers will be happy to take a critical or combative stance toward an assigned topic or to commit themselves to a position. While questions of topic can be solved with a sensitive approach, teachers need to be aware that writers from other cultures may apply different standards to what is addressable in writing.
Reflection 2.6
Are there any topics that you might feel uncomfortable to write about in a classroom context? List some and consider why these are sensitive to you.
Teachers also need to be alert to the fact that some L1 teaching techniques may conflict with students' expectations. One potential problem area is that of feedback preferences. Many writing teachers, influenced by cognitivist and expressivist ideas in LI classrooms, stress the expression of meaning in their teaching and tend to respond to the content of their L2 students' essays in their feedback. But the LI and L2 literacy training of many ESL learners has involved traditional product-centered instruction, focusing on accuracy, so students often put a high premium on feedback that addresses the mechanics and grammar of their texts. In Hong Kong secondary schools, for example, students expect their English teachers to correct every grammatical error they make in their essays. These different experiences may create disparities between preferred teacher and student practices.

42 Second language writers
Another potential area of difficulty is that of peer review. A central fea-ture of LI process writing approaches, the practice of asking students to respond to the texts of their peers, is generally seen as beneficial in L2 writ-ing instruction (e.g., Hedgcock and Lefkowitz, 1992). Group members are asked, to comment on whether particular elements of an individual's essay are effective or not, supporting their views with examples from the essay (see Chapter 7). But while this may help some learners to develop better re-vision strategies and envisage their audience more effectively, peer response has been criticized as culturally inappropriate for learners from more col-lectivist cultures. Thus, in Carson and Nelson's (1996) study, the primary goal of Chinese students in such groups was social - to maintain group harmony - and this led them to avoid criticism of peers' work and to avoid engaging in a dialogue about the comments peers gave on their writing.
The following comments, from a Chinese and a Hong Kong learner, show similar concerns about peer feedback:
I want some comments and I asked ZC. Well, he said "it's all right." Nothing important, nothing useful. Maybe he didn't like to comment. Especially for Chinese, for Chinese people you know they seldom comment on some other people's work. I think it is not good.
The conference is not so useful because our group members just give good comments. We just say the essay is OK. Perhaps suggest a small change sometimes, especially grammar mistake. We don't usually make a criticism to our classmate.
Although such cultural strategies may encourage a positive group climate and avoid threatening the "face" of its members, they may be less effective in fostering a critical appreciation of texts or developing writing skills.
Reflection 2.7
Imagine you are using peer response methods with a group of students like Carson and Nelson's from a collectivist culture. How would you introduce the idea of peer response to them and how would you encourage them to share their writing and respond to their peers' work?
Teaching and learning styles
Awareness of differences in preferred learning and teaching styles is also po-tentially useful in L2 classrooms. Research suggests that students have their

Teaching and learning styles 43
own learning styles or general approaches to learning and that these are at least partly shaped by their cultural backgrounds and prior experiences (e.g., Hyland, 1994). Learning styles are the "cognitive, affective and perceptual traits that indicate how learners perceive, interact with and respond to, their learning environment" (Reid, 1993:. 56), and while some students have mul¬tiple learning styles that allow them to switch styles according to the context, most occupy points along a continuum between two opposing styles. Research has focused largely on three broad types of style:
1. The cognitive dimension distinguishssfield-independent learners who are mainly analytic and prefer instruction that emphasizes rules, from field-dependent students who flourish in cooperative, experiential classrooms with plenty of interaction and feedback on their writing.
2. The affective dimension differentiates students who depend on social and emotional factors from those who rely more on logic. It also separates out extroverts and introverts.
3. Perceptual learning styles are most relevant in the ESL/EFL class. Visually oriented students like to see information written down, while auditory learners prefer lectures and spoken input. Tactile or kinaes-thetic students learn best if they are active and can work with tangible objects.
The difficulties in determining a single learning style for any particular student should not be underestimated. Very few learners are likely to dis¬play a single style in a uniform or exclusive way, and organizing a writing curriculum around these learner characteristics could be a largely frustrat¬ing experience. However, diagnosing students' preferred styles encourages teachers to consider the potential range of learning styles in their classes and to provide learners with the kinds of input and writing tasks that will help them learn best. This means raising students' awareness of productive strate¬gies and adapting their own activities to the range of styles in their classes to avoid the "style wars" between their own and their students' styles, which can have a negative effect on both attitudes and learning (Bialystock, 1985).
Of particular interest to writing teachers in L2 classrooms is that although diversity in a culture is the norm, individuals within a culture tend to exhibit consistent patterns of learning when compared with those of other cultures (Oxford and Anderson, 1995). It is important to avoid stereotyping linguistic groups as having uniform preferences because factors such as age, gender, and learning experiences cross-cut cultures (Hyland, 1994), but, as Oxford, Holloway, and Horton-Murillo (1992: 441) point out, "although culture is not the single determinant, and although many other influences intervene, culture often does play a significant role in the learning styles

44 Second language writers
Table 2.3: Results of Reid's study of learning style preferences

Very strong Strong Quite strong Minor Negative
Native learning learning learning learning learning
language style style style style style
(number) preference preference preference preference preference


Arabic (193) Spanish (205) Kinesthetic
Tactile
Kinesthetic Auditory Tactile
Japanese (130)
Chinese (90) Korean (118) Kinesthetic Tactile Kinesthetic Tactile Auditory Visual

Visual
Visual
Auditory


Group individual
Visual Group
Auditory
individual
Visual Group
Auditory
Kinesthetic
Tactile
Individual
Individual Group
Individual Group

Source: Reid, 1993:58.
unconsciously adopted by many participants in the culture." The most well-known study linking learning styles and culture is Reid's (1987) self-report survey of the perceptual learning style preferences of 1,234 students from various cultures. Some of her findings are shown in Table 2.3.
Reflection 2.8
In the L2 writing class, teachers need to consider how the varied cultural and linguistics backgrounds of students might influence the ways they learn to write and to accommodate these in their teaching. Select one language group from Table 2.3 and consider if Reid's results accurately reflect what you know of this group's learning preferences. Can you recommend some writing tasks that might work successfully with this group?
In writing classes, students' perceptual style preferences can be accom-modated in various ways:
• Students with an auditory preference work best on tasks like listening to lectures, conversations, or taped material as sources for writing and tasks that require interaction with others such as group or pair work involving information transfer, reasoning problems, and discussion.

Cultural differences in written texts 45
• Predominantly visual learners may respond well to reading source texts, writing class journals, completing gapped texts, and transferring infor¬mation from graphic, textual, or video material.
• Kinesthetic students like to participate actively and therefore suitable tasks include role-plays and simulations with writing elements, site visits, and projects involving data collection.
• Tactile students may work better with tasks that involve writing reports on building and testing models, developing and acting scripts for plays, and sequencing activities such as jigsaw texts.
• Students differ in whether they work best alone or collaboratively, and teachers should vary the emphasis they give to individual and peer writing to help students extend the ways they write.
So, while it may not be possible to discover a single learning style for each student, explicitly addressing the issue can be a good exercise for both teachers and learners. Reid's questionnaire (Appendix 2.1) is a useful means of gathering data, raising awareness, and explaining the purpose of different classroom activities. When this information is combined with an analysis of students' self-report data about their existing competencies as writers and their writing experiences (see Chapter 3), then teachers are able to devise in¬struction types, and writing activities which consider student variations and which capitalize on the strengths and address the weaknesses of them all.
Reflection 2,9
What do you think is your own preferred learning style? Have you always had the same preference or has it changed over time? How do you think this influences your preferred teaching style?
Cultural differences in written texts
Perhaps the most-examined aspect of culture in writing is the differing cul¬tural expectations that people have about the ways texts are organized and the effects these may have on L2 literacy development. What is seen as log¬ical, engaging, relevant, or well-organized in writing, what counts as proof, conciseness, and evidence, all differ across cultures. Although it is far from conclusive, research suggests that the schemata of L2 students differ from those of LI writers in their preferred ways of organizing ideas, and these cultural preconceptions may hinder effective communication. This field is known as contrastive rhetoric (CR): "Contrastive rhetoric maintains that

46 Second language writers
Table 2.4: Some differences between L1 and L2 student academic essays
• different organizational preferences
• different approaches to argument (justification, persuasive appeals, credibility)
• different ways of incorporating material (use of quotes, paraphrase, allusion, unacknowledged borrowing, etc.)
• different ways and extent of getting readers' attention and orienting them to topic
• different estimates of reader knowledge
• different uses of cohesion and metadiscourse markers (see below)
• Differences in how overt linguistic features are used (generally less subordination, passives, modifiers, lexical variety, and specificity in L2 writing)
• Differences in objectivity (L2 texts often contain more generalizations and personal opinions)
• Differences in complexity of style
Sources: Connor, 1996; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996: 239; Hinkel, 1999.
language and writing are cultural phenomena. As a result, each language has rhetorical conventions unique to it. Furthermore the linguistic and rhetorical conventions of the first language interfere with the writing of the second language" (Connor, 1996: 5). The findings of contrastive rhetoric are in¬conclusive and show differences across L2 groups, but some of the results are summarized in Table 2.4.
The idea of cultural differences in rhetoric has been of interest to writing teachers since Kaplan's (1966) study of six hundred L2 student essays over thirty-five years ago. Kaplan found that students from different backgrounds systematically identified and developed their ideas in different ways. Com¬pared with what he saw as the essentially linear pattern of English para¬graphs, he suggested that Arabic speakers produced texts based on a series of parallel coordinate clauses; "Oriental" writers used an indirect approach and came to the point only at the end; and French, Spanish, and Russian speakers digressed and introduced extraneous material far more often than English writers. Because these culture-specific patterns were believed to negatively interfere with students' L2 writing, teachers were urged to pro¬vide students with explicit models of English expository paragraphs, con¬centrating on a "factual-inductive" organization with clear topic sentences. Exercises such as parallel writing, reconstructing jumbled sentences, and writing summaries (e.g., Kaplan and Shaw, 1983) were recommended to raise students' awareness of appropriate rhetorical structures.
Kaplan's original findings, however, have been widely criticized:
• for lumping different language groups together, for example, all Asians as "Oriental"
• for being too prescriptive in taking a rigid view of "correct" English rhetorical patterns

Cultural differences In written texts 47
• for being too ethnocentric in privileging the writing of native English speakers as "linear"
• for being too simplistic in attempting to see LI thought patterns in L2 essays
• for oversimplifying both L2 and LI forms of writing
One problem has been in establishing equivalent writing tasks for com¬parisons as not all cultures share all genres. Kachru (1996), for instance, observes that the Indian genre of writing horoscopes has no parallel in the West and that the Anglo-American genre of written invitations is unknown in India. Thus, it may not be helpful to directly compare the argumentative essay, which seeks to prove one position correct and all others wrong, with its Indian counterpart, which puts forward several positions and allows the reader to decide.
CR has abandoned this strong view that writing reflects actual patterns of thinking, and now sees LI rhetorical structures as learned cultural pref¬erences (Kaplan, 1987). The different rhetorical modes discussed above are available to all writers and do not allow us to predict how students from different language backgrounds will write. Essentially LI patterns represent tendencies which may intrude on writing in English, rather than inevitably interfere with it. However, research has continued to identify dif¬fering rhetorical patterns and conventions across a number of languages and to demonstrate the impact these may have on L2 students' writing in English at various proficiency levels.
Reflection 2.10
One criticism of contrastive rhetoric has been that it involves an idealized notion of what an English paragraph or composition is and ignores the genre variations that we find in real life. Should teachers encourage individual creativity when developing writing skills for academic genres? To what extent do you think L2 students might prefer to have models to follow?
Writer-responsible versus reader-responsible languages
Basically the L2 writer is writing from his or her own familiar culture and the LI reader is reading from another context. One possible explanation for these difficulties therefore is that they are related to the amount of effort the writer expects the reader to invest in the text. Hinds (1987:143) suggests that in languages such as English the "person primarily responsible for effective

48 Second language writers
communication is the writer," but in Japanese (and perhaps Korean and classical Chinese too) it is the reader. Writers compliment their readers by not spelling everything out, while readers are said to savor hints and nuances. Similarly Clyne (1987) argues that while English language cultures urge writers to produce clear, well-organized statements, German texts put the onus on the reader to dig out meaning, and this seems to apply to Spanish texts as well (Valero-Garces, 1996). Coherence, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder.
A good example of how skilled writers achieve this kind of clarity in English is their regular use of "signposts" to help readers through their arguments. It is the writer's task to provide appropriate transition statements when moving from one idea to the next and to regularly place signals in the text so the reader can see how the writer intends the text to hold together. These signals are called metadiscoiirse markers, and they serve to explicitly organize the text and comment on it by use of:
• sequencing points (first, next, last)
• connecting ideas (however, therefore, on the other hand)
• showing what the writer is doing (to summarize, in conclusion, for example)
• reviewing and previewing parts of the text (in the last section we..., here we will address...)
• commenting on content {you may not agree that..., it is surprising that...)
These features help the reader through a text (Hyland, 1999) but their signifi¬cance may not always be obvious to L2 writers from more reader-responsible cultures. Americans, for instance, have been found to use far more of these features than Finnish writers, probably because Finnish schools teach stu¬dents that metadiscourse is not only superfluous, but the sign of a poor writer (Mauranen, 1993).
Implications of contrastive rhetoric for teachers
One consequence of taking culture seriously in L2 writing teaching has been to broaden the concept of culture itself, and to identify the impact of professional, institutional, and disciplinary cultures on writing conventions. Such views of writing acknowledge that the schemata we use to produce and understand texts are sensitive to the ways of thinking of our discourse communities (Hyland, 2000). Most of the significant writing we do is in our communities - in school, in recreational groups, or in the workplace. Contrastive rhetoric shows us that writing is a cultural resource and that

Cultural differences in written texts 49
different genres and rhetorical conventions operate in different settings. Simply good writers are people who are better able to imagine how their readers will respond to their texts because they are familiar with the conven¬tions and expectations that operate in those settings. This helps to account for why many native English speakers find writing at university so difficult: it is not a failure to think logically or an inability to write, but the struggle is to acquire the literacy skills of a new culture.
One pedagogic response to the ideas and research of contrastive rhetoric has been to bend the ways of writing of nonnative speakers to those of Anglo-American conventions, a practice criticized in Phillipson's (1992) notion of "linguistic imperialism." However, it is obviously impossible to train the world's entire English-using population in the norms of one variety. Similarly, the majority of students learning English around the world is being taught by nonnative speakers of English and it is equally unrealistic to expect them to teach one set of writing conventions. Instead, contrastive rhetoric suggests that teachers need to become aware of different rhetorical conventions, to understand some of the issues L2 writers face, and to accept different conventions in the work of their learners. This tolerance, however, needs to be tempered with an understanding of the degree of variance that readers are likely to accept in the students' academic or work situations.
Teachers can therefore take a number of different insights from con¬trastive rhetoric. Principally, however, it serves to remind us to avoid stereo¬typing as it shows how different writing styles can be the result of culturally learned preferences, helping us to recognize that student difficulties in writ¬ing may be due to the disjunction of the writer's and reader's view of what is needed in a text. In short, CR encourages us to see the effects of differ¬ent practices where we might otherwise only see individual inadequacies. Acknowledging the importance of prior experiences also has practical im¬plications for what teachers do in their classrooms, suggesting that:
• Teachers should help students to become more aware of these variations so they can see that there are different cultural criteria for effective writ¬ing, and to recognize that both their own and the target practices are equally valid ways of accomplishing goals in different contexts.
• Teachers should explore ways of encouraging students to think about the needs, experiences, and expectations of their readers.
• Teachers should understand the patterns of the genres students will need to write in their target contexts and provide them with appropri¬ate schemata for these.
• Students need to interrogate the tasks assigned to them to understand teacher expectations.

50 Second language writers
Summary and conclusion
This chapter has explored the main sources of differences between LI and L2 writing. It has emphasized that while there are parallels in the composing processes of first and second language writers, the latter are distinguished by their bilingual and bicultural backgrounds and particularly their prior experiences as writers and learners. I have also emphasized that all writ¬ers are different and we should be cautious about jumping to conclusions about students based on cultural stereotypes. Learners have their own per¬sonalities and there are numerous individual variables that can intervene to influence their acquisition of L2 writing skills. However, culture is too intimately bound up with language, rhetorical styles, learning preferences, and understandings of knowledge, texts, and identity to simply ignore when considering writing instruction. The main points of the chapter can be sum¬marized as follows:
• Individual differences influence how students learn, how they respond to instruction, and the progress they make to improve their writing.
• L2 writers are unique because of their bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate experiences, and these can facilitate or impede writing in various ways.
• L2 learners may have different conceptions of knowledge, self, and texts which conflict with teachers' instructional practices and judgments of writing quality.
• Both teachers and students have preferred learning styles which are partly shaped by cultural experiences and which may conflict with each other and hinder progress in learning to write.
• L2 learners' cultural schemata can impact on the ways they write and the writing they produce.
• Effective L2 writing instruction can make schemata differences explicit to students, encouraging consideration of audience and providing pat¬terns of unfamiliar rhetorical forms.
Most important, cultural factors should be understood as a potential source of explanation for writing differences and used to recognize that there are numerous ways of making meanings. For inexperienced teachers or those without experience of other cultures, there is a danger of ethno-centrism about learning to write, of regarding L2 students as simply defi¬cient writers. An appreciation of writing differences, however, can facilitate cross-cultural understandings and help us see that writing difficulties are not problems inherent in students themselves. Moreover, these understand¬ings can support teaching practices that make such differences explicit to students. By openly addressing students' LI writing experiences and

Discussion questions and activities 51
rhetorical styles and by contrasting them with the expectations of target writing communities, teachers make both instruction and genres relative to context. Thus, we are not seeking to replace the ideas and practices students bring with them, but to add others to their repertoire so they can effectively participate in new situations.
Discussion questions and activities
1 This chapter is about LI and L2 writing differences. What is the most in-teresting single difference for you? List the main issues associated with this factor for the writing teacher and describe how the teacher might successfully address them.
2 The following topics are taken from an L2 writing textbook widely used in the United States. Do you think all cultural groups are likely to be comfortable writing about these topics?

• In your country, how common is cohabitation, or consensual unions without marriage?
• In your culture, how do people view births outside of marriage?
• In your culture, do some people judge others by their manners at the table?
• What kind of role model do fathers in your country provide for their children?
From your own experience, do you think asking students to discuss their cul¬ture helps build on their personal experiences for writing or does it help draw boundaries which polarize cultural identities and prevent them responding as individuals?
3 The discussion of cultural differences in the use of language suggests that students would benefit from a clear understanding of how writing is used in their first language and culture. This would help them to develop an appreciation of the different relationships between writer and reader and how expression of purposes and meanings differ across cultures. How could students discover more about writing in their own culture? How might you as a teacher learn about the most frequent kinds of writing they do, who the audiences are, and the style of the writing?
4 Interview someone who has learned to write in a second language. What did he or she consider the main linguistic or cultural factors that affected this process? List the influences he or she identifies and note how these influences worked to assist or to hinder writing development.
5 In a small group, discuss what you see as the main features of contrastive rhetoric. How do you respond to the criticisms made of it? Describe how

52 Second language writers
contrastive rhetoric might influence:
a. the ways you understand your students
b. the ways you understand their writing
c. the ways you teach writing
6 Consider Hinds' distinction between "reader-responsible" and "writer-responsible" languages. How do you think a teacher might help a student from a "reader-responsible" culture write an effective essay in English? Sug¬gest two or three teaching strategies or tasks to do this.
7 This text is the acknowledgment section of a report written by a Hong Kong undergraduate. While the writer has a good control of the language, it never¬theless seems "wrong." What aspects suggest the text was written by an L2 student and how does it reflect imperfect schema knowledge? Do you think cultural factors may have influenced the writer?
Having worked for more than half year in reading books and articles, collec¬tion of data in library and Internet, it was a tough job for me to go through words, find the appropriate framework and theories, and reduce plenty of stuff to complete this report. So I hereby use this golden opportunity to solicit special thanks to my excellent and compassionate supervisor Dr. Z. Ding because my report will surely not be completed without his constant encouragement and tremendous advice.
8 One aspect of potential cultural variation not mentioned in the chapter is that students may come to the writing class with a different view of the teacher's status, prestige, and role. How might different norms of deference and social distance influence students' experience of the class? How might you, as a teacher, address these different expectations of the way the teacher should conduct the class in your teaching?
9 Use Reid's questionnaire given in Appendix 2.1 to conduct a perceptual learning survey of your students or your classmates.

• Were there different patterns of major learning style preferences for different cultural groups?
• Can you explain your findings as cultural tendencies or are they best viewed as individual preferences?
• What writing teaching strategies could you use to accommodate these preferences in a writing class?

Appendix 2.1 53
Appendix 2.1: Perceptual learning style preference questionnaire

Age_
Sex
Name
First Language
This questionnaire has been designed to help you identify the ways you learn best. Please respond to the statements below AS THEY APPLY TO YOUR STUDY OF ENGLISH. Decide whether you srongly agree (5), agree (4), are undecided (3), disagree (2), or strongly disagree (1). Circle the appropriate number. Please respond to each statement quickly and try not to change your responses.


5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
5 4 3 2
1. When the teacher tells me the instructions, I understand better
2. I prefer to learn by doing something in class
3. I get more work done when I work with others
4. 1 learn more when I study with a group
5. In class, I learn more when I study with a group
6. I learn better by reading what the teacher writes on the board
7. When someone tells me how to do something, I learn better
8. When I do things in class, I learn better
9. I remember things I have heard in class better than things I have read

10. When I read instructions, I remember them better
11. I learn more when I can make a model of something
12. 1 understand better when I can read instructions
13. When I study alone, I remember things better
14. I learn more when I make something for a class project 15.1 enjoy learning in class by doing experiments

16. I learn better when I make drawings as I study
17. I learn better in class when the teacher gives me a lecture
18. When I work alone, Ilearn better
19. I understand things better in class when role playing
20. I learn better in class when I listen to someone 21.1 enjoy working on an assignment with two or three classmates

22. When I build something, I remember what I have learned better
23. I prefer to study with others
24. I learn better by reading than by listening to someone
25. I enjoy making something for a class project
26. I learn best in class when I can participate in related activities
27. In class, I work better when I am alone
28. I prefer working on projects by myself
29. I learn more by reading textbooks than by listening to lectures
30. I prefer to work by myself
Scoring: There are five questions for each category, grouped in the following way: Visual: 6, 10, 12, 24, 29 Auditory: 1,7, 9,17, 20 Kinesthetic: 2, 8, 15, 19, 26 Tactile: 11, 14, 16, 22, 25 Group: 3,4, 5, 21,23 Individual: 13,18, 27, 28, 30
Add the scores for each category and multiply by 2. Results can be understood as:
Major learning style preference 38-50
Minor learning style preference 25-37
Negligible 0-24
Source: J. Reid, personal communication.

3 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Aims: This chapter examines basic principles and techniques of syllabus de¬sign and identifies the centra! components of an integrated writing course. It focuses on practical aspects of the teacher's planning tasks: conducting needs analyses, constructing a syllabus, and designing units of work and lessons.
Students cannot acquire everything they need to improve their writing skills at once, nor can they learn effectively from a random collection of exercises and assignments. Teachers therefore have to develop a systematic plan of what needs to be learned, selecting and sequencing the content and tasks that will lead to the desired learning outcomes. This requires teachers to devise a syllabus and plan lessons based on it. A syllabus is a coherent plan for a course of study, providing a map for both teachers and learners which specifies the work to be accomplished by students based on explicit objectives. Teachers may not always have complete freedom to choose what their courses will include, and may find their syllabus handed down to them by administrators or prescribed in set texts. But there is usually some flexibility, and it is always good practice to plan teaching with reference to syllabus goals.
The fact that L2 writing is taught in a huge variety of settings all over the world, each with its own institutional constraints, teacher preferences, and learner goals, means that writing courses can differ enormously. Any of the orientations discussed in Chapter 1 can form the basis of a writing syllabus and these can be combined in many different ways (Ur, 1996). Despite this variety, however, designing any kind of writing syllabus requires teachers to:
• Analyze learner needs
• Select what is to be learned based on these needs
• Sequence the elements for effective learning
• Provide opportunities for writing
• Monitor learner progress and provide effective intervention
54

Elements of a writing syllabus 55
Orientation
Are writing courses like other courses in English language teaching in the ways they are designed and organized? In what ways might planning a writing syllabus be similar or different to designing other types of language syllabus? Is devising a syllabus always useful in course planning?
Elements of a writing syllabus
Some central questions a teacher should address when designing a syllabus are:
Which aspect of writing should be the main organizing principle for the
course? How much time should be given to writing as opposed to discussion,
feedback, language work, and so on? What kinds of writing will students do? How can the development of writing skills and target genres be
integrated? What role should grammar play? What will constitute progress?
While these questions can be answered in numerous ways, our own syllabi will respond to the characteristics of the students, the teaching context, and our own stance concerning effective learning. In other words, the design of a syllabus is influenced by three factors:
1. It should begin with the needs of the learner and incorporate these.
2. It should take account of wider curricular goals, both within and out¬side language learning.
3. It will reflect the teacher's philosophy of writing, including a view of language and learning.
More explicitly, learning to write needs to be seen in the context in which it occurs, so that what we know about writing and learning are linked to the particular students and environment we are going to face. This process starts with a fact-finding stage to discover the current proficiencies and wants of the students and the constraints of the learning situation in terms of time, resources, and so on. It then identifies, as far as possible, the competencies and tasks that will be required of students in target contexts. The teacher then uses this information to decide on course objectives and writes the syllabus

56 Syllabus design and lesson planning


View of language
Identify learners
1/ \f
View of learning
Analysis of
learning
situation
Identify skills and genres needed in target situation
Analysis of -target writing situation
Identify students' attitudes and abilities Identify constraints of learning situation
4


Course
Teach M Wrjte sy||abus and ^ Teach.
course
materials
evaluation course

Course evaluation

Source: After Hutchison and Waters, 1987: 74.
Figure 3.1: The course design process.
so that they can be achieved. This involves drawing on his or her experience and beliefs to select and sequence what is to be learned and the methods, materials, and activities to support this. An ongoing evaluation ensures a continuous review, encouraging reflection on each stage of planning by assessing the effectiveness of the tasks, the appropriateness of the content, and the adequacy of the resources in light of the course objectives. Figure 3.1 shows diagrammatically how these elements interact.
These ideas are not new, nor did they originate in the field of language teaching. Modern views of syllabus design largely began with Tyler (1949), who observed that teachers seemed unable to explain the goals of their teaching and how these might be achieved. He argued that educational ob¬jectives should describe learner behavior rather than teacher behaviors and should identify the outcomes of teaching. While there has been criticism of this rather rationalist view, the idea that instruction begins with an informed judgment of the skills and knowledge required by learners and proceeds through development of methods, materials, and assessment which then feed back into the model has been widely adopted in education. Richards (2001) and Yalden (1987) provide overviews of these developments.
In English language teaching, several models of syllabus design have been proposed (e.g., Brown, 1995; Hedge, 2000), but the elements of Figure 3.1 provide the basis for the following practical step-by-step pro¬cess, bearing in mind the necessity of constant evaluation and possible

Elements of a writing syllabus 57
modification of the course at each step. The followmg sections and chapters will address these steps:
Consideration of the students (personal goals, proficiency levels, inter¬ests, etc.)
I Consideration of the learning context (duration, resources, relationships to other courses)
Consideration of the target context (future roles of learners and the texts and tasks they need)
Establishment of course goals and objectives (projected outcomes of the course)
Planning the syllabus (personal beliefs about writing applied to data on learners and context)
Devising units of work and lessons (division of syllabus into manageable chunks of work)
Creation or evaluation and selection of materials (Chapter 4)
I Teaching the course (Chapters 5, 6, and 7)
Evaluation of learners (Chapters 7 and 8)
Reflection 3.1
The following advantages for having a syllabus are often cited. Do you agree with each of them? Would you add any others? What do you use a syllabus for? Prioritize the list from most important to least important for your own particular circumstances.
1. Provides a basis for assessment
2. Gives moral support to teachers and learners by making learning seem manageable
3. Reassures administrators that thought and planning have gone into the course
4. Establishes goals for learning
5. Helps teachers plan and organize their teaching

58 Syllabus design and lesson planning
6. Makes teachers accountable for what they do in their classrooms
7. Gives learners a sense of direction and a way of previewing and revising
8. Provides a statement of what writing is and what is important in learning to write
9. Provides a set of criteria for selecting materials and evaluating textbooks
10. Helps achieve standardization of learning across different classes (and
years and schools)
Analyzing student needs
Designing an L2 writing syllabus starts with the question "Why are these students learning to write?" When preparing a course for adolescents in schools or for adults in English for General Purposes (EGP) contexts, it may be difficult to identify the eventual needs of learners, but gathering what information we can about students is essential to making a course as effective as possible. The term needs analysis is used to refer to the techniques for collecting and assessing this kind of information: the means of establishing the how and what of a course. It is a continuous process since we modify our teaching to better accommodate our students as we come to learn more about them. In this way needs analysis actually shades into evaluation - the means of establishing course effectiveness.
What are needs?
Needs is actually an umbrella term that embraces many aspects: What are learners' goals, backgrounds, and abilities? What are their language profi¬ciencies? Why are they taking this course? What kinds of teaching do they prefer? What situations will they need to write in? How are writing knowl¬edge and skills used in these situations? Needs can be perceived objectively by teachers or subjectively by learners, can involve what learners know, don't know, or want to know, and can be analyzed in a variety of ways (e.g., Brown, 1995).
Once again, needs analysis is not unique to language teaching. It is used widely in corporate training and aid development programs worldwide as a basis for securing funding and credibility by linking proposals to genuine needs (e.g., Pratt, 1980). In education contexts, needs analysis emerged in the 1960s through the ESP movement as the demand for specialized language programs expanded and, in North America, as the "behavioral

Analyzing student needs 59
objectives" movement sought to measure all goals with convincing precision and accountability (Berwick, 1989). Today, needs analysis is a form of educational technology represented in a range of research methodologies which can be applied before, during, or after a language course.
Despite this apparently straightforward description, needs are not always easy to determine and can refer to students' immediate language skills or future goals, the requirements of employers, institutions, or exam bodies, or the visions of government organizations acting for the wider society. While needs are often seen as the gap between current and target needs (often called "lacks"), this gives a misleading objectivity to the process, suggesting that teachers simply need to identify and address an existing situation. In reality, needs reflect judgments and values and as a result are likely to be defined differently by different stakeholders with school ad-ministrators, government departments, parents, employers, teachers, and learners themselves having different views (Richards, 2001: 54). Teachers construct a picture of what learners need from a course through their analy¬ses, bringing to bear their values, beliefs, and philosophies of teaching and learning.
To simplify this, we can distinguish between present situation analysis and target situation analysis (cf. Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998):
• Present situation analysis refers to information about learners' current abilities, familiarity with writing processes and written genres, their skills and perceptions; what they are able to do and what they want at the be¬ginning of the course. Data can therefore be both objective (age, profi¬ciency, prior learning experiences) and subjective (self-perceived needs, strengths, and weaknesses).
• Target situation analysis concerns the learner's future roles and the lin¬guistic skills and knowledge required to perform competently in writing in a target context. This involves mainly objective and product-oriented data: identifying the contexts of language use, observing the language events in these contexts, listing the genres employed, collecting and an¬alyzing target genres.
Reflection 3.2
What information do you think it is most important to collect about learners at the beginning of a writing course? What do you think might be the best ways to collect this information? How could this information help you in designing your writing syllabus?

60 Syllabus design and lesson planning

Present Situation Analysis
Why are learners taking the writing course?
compulsory or optional whether obvious need exists personal/professional goals motivation and attitude what they want to learn from the course
How do learners learn?
learning background & experiences concept of teaching & learning methodological & materials
preferences preferred learning styles & strategies
Who are the learners?
age / sex / nationality / L1 subject knowledge interests
sociocultural background attitudes to target culture
What do learners know about writing?
L1 and L2 literacy abilities proficiency in English writing experiences and genre
familiarity orthography

Target Situation Analysis
Why does the learner need to write?
study, work, exam, promotion, etc.
What genres will be used?
lab reports, essays, memos, letters, etc.
What is the typical structure of these genres?
What will the content areas be?
academic subject, professional area, personal interest, secondary school, craftsman, managerial
Who will the learner use the language with?
native or nonnative speakers reader's knowledge - expert,
layman, etc. relationship - colleague, client,
teacher, subordinate, superior
Where will the learner use the language?
physical setting: office, school, hotei linguistic context: overseas, home
country human context: known/unknown
readers

Source: After Hutchison and Waters, 1987: 62-3.
Figure 3.2: A framework for needs analysis.
Figure 3.2 summarizes the information that the syllabus designer needs to gather about both the present and target situations in the form of general questions.
Reflection 3.3
Do you think target or present needs should be given priority in designing an L2 writing syllabus? How could a syllabus actually be designed to take account of students' current wants?

Analyzing student needs 61
Table 3,1: Some common needs data collection methods
Personal goals and priorities brainstorming, group discussions, individual
interviews, student diaries
Learning preferences interviews, group discussions, questionnaires,
observations diaries
Background information enrollment documents, individual interviews,
{age, gender, prior learning, questionnaires, observations
immigration status, LI,
L1 literacy, occupation,
years in country)
Current L2 proficiency placement or diagnostic tests, individual interviews,
(English literacy and classroom observations
writing experiences)
Target behaviors interviews with learners, interviews with "experts,"
literature reviews, genre analyses, examinations of tasks, observations of target sites, questionnaires, case studies
Collecting needs data
In order to collect data on the various needs described above, the teacher may have to draw on a range of different sources and techniques. Brown (1995: 45) lists twenty-four different procedures for collecting needs data, grouping them into six main categories: existing information, tests, observa¬tions, interviews, meetings, and questionnaires. The list might be extended to target situations by also including literature reviews and text analyses. Table 3.1 lists some of the main methods used to collect different types of information in needs analysis.
It is rarely necessary to employ all these procedures, and the choice will obviously depend on the time and resources available. It should be remembered, however, that different methods address different areas and it is always a good idea to triangulate approaches to data collection (i.e., collect information from several sources) to achieve a more reliable and comprehensive picture.
Reflection 3.4
Select one of the methods listed in Table 3.1 and consider how it might be useful when designing a syllabus. What are its strengths, what information could it provide, and how could you use this data in syllabus planning? Can you foresee any problems in using this method? How might you overcome these?

62 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Writing tests. One of the most widely used sources of information about learners is writing tests. Students are normally tested upon entering a course or institution and the results can also be useful to course designers, both for sorting students into levels of writing proficiency and revealing areas of weakness that can be addressed in the course.
Writing assessment will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8, but it is important to note the limitations of placement tests for measuring students' writing skills as part of a needs analysis. Indirect measures of writing such as multiple choice tests are widely used for their convenience, but are un¬reliable indicators of learners' abilities. Unfortunately the main alternative, a single timed essay, provides little information about students' abilities to produce a sustained piece of writing for different audiences or pur¬poses. Moreover, the holistic scoring procedures generally used to mark such essays often fail to distinguish students with mid-range scores who may have different writing strengths and weaknesses (e.g., Hamp-Lyons, 1991). A response to two different writing tasks, such as an imaginative writing and an information transfer essay, increases the chances of accu¬rately placing students and providing reliable information about their writing abilities.
Text analyses. Perhaps the most important source of target situation data in devising an L2 writing syllabus is the analysis of authentic texts. Examples of the texts that learners are expected to produce in their target contexts pro¬vide invaluable information about relevant content, format, and language for teaching and may also be used as classroom materials. Analyzing texts may seem a daunting prospect for many teachers, but it is important to iden¬tify the main features of the kinds of writing to be taught. The regularities in texts of the same kind allow commonly occurring patterns to be described and taught. One pattern found in a range of academic, business, and social genres is the problem-solution pattern discussed by Hoey (1983). This has four basic moves:
Situation: Last week we announced our annual sale of high-quality com¬puter equipment.
Problem: This proved so popular that all stock was sold within a few days and many customers were unable to buy the goods they needed.
Response: We have placed an order for more stock with our suppliers, which will arrive tomorrow.
Evaluation of response: Customers can now find everything they need in our shop.

Analyzing student needs 63
Other familiar patterns in English texts are claim-justification, general-particular, and hypothetical-real. Because these are common patterns across many genres they are highly productive teaching items, and the fact that they can be expressed at different levels of complexity means that they can be taught to students at different proficiency levels.
As noted in Chapter 1, texts may be described in terms of the ways they are structured, or staged, to achieve different purposes in writing, and a large research literature has developed which describes many school and professional genres. This research is a good place to start to understand how particular genres work and the clusters of register, style, lexis, and other fea¬tures that distinguish them. Teachers can find descriptions of sales letters (Bhatia, 1993), research article introductions (Swales, 1990), application letters (Henry and Roseberry, 2001), business faxes (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen, 1999), and many other professional genres that students may have to write. Macro-genres such as narrative, recount, argument, and re¬port, which routinely occur in the kinds of writing required in school and university contexts, have also been described (e.g., Butt et al, 2000; Lock andLockhart, 1999).
Reflection 3.5
Choose a text suitable for a particular group of students you are familiar with. Can you recognize its genre? Are there any particular features of the text that suggest this? Can you identify any stages in the text? Compare your responses with those of a classmate.
Questionnaires, interviews, and observations are important methods of collecting needs analysis data (see Chapter 9). Questionnaires are perhaps the most widely used means of collecting needs data and are useful for elic¬iting information on students' personal goals, attitudes, and backgrounds, although careful thought is needed in constructing questions to avoid am¬biguity and to achieve a balance between gathering sufficient data and not overburdening L2 respondents. Structured interviews, drawing on prepared questions, are more time-consuming, but help build rapport with students and allow follow-up questions to better understand their needs. Finally, observing students actually writing can be useful in discovering students' difficulties with writing tasks and, like interviews and questionnaires, can also provide information about the behaviors, expectations, and perceptions of those in target contexts.

64 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Reflection 3.6
Look again at the learning styles questionnaire in Appendix 2.1. Do you think this would be useful as part of a needs analysis exercise? What other questions would you want to include to make it broader in scope? Could you adapt this for a class for lower proficiency students?
Finally, a caution. I have considered needs largely in terms of language needs and the behaviors students need to acquire to perform successfully in particular domains of writing. But all decisions about what to teach and how to teach it are not simply neutral professional questions but involve issues of power with possibly important consequences for learners. In devising writ¬ing syllabi we need to reflect on whether students' needs are best served by adopting exclusively pragmatic and instrumental goals, or whether this simply accommodates them uncritically to the authority of existing insti-tutions. A writing course for adult migrants, for example, might not only help participants to access resources through completing social services documents, but also to express and defend their interests in other areas. Similarly, courses preparing learners for academic study in English might help learners to articulate their reservations about their subject courses, providing them with the means to negotiate their roles and to help them "participate more democratically as members of an academic community and in the larger society" (Benesch, 2001: 61).
Reflection 3.7
Benesch (2001) refers to rights analysis as a way of highlighting power rela-tions and seeing teaching as more than initiating students unquestioningly into particular discourse communities. What kind of methods could you use to iden¬tify the implicit and explicit regulation in a particular setting? How might you go about including this information in a writing course to facilitate students' access to greater cooperation and decision making in their target communities?
Analyzing the learning context
In addition to learner issues, teachers need to ensure that their writing syllabi will operate successfully in the local context, acknowledging the opportunities and constraints presented by the situation in which the course

Analyzing the learning context 65
will run. By analogy with needs analysis, this is sometimes referred to as means analysis (Holliday and Cook, 1982) and involves consideration of the teachers, methods, available materials, facilities, and the relationship of the writing course to its immediate environment. Obviously, some of these elements are predetermined by circumstances while others permit teacher intervention.
Reflection 3.8
Consider a language teaching context you are familiar with and list some of the most important factors that are likely to influence the effectiveness of the course. Now rank them in order of importance. Are the most influential factors on your list always likely to be the most significant in syllabus design?
The first step in examining the local teaching context is to determine whether available resources will support the proposed course. Teachers are a key factor in the success of a teaching program and consideration needs to be given to their training, experience, attitudes, and expertise. Teachers already burdened with heavy workloads, for instance, may lack any enthu-siasm to teach a new course, while those familiar with process orientations may lack the experience and commitment to implement a writing syllabus that emphasizes text genres and language outcomes. Local conditions must also be sufficient to ensure that adequate materials are available or can be developed. Are copies of a set text easily obtainable? Is there a teaching resource room? Can teachers develop resources with computers and photo-copiers? Will library facilities support proposed assignments?
The syllabus designer must also carefully consider course constraints and what objectives can be realistically achieved within them. Intensive courses, for example, may be suitable for concentrating learners on a particular skill, such as report writing, but they may lack opportunities for reflection on texts or writing. The relationship of the course to other courses and to the wider curriculum is also important. In schools and universities students' needs are typically immediate as they will have to cope with the demands of an external exam or with writing in other subjects. Sometimes this will be in adjunct classes where the writing course runs parallel with a subject course and shares assignments with it (e.g., Benesch, 2001). In contrast, other courses prepare learners for writing in their future professional worlds. In these circumstances the kinds of writing students do and the topics they write about may be more negotiable depending on the predictability of these needs.

66 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Institutional factors may also need to be taken into account as part of the learning context. Writing courses are typically delivered in institutions such as schools, language institutes, training centers, and so on, each of which will differ considerably in their aims and the priority they give to writing in the curriculum. Individual institutions also vary in terms of their "culture" or patterns of interaction, relationships, and decision making, influencing such issues as morale, teacher cooperation, attitudes toward innovation, and independent decision making among teachers. Each of these factors can af¬fect how the syllabus is received and implemented in a particular institution.
More broadly, teachers should be sensitive to local sociocultural attitudes and practices when designing a writing syllabus. In Chapter 21 discussed the importance of recognizing students' prior learning experiences and views toward classroom instruction. Means analysis considers similar factors at a societal level, stressing the fact that cultures differ in the status they af¬ford English, the ways it is taught, and the uses to which writing is put. Canagarajah (1999: 5), for instance, describes how university students in the Jaffna peninsula of Sri Lanka expressed subtle forms of opposition to the ideologies embedded in their English syllabus. He suggests that teachers need to develop "a thinking on language, culture, and pedagogy that is motivated by the lived reality and everyday experience of periphery sub¬jects." Similarly, Holliday (1994), discussing Egypt, cautions against the imposition of alien pedagogic models in non-Anglo EFL writing contexts.
Reflection 3.9
Imagine that your institution, or one you are familiar with, is installing a new media lab and has decided that all L2 writing instruction will be taught using computers and other technological aids. What factors might affect the reception of this idea and how could negative factors be addressed?
Some of the main dimensions and issues of context analysis are listed in Table 3.2.
It is important to bear in mind that a characteristic of most L2 writing courses is limited time and that this will almost certainly be insufficient to meet all students' needs. It is also true that the time available for collect¬ing and analyzing needs data is also constrained, and in practice teachers may have to make syllabus decisions with incomplete information. What is crucial, however, is that writing syllabi are planned in advance and that as much data as possible are gathered to shape a relevant and interesting

Setting course goals and objectives 67
Table 3.2: Some features of the teaching context that can affect syllabus design
• The society Whether it is a Foreign or Second Language context
Attitudes toward English in the society (imperialistic, pragmatic, indifferent, etc.) The kinds of teaching methods and materials that are culturally appropriate The kinds of roles normally associated with teachers and learners
• The institution Influence of "stakeholders" (school, employer, sponsor, government, etc.)
The "culture" of the institution (attitudes to innovation, teacher autonomy, etc.) Morale of staff and students within the institution
• The resources The number, background, and professional competence of teachers involved
Teachers' knowledge and attitude to the syllabus, materials, and methods Availability of materials, aids, library facilities, etc.
Technological and reprographic resources (computers, photocopiers, etc.) Physical classroom conditions (pleasant, noisy, cold, etc.)
• The course The length of the course and what it can reasonably hope to achieve
Whether the course is intensive or extensive and frequency of sessions Whether the course is linked to other courses in the curriculum Whether the course focuses on students' current or future needs Whether there is an external examination
• The class Whether the group has been selected on the basis of language proficiency
Whether the group is homogenous in terms of goals, age, interests, etc.
writing course. We should also note that needs analysis is not a "done-once-then-forgotten activity." Behind every successful writing course there is a continuous process of questioning and revision to check the original results, evaluate the effectiveness of the course, and revise objectives. Teacher-led classroom research, monitoring of student writing, and ethnographic obser¬vation can play useful roles in developing appropriate practices throughout the course (see Chapter 9). Needs analysis, then, is always dynamic and ongoing.
Setting course goals and objectives
Once collected and analyzed, needs analysis data are used to formulate course goals (or aims) and objectives. Goals are rather general statements about what the course hopes to accomplish (Brown, 1995). They are the global target outcomes around which the syllabus is organized given the students' purposes and abilities, their target needs, and institutional re¬quirements. The following are the goals for a process-oriented university academic writing course (Hoist, 1993).
The course has been designed to help students:
• Realize the power of writing to assist learning in clarifying thinking and understanding;

68 Syllabus design and lesson planning
• Develop efficient and effective techniques for generating, organizing, drafting, and editing written texts;
• Master the conventions and techniques of academic writing in the uni¬versity;
• Develop grammatical competence and awareness in their written expression.
Goals can vary in their emphasis on affective, learning, language, and cognitive outcomes, but they should seek to reflect skills that can be de¬scribed, practiced, and assessed in the course. It is also worth bearing in mind that goal statements do not directly and objectively relate to needs. Once again, judgments are involved as the teacher brings his or her be¬liefs and views about language and learning to syllabus planning. It is the teacher, not the analysis, that determines which skills and abilities are worth pursuing and achieving.
While goals tend to be broad statements of purpose, instructional objec¬tives are more specific, describing "the particular knowledge, behaviours, and/or skills that the learner will be expected to know or perform at the end of the course" (Brown, 1995: 73). Objectives thus break down goals into smaller, achievable units of learning which can provide the basic frame¬work of the course and a coherent learning program for students. The goals listed above for an academic writing course, for example, translate into the following objectives (Hoist, 1993; 4).
By the end of the course, a student will be able to:
• Specify a purpose, audience, and format for a given writing task;
• Generate questions and ideas using a variety of brainstorming, free writing, and analytical techniques;
• Draft a paper rapidly;
• Edit a draft for sense, organization, audience, and style;
• Evaluate and edit others' writing;
• Analyze a specialist text for its structure and characteristic stylistic features;
• Write an essay with a thesis, supporting argument, introduction, and conclusion;
• Write an essay using multiple sources and appropriate citation techniques.
Some planners (e.g., Mager, 1975) advocate that objectives should spec¬ify three essential dimensions:
• Performance: what learners will be able to do
• Conditions: the parameters within which they can do it
• Criteria: the level of competence expected

Setting course goals and objectives 69
So, for example, an objective from an elementary writing course might be: By the end of the course students will be able to complete gapped sales letters from the textbook with 80 percent accuracy. This kind of precision allows objectives to be finely graded for different proficiency levels by mod¬ifying the conditions and criteria. It is likely, however, that most teachers would find such behavioral objectives too unwieldy - as the system gener¬ates more objectives than they could possibly teach, and too constraining -forcing them to focus only on a narrow band of skills and products. More realistically, Richards (2001:122-4) suggests that four features provide suf¬ficient guidance for syllabus planning, teaching, and assessment. Objectives should:
• describe a learning outcome - objectives should be phrased in terms of what learners will be able to do at the end of the course rather than what they will do during it.
• be consistent with goals - all objectives should contribute to the overall purpose of the course.
• be feasible - objectives should be possible to achieve in the time frame of the course.
• be precise - vague and ambiguous objectives are unhelpful.
Reflection 3.10
Which of the following objectives violate Richards' criteria? Which points do they fail to meet for a writing course?
1. Learners will learn about note taking from different sources.
2. Students will be able to take detailed notes on familiar topics.
3. Students will know how to use useful English expressions in personal letters.
4. Learners will brainstorm essay ideas in groups.
5. Course participants will be able to publish their writing in international journals.
6. Students will be able to recognize and use greetings, feedback, and clo-sures in casual conversation.
Objectives thus provide information for teachers and learners about what will be accomplished and act as reference points for selecting and sequenc¬ing content and activities into units of work and lessons. While teachers may see the planning role of objectives as more important, the value of providing learners with detailed information about goals and objectives is crucial. If

70 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Table 3.3: Syllabus information for students
%/ Course name, number, and any prerequisites
tf instructors' names and contact details
|/ Course goals and objectives
tf Materials - titles of set texts or handouts, where to get them, and details of any
reading assignments V^ Instructional methods - time devoted to input, workshops, discussions, etc., and
expectations about participation and attendance ^ Course schedule - class-by-class calendar of topic coverage and assignments \/ Course requirements - assignments with weightings and deadlines and full
assessment criteria
they know what the course will offer them, how it is relevant to their needs, and what they have to do to meet course requirements, then students are more likely to be involved in the course and to appreciate and accept the learning experience in which they will engage. It can be useful therefore to provide learners with a handout with the information in Table 3.3.
Developing the syllabus
The next stage of designing an ESL writing syllabus is to determine the content, tasks, and assignments which will meet the objectives that have been established for the course. An effective writing syllabus will include a balance of writing skills and text knowledge and a variety of topics, task types, genres, and input, with discussions, talk, and data gathering as input for writing. As I have noted, these decisions do not automatically flow from needs data or instructional objectives but involve making judgments. A syllabus publicly announces what the teacher regards as important to the course and to good writing and so reflects his or her philosophy of writing, including beliefs about language and learning.
Reflection 3.11
Can you think of ways by which our beliefs about language, learning, and writing might influence our decisions about how to select and sequence items for a syllabus?
We saw in Chapter 1 that a writing course can be organized around one or more of a number of guiding orientations depending on the teacher's views. I want to take a broad perspective here and suggest that language is a resource

Developing the syllabus 71
for making meanings to achieve particular purposes in social contexts and that learning involves gaining control of these resources. This view does not commit the teacher to any single course orientation but ensures that he or she makes provision for each of the five kinds of knowledge and skills listed at the end of Chapter 1:
• Process - making provision for students to develop their composing skills with different types of writing practice (journals, timed essays, out-of-class assignments, etc.)
• Genre - ensuring relevant genres are included and deciding how these will be modeled/introduced
• Context - familiarizing learners with the contexts in which the genres are used and the roles and relationships they imply
• System - teaching the elements of the language system students need to understand the genre and complete the writing tasks
• Content ~ selecting and sequencing the topics and content domains students will learn "through"
Clearly there are a number of ways a syllabus can be organized to include these elements, but all approaches begin by selecting one as the core element, then organizing the others to form a coherent sequence which ensures that students can progress smoothly from one developmental step to the next. In a content-based syllabus, for instance, topics are selected according to their relevance or interest to learners and sequenced by learner need or difficulty. Process writing syllabi generally focus on students gradually learning to create texts by mastering writing strategies. As a result they are organized around a series of assignments (Ferris and Hedgcock, 1998) sequenced to facilitate multi-drafting, polishing, and evaluating written work. In a genre writing syllabus, on the other hand, the basic element is text-types, selected according to learner need and sequenced according to their use in a real-life situation or increasing levels of technicality, abstractness, or rhetorical complexity (Partridge, 2001).
Reflection 3.12
In many target contexts one genre often relates to or interacts with others. They form part of "genre sets." Think of a situation where one genre normally follows another. For example, what written genres usually precede a research essay or a job interview? Could these connections be useful in designing a writing course? Consider how you might make use of this idea in syllabus design.

72 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Table 3.4: Planning a writing course
• Write course objectives based on overall goals and established by needs analysis.
• Organize the objectives so they can be achieved through manageable chunks of writing elements (i.e., units of work based on content, genres, processes, etc.).
• Link and sequence these units of work.
• Organize each unit to achieve its objectives.

1. Select element for the starting point of the unit (topic, genre, process strategy, language point).
2. Select texts, contexts, audience, content, and so on for the unit.
3. identify text features that are required to complete the writing tasks.
4. Select methodology - procedures, input sources (reading/film/visit/etc.) and resources to support progress toward the objectives of the unit.

• Select teaching and learning activities and sequence them to move from teacher-supported to independent tasks with learners gaining increasing control of an aspect of writing.
• Integrate diagnostic and achievement assessment into the units to measure learner progress.
• Integrate course monitoring for the ongoing evaluation and revision of the course.
Whatever a teacher's preference, syllabus planning always takes time. Although objectives provide a framework for structuring learning, these have to be transformed into units of work and individual lessons. The scope of the course needs to be determined, or the range and extent to which content will be covered, given the proficiency of the students, the time, and resources available and so on, must be planned. Then ideas for units of work have to be generated through brainstorming and refining possible themes or topics, finding suitable texts, understanding how these texts work, and devising appropriate activities.
Of critical importance at this stage is determining the linguistic and strate¬gic resources that students will need in order to complete writing tasks. This will involve deciding on the techniques learners require to generate material, gather data, structure ideas, and express meanings in constructing specific genres. Teachers therefore have to look carefully at texts to understand the distinct ways meanings are coded, both at the level of the whole text in relation to its purpose, audience, and message, and how paragraphs and sentences are structured (Knapp and Watkins, 1994). This information then has to be related to the learners' current abilities and the tasks and activi¬ties selected to help guide them to construct effective texts (see Chapter 4). Table 3.4 sets out the steps in this process.
Teachers also need to consider the content areas through which students will learn to write. Macken-Horarik (1996) has suggested a framework for planning topic areas based on a series of experiential domains which make increasing demands on learners in terms of the knowledge on which they

Sample approaches to syllabus organization 73

Everyday <=> Applied o Theoretical => Critica!
Type of knowledge Common sense Practical Formal education Informed
Identity and Roles Familiar Practitioner Impersonal Complex
Topics and Home, family, Work skills Technical and Interpretative
language community professional
Domestic Persuasive
Hobbies
Source: After Macken-Horarik, 1996.
Figure 3.3: Experiential content domains.
draw to provide content for writing and what this involves for the types of texts they write. As can be seen from the summary in Figure 3.3, L2 learners with little formal education can begin their writing instruction with topics associated with the everyday domain, while those who bring specific skills to the classroom are introduced to genres and varieties of language through those skills. Students with higher levels of education in their LI and with clear needs usually begin with the applied or theoretical domains. Clearly, however, many topics can be considered from any of the four domains, allowing students to move from one domain to another within a single topic or for a disparate group of students to work on the same topic in different domains.
Reflection 3.13
Consider how you might use the information in Figure 3.3 to plan for a group of learners with diverse educational backgrounds and experiences. Select one topic that all the students could work on in different domains. How would group work help you to organize learning in the class?
Sample approaches to syllabus organization
It may be helpful at this point to briefly consider how all of this fits together into the final syllabus. I have noted that process and genre orientations are

74 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Consideration of context and topic (teachers and learners build up a picture of topic, audience, and purpose)
i
Generating ideas and gathering data
(brainstorming, library and web searches, readings)
i
Language input and consideration of genre (tasks developing appropriate language for the genre)
4 Creating and reworking a draft
4
Evaluation of draft
(peer, teacher, self-marking)
I
Editing for form and style
(further discussion and input on language)
i Text
Figure 3.4: A process-driven syllabus model.
the dominant approaches to L2 writing teaching, but we have also seen the need to combine and sequence other elements within these syllabuses. Whatever the approach, it is important to recognize that learning to write requires knowledge about language, knowledge of the context and purpose for the writing, and the skills in crafting texts.
A process-driven writing course will give priority to techniques for gen¬erating, drafting, reshaping, and evaluating texts, with each unit of work perhaps emphasizing a particular element of the process and assisting learn¬ers to see its recursive nature. It will recognize, however, that all writing is embedded in a particular context and written to achieve a particular pur¬pose, and that these contexts have to be made explicit and linked to relevant content areas. Topics may be negotiated with learners or generated by the priorities of a needs analysis, with selected readings used to enhance topic knowledge and raise genre and rhetorical awareness. Although each unit of work will move through the process cycle, the learners' needs for explicit linguistic knowledge will be acknowledged with input provided in various ways to ensure they have the resources to create the texts they are asked to write. Each unit of work will therefore incorporate opportunities for learn¬ers to develop their writing strategies together with explicit teaching of the structures and realization features of target genres. Figure 3.4 shows this diagrammatically.

Sample approaches to syllabus organization 75
Establishing a context (exploring the situations that require a particular genre, purpose, topics)
4-
Modeling the genre
(reading texts of the appropriate genre)
4-
Noticing
(drawing attention to typical functions, features, and stages of the genre)
i
Explicit analysis of texts
(focus on features, grammar activities, and info transfer)
I
Controlled production
(text completion, text reconstruction, re-ordering)
i
independent writing
(planning, drafting, teacher and peer feedback)
I Text
Figure 3.5: A genre-driven syllabus model.
Genre-driven courses, on the other hand, will take texts as the start¬ing point but provide opportunities for learners to develop text-generating strategies. The guiding principle is that literacy development requires an explicit focus on the ways texts are organized and the language choices that users must make to achieve their purposes in particular contexts. Genres offer a focus for understanding the types of texts students will need in a given situation and also act as vehicles for relevant topics. Beginning with contexts, students gradually acquire an understanding of how texts and sentences are structured so that they are meaningful, clear, and accurate and a means of discussing the relationship between a text and its context and how it changes in different situations. The syllabus aims to move the learner through various tasks related to the genre being taught and the kinds of process skills required to produce it, gradually withdrawing support as confidence and abilities are developed. Figure 3.5 outlines this model.
In sum, all syllabus design should acknowledge that the skills involved in learning to write include the ability to draft, revise, conference, edit, proofread, and publish, and to form well-structured, effective texts. Whether the teacher starts from contexts, processes, genres, topics, or structures, each aspect should be included and related to the others in ways that gradually develop students' abilities to write and to understand the effects of the available choices. Various sources of input and activities are essential, with

.76 Syllabus design and lesson planning
opportunities for learning through readings, discussions, and controlled exercises as well as independent writing.
Reflection 3.14
How can a syllabus and course outline help us in planning writing instruction? List the advantages to students of a planned writing course. Which of the two models sketched in Figures 3.4 and 3.5 do you think offers the most to L2 writing students?
Planning units of work
Teachers do not generally develop lessons directly from their syllabus, but break the syllabus down into units of work which are instructional blocks of several lessons planned around a single instructional focus or theme. Richards (2001: 166) lists five factors that account for a successful unit of work:
1. Length - sufficient material but not overly long to create boredom
2. Development - one activity leads smoothly to the next in a logical way
3. Coherence - the unit has an overall sense of coherence
4. Pacing - each activity moves along and no activity is markedly longer than the others
5. Outcome - at the end of the unit, students know how to do a related series of things
Once again, objectives are important to ensure that appropriate learning is achieved. Just as syllabus objectives specify the knowledge and skills students will acquire at the end of a course, lesson and unit objectives describe the observable behaviors learners will display at the end of the unit. The way that units relate directly to the course objectives can be seen in this example from a school context: Syllabus objective:
Students will be able to produce a range of well-structured and well-presented factual texts for a wide variety of purposes and audiences.
Unit objectives:
Students will collect information on a series of events by completing a
worksheet. Students will write a recount in the form of a diary.

Planning units of work 77
Students will use these sources to jointly compose a factual recount of a
class excursion. Individual students will develop the recount by adding in words/phrases
to describe people, events, locations, time, in more detail.
The proposed outcome is clearly stated in terms of student behaviors that can be observed and evaluated, using action verbs such as collect, write, and compose. While not all teachers write detailed objectives for units and lessons, they do have clear outcomes in mind, ensuring that each activity can be justified in terms of what the syllabus is seeking to achieve.
It is a good idea for novice teachers to include their objectives in plans to ensure a successful connection is made with syllabus aims and to pro¬vide a principled means of integrating and sequencing tasks and content. These two teachers mention two ways of using the syllabus objectives for planning:
The syllabus is set by the Ministry in my school, but I find it useful in planning classes. We use a textbook for writing classes in my school but it's mainly a grammar book and not very interesting, so I have to organize the classes myself or it would just be grammar drills. When I prepare a class or series of classes I check to see what is on the syllabus and what is appropriate to teach next. I use this to plan and schedule the activities I want the students to do and the kinds of text analyses we will do. The objectives help me go in the right direction. Then I go to the resource room and use materials as I need them.
I usually start with a topic for a unit and we normally work this out in class, what the students are interested in. Then I collect texts for readings around the topic. The syllabus is a kind of checklist for what I need to do with the topic. So it tells me whether students have to write a report or argument or whatever and what levels of competency are required. My job is to put the syllabus into practice in as interesting and effective a way as I can with lots of writing for the students.
To organize a series of lessons into a unit of work requires a theme. Unit themes are best seen as real-life activities or situations in which peo¬ple do specific things through writing rather than grammatical structures, functions, or text-types. Common starting points for units are situations or topics, as these provide potentially relevant and motivating ways to get into writing while unifying a set of contexts and activities. The choice of situa¬tion or topic evokes a set of social contexts that can be organized according to the experiential domains listed in Figure 3.3. Clearly, the situations and topics selected for the units will depend on the proficiency of the students and the objectives of the course, although many themes can be explored within several domains.

78 Syllabus design and lesson planning
Table 3.5: Possible themes for organizing units of work
Possible situations for writing Possible topics for writing
• Responding to customer inquiries • impact of science
• Applying for a job • Work and leisure
• Researching an argument essay • Crime and punishment
• Writing a feasibility report • Love and marriage
• Enrolling at university • Terrorism
Each context suggests the key genres which tend to occur in that context and these provide a basis for selecting appropriate readings, text models, and discussion themes. In turn, these lead to decisions about the content material and the language input needed for particular learners, working from the target situation analysis or topic for the content and the text type for language. From here the tasks, language activities, and writing skills that students will need to practice can be developed. Situations for writ¬ing may be based on the students' target professional or academic con¬texts, and so involve an event sequence of relevant genres. The situation "applying for a job," for instance, is likely to involve scanning newspapers, writing applications and resumes, writing to referees, being interviewed, and follow-up letters. Topics can stimulate writing projects and serve to develop the different process skills for various kinds of writing. The topic "technology," for example, suggests a factual description (explaining how something works), a narrative of personal experience (an encounter with phone banking), an argumentative essay (pros and cons of the Internet), and so on. Some common situations and topics for units of work are given in Table 3.5.
Grabe and Kaplan (1996: 266-376) provide a range of excellent ideas for learning and assessment that can be drawn upon in this regard. In three chapters they offer seventy-five instructional themes or topics appropriate for teaching writing at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of proficiency organized into five general principles which can be useful for writing teachers:
1. Preparing students for writing through awareness, confidence building, development tasks, and so on
2. Assisting and guiding writing through ideas for organizing, adding infor-mation, and responding
3. Working with writing through different topic ideas and multi-drafting
4. Writing for different purposes through different genres
5. Extending the writing curriculum through independent opportunities for writing and awareness of styles.

Planning lessons 79
When one or more topics have been selected, these then have to be organized and sequenced. Organizing provides an overall coherence to the course for students and is crucial in devising materials and activities. This involves deciding on the theme of each unit, how many lessons each unit will comprise, and how they will be sequenced. Themes can be sequenced in a number of ways and this will depend on the course and the learners. However, it is common to use one of the following principles:
• Begin with topics or situations that are concrete and relate to learners' prior experiences and everyday life and move on to more applied or theoretical topics later.
• Begin with topics that are relatively simple and that progress to more advanced activities.
• Begin with topics that meet the most urgent needs of learners. This is particularly relevant to new migrants and ESP learners.
• Begin with topics or situations that are less controversial or that generate simple polar opinions to allow students to develop the confidence to handle and express more varied views.
Planning lessons
Just as a unit of work is made up of a series of lessons that contribute to its coherence, lessons themselves should also be internally consistent so that students can recognize what is being learned and work toward an expected outcome. Lesson planning is one way of ensuring that this happens. Plans, however, should not be seen as commandments set in stone to be rigidly respected; some activities may not work as expected and not everything that is likely to occur in a class can be anticipated.
But this does not mean that lesson planning is wasted effort. It both familiarizes teachers with the lesson content and helps them to anticipate what "may go wrong and so prepare for the unexpected. Equally impor¬tantly, planning lessons prompts us to think of our learners, their needs, interests, and difficulties, as well as encouraging reflection on our teach¬ing by providing a framework for evaluating both successes and failures (Richards and Lockhart, 1994). So although lesson plans are useful, they are proposals for action rather than scripts to follow: a means to identify aims, consider learning, and predict problems. While there is no "right format" in constructing lesson plans, most consist of certain core com¬ponents, written out in more or less detail depending on the teacher and the class, as shown in Table 3.6. An example lesson plan is shown in Appendix 3.1.

80 Syllabus design and lesson planning Table 3.6: Elements for a lesson plan format
%/ Lesson objectives - concrete aim, e.g., to design and draft a crime prevention
leaflet; to build vocabulary for describing places for "my country" essay and
practice structure of a short description %/ Previous learning - reminder of work completed in previous units and class »/ Materials and aids - textbook, handouts, any audiovisual materials needed •/ Housekeeping - announcements, assignments to be collected or given, and so on l/ Sequence of activities - time given to each activity, the tasks (discussion, input,
reading, writing), the interaction types (individuai, pair-work, groups) and instruction
for transitions between tasks ^ Contingency task - additional activity to fill out time or to substitute if one falis flat
Table 3.7: Organization of a lesson
1. Having a clear purpose Know why you are giving the lesson - what it is
leading to. It is often helpful if students know this too.
2. Selecting syllabus elements The syllabus outline provides the basis of what is
chosen. It is important that each lesson follows the last so learners experience a sense of progression through the syllabus.
3. Fitting activities to available Anticipate how long each activity will take and match
time activities to the time available. Appropriate pacing
and variation of activities is vital. Open-ended activities (pair work, discussions of texts, feedback sessions) always take longer than expected.
4. Giving the lesson a clear Each lesson needs an introduction to activate prior
structure learning, linking it with previous lessons and stating
objectives. Each activity is introduced to ensure students know what is expected of them and transitions are clearly signaled and organized. Having a variety of activities helps maintain students' interest and energy. Closure is achieved through a review of what has been done, the purpose that has been achieved, or a link with the next lesson.
' Organization is the key to a successful lesson and this means careful time management, clearly setting out what both the teacher and learners will be doing at each phase of the class. For Feez (1998: 129), lesson organization involves the four main steps outlined in Table 3.7.
Reflection 3.15
In your view, what makes a good lesson in a writing class? What input should the learners receive? What kinds of tasks should be included and how should they be organized? Should students do a lot of writing in class or should this mainly be a homework activity?

Summary and conclusion 81
Two remaining considerations in planning lessons concern setting the tasks and managing class interaction. The choice of writing tasks partly depends on the proficiency of the students and their familiarity with the genre being studied, but when students are working with a new genre it may be necessary to invest considerable time on activities that focus on the purpose, structure, and language features of the text as well as the most effective ways of planning and drafting it.
Teachers also need to be sensitive to the importance of different interac¬tion patterns and seek to maintain motivation and concentration through a variety of patterns: teacher-fronted, class discussion, group andpairwork. It might also be useful to consider the advantages of varying the tempo of the lesson through a mix of difficult and easy activities or the extent to which tasks "stir or settle" learners, either enlivening them with con¬troversial discussion, or calming them with reading tasks (Ur, 1996: 217). This variety needs to be carefully planned, however, with particular thought given to transitions between tasks and to pulling the class together at the beginning and end to ensure that students have a sense of structure and progression.
Finally, there is the issue of evaluating the effectiveness of the class and drawing lessons from this. It is important to reflect after a lesson and consider whether it was successful in achieving its aims, motivating learners, and facilitating learning. Reflection needs to go beyond impressions of whether the students seemed to be enjoying the class or whether the planned material was covered. The crucial issue is whether the students learned the material well or progressed with the writing tasks they were given. Periodic checks on learner performance or questionnaires asking students to evaluate the course are helpful, but reflection is the most immediate and effective technique. Brown (1995) and Richards and Lockhart (1994) suggest a number of systematic self-assessment tools, but most teachers simply can consider the students' responses to the activities and ask whether they would make changes next time: to the timing, the instructions, the kinds of writing done, the support provided, the sequence of learning, or the activity itself. Learning from what we have done is the best way to improve our practices, and reflection can offer a starting point for planning the next class.
Summary and conclusion
Designing a syllabus and the units of work and lessons that realize it in the classroom can be challenging tasks for writing teachers. This chapter has therefore offered principles and approaches to make these tasks more

82 Syllabus design and lesson planning
manageable. The main points were:
• Course design is based on a clear understanding of learners' back¬grounds, interests, expectations, and abilities, and on knowledge of the texts and contexts of their target situations.
• All writing courses should take account of the realities of the institutional and cultural constraints and requirements within which they are taught.
• All syllabuses are shaped by our views on writing, including how we see language and learning. There is no such thing as "theory-free" teaching.
• Successful syllabi, units of work, and lesson plans are based on clearly formulated and achievable course goals and instructional objectives de-rived from pre-course and ongoing needs analysis.
• Planning needs to consider the processes, genres, contexts, language features, and content that will be addressed in the course.
• Effective lessons and units of work need a balance of tasks, interactional patterns, and opportunities for writing, but they also need to provide suf-ficient scaffolding for learners in terms of language input, content, con-textual data, and process skills at early stages of learning to write a genre.
• Flexibility is an essential element of all planning and delivery.
Discussion questions and activities
1 Some teachers prefer not to use a syllabus, arguing that learning is too complex, personal, and multifaceted to be organized by a formal syllabus and no syllabus can adequately cater for the needs of individual learners. How do you respond to this argument?
2 Given constraints of time and other resources, it is often impossible to gather as much information about learners and their needs as we would like. Given such constraints, what kind of information do you consider it is most im¬portant to collect for a needs analysis? Justify your answer and suggest how you would use this information.
3 Look again at the firamework for needs analysis in Figure 3.2 and use it to devise a needs analysis questionnaire for a group of new students you are about to teach. You might want to include questions which address the following areas:

• The situation in which students need to write in English
• The types of writing they will have to do
• What students hope to learn from the course
• Self-assessment of current writing abilities in English
• Views on textbooks or methods of learning

Discussion questions and activities 83
• Learning style preferences
• Views on English as an international language of communication
4 The following goals are taken from the school English writing syllabus for
years7to 10 in New South Wales, Australia (Board of Studies, 1998a: 27).
While the extract is incomplete, can you identify the main orientation of
this writing syllabus? Select some of these general statements to write more
specific instructional objectives.
The course will involve students in developing:
• A sense of the appropriate register for the situation.
• An ability to write to a purpose: to describe, narrate, reflect, inform, persuade, argue, make an exposition.
• An ability to write to an audience: the class, the teacher, other person, imagined persons or groups, the general reader, oneself.
• An ability to write in various forms: personal records, stories, novels, poems, plays, articles, letters, news items, items for use in various media.
• An ability to assess one's own writing and from this grow in confidence and competence as a writer.
• An awareness in their writing of the conventions which promote clarity of meaning.
5 What would be a suitable theme for writing class for a group of learners you
know? Consider how you might use this theme to sketch out a unit of work.
In particular, think about the following questions:
What situational contexts, content, and genres does the theme suggest?
Do the genres form a natural sequence?
What kinds of readings could exploit the themes?
What are some of the main language forms that students would need to
write these genres? What would be a suitable writing assignment for this theme?
6 What are the advantages of writing lesson plans and reflecting on their effectiveness? Using the format outlined in Table 3.6, create a lesson plan for a writing course you are familiar with or for a textbook unit that you would like to use. Evaluate its strengths and weaknesses for a particular group of learners.
7 Look at the lesson plan in Appendix 3.1 for a 90-minute intermediate EFL class. Using the criteria and principles discussed in this chapter, consider its strengths and weaknesses. Are the objectives clear and achievable? Do the activities address the instructional objectives? Is there a balance of tasks and sufficient scaffolding? How would you follow up this lesson to develop narrative writing further in the next class?

84 Syllabus design and lesson planning Appendix 3.1
Lesson plan for a writing class

Qodh LearnerswUbwrit&a/short aeeXderitreport
Objectives 1. To- develop questions for de^crihirsj^ an/ incident
2. To- make/noteson/a/short newspaper report
3. Todi&cuss, compare/, and/comhine/ir^for motion from/notes in/pairs
Previousworh Materials
Housekeeping' Activities T -> SS
4. To draft O'reported an/axxident from/1heir rioter
Takings notes from/ short tenty. Mod^lof report structure
2 newspaper articles on/sarrie event (10 copies), OHT of model,
OUT of Categories for questions
"Record/ attendance-, £}&& assignment date-.
5 mln/.
Remind'students of report.
5 mln/.
T-> SS
T -> 55
5 mln/.
T -> 55 5,5,5
r-> 55
S^S
5,5,5
5 --5-5-5
r-> 55
25 mln/.
HXiclt purpose and/ structure. Put up OHT of structure/ Introduce/activity. EUcit questions students-would/ ashIf■ reporting'an/accident'for anewspaper Write up categories of information/on/board/ What sort coincident? When/did/ithappen/? Where did/ it happen/? Who ww involved/? Whathappened/to- each/person/? Whatwas the result? How did/they feel? Distributearticles - one/to-each/student Students, make- notes on/ article usung^ above/categories
Put students in/pairs - one with article-A and/ one/with Article/®
10 mln/.
30 mln/.
10 mln/. 10 mln/.
Students compare/ notes and/ add/ extra/ details from/ Partner
Students individually write up report from/ notes
T>ctra/activity
In/ groups students share/ each other's worh VCscu&show the- questions mlghtbe useful/ in other types of reports Groups select a/headlinef6rthete#t

4 Texts and materials in the writing class
Aims: This chapter builds on the previous one by discussing the roie of in-structional materials in the writing class, elaborating the steps in selecting and supplementing published materials, in finding and using texts, and in designing and evaluating writing materials.
Teaching materials are central to writing instruction and are widely used to stimulate, model, and support writing. They tend to be mainly paper-based, but also include audio and visual aids, computer-mediated resources, and real objects. These materials provide most of the input and exposure to written language that learners receive in the classroom, and as a result our decisions about texts, coursebooks, and practice media are no less important than those we make when planning syllabuses and lessons. Because course outcomes significantly depend on them, teachers need to ensure that their classroom materials relate as closely as possible to the profiles of their learners, to program goals, and to their own beliefs as teachers. This means they have to be able to develop clear principles and procedures to make the best use of existing resources and create their own.
This chapter will consider the major issues and steps in these processes. Focusing mainly on print resources, it will explore the role of materials in L2 writing instruction, the value of authentic materials, textbook assessment, and procedures for modifying and developing materials.
Orientation
What different kinds of teaching materials - print, audio, visual, digital - are you familiar with? Why might writing teachers decide to supplement or modify a textbook with their own texts or activities? Write a list of potential sources of materials you might use to supplement a writing textbook.
85

86 Texts and materials in the writing class
Table 4.1: The roles of materials in writing instruction
1. Language scaffolding: Sources of language examples for discussion, analysis, exercises.
2. Models: Sample texts provide exemplars of rhetorical forms and structures of target genres.
3. Reference: Typically text or Web-based information, explanations, and examples of relevant grammatical, rhetorical, or stylistic forms.
4. Stimulus: Sources of ideas and content to stimulate discussions and writing and
■ to support project work. Generally texts, but can include video, graphic, or audio material, items of realia, Internet material, or lectures.
The roles of materials in the writing class
Materials are generally used to provide a stimulus to writing or discussion, as a starting point for language input and analysis, and as ideas for organizing lesson activities. In EFL contexts, moreover, materials play a particularly important role as they may be the only contact that learners have with English and offer the only opportunities for them to study target texts. Table 4.1 lists the main roles materials play in writing instruction.
Reflection 4.1
Where would you go to find materials to fulfill each of these four roles? Can some materials perform more than one role? Which are likely to be the most important of these roles when teaching inexperienced writers? Are there any other purposes for using materials in L2 writing instruction?
Language scaffolding
An important role of instructional materials is to provide the foundation for learners' understandings of writing and language use. They are often used to present a focus for language, for example, to "scaffold" learners' evolving control of different texts as a preliminary to guided writing, or their understanding of salient text structures and vocabulary through sentence-level reinforcement exercises (e.g., Macken-Horarik, 2002; Rothery, 1986). Materials that assist learners toward producing clear and accurate sen¬tences and cohesive texts are obviously very important when learning to write, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. It is important to note here, however, that the most effective language exercises are not

The roles of materials in the writing class 87
a. Read the passage again and draw alboxlaround all the words which have the same meaning as the word example. Notice how they are used and the punctuation that is used with them.
b. Nowdrawaiine under ail the examples. E.g., [For example,! many birds utter
warning calls at the approach of danger.
c. The following sentences are based upon the information contained in the
passage above. Complete the sentences making use of each of the following
words (use each only once).
Illustration for example a case in point an example for instance such as
1. At the approach of danger many birds utter warning calls: this is of
animals communicating with each other.
2. Cries, those of anger, fear, and pleasure, are uttered by apes.
3. There are important differences between human language and animal communication: , animals' cries are not articulate.
4. Animals' cries lack, , the kind of structure that enables us to divide
a human utterance into words.
5. A good of changing an utterance by substituting one word for
another is a soldier who can say "tanks approaching from the north" or "tanks approaching from the west."
6. The number of signals that an animal can make is very limited: the great tit
is .
Source: Jordan, 1990: 39.
Figure 4.1: Materials illustrating some features of general descriptive texts. Source; Jordan, 1990: 39.
presented in isolation from the ways they are used in specific kinds of texts and domains, but relate closely to these to help students create meanings for particular readers and contexts. An example is shown in Figure 4.1, which highlights typical features of exemplification texts.
Models
Models are used to illustrate particular features of the text under study. Representative samples of the target discourse can be analyzed, compared, and manipulated in order to sensitize students to the fact that writing differs across genres and that they may need to draw on the particular structures and language features under study to achieve their writing goals. This approach is known as consciousness raising (e.g., Swales and Feak, 2000), a process that assists students both to create text and reflect on writing by helping them to focus on how a text works as discourse rather than on its content.

88 Texts and materials in the writing class
Informal elements in academic style
Table 1.2 Occurrences of six informal elements in thirty research articles

Element No. of Avg. per No. of authors
occurrences paper using element
Imperatives 639 21.3 30
l/my/me 1020 34.0 23
Initial but 349 11.6 23
Initial and 137 4.6 17
Direct questions 224 7.5 17
Verb contractions 92 3.1 11
Take a photocopy of what you consider to be a good but typical paper from your own specialized area, and with a highlighter, highlight all occurrences of the six informal elements that you find. Count and tabulate your findings. Then list and count the number of each different verb you found in the imperative (if any). If you are in a class, email your instructor your findings.
In general, how does your field compare to those in Table 1.2? What explana¬tions for any differences occur to you? Which of these elements would you feel comfortable using yourself?
Have you come across or been toid other prescriptive rules such as "never start a sentence with however as the first word," or "never use which to introduce a defining or restrictive relative clause"? Do you think such rules have validity?
Source: Swales and Feak, 2000:17-18.
Figure 4.2: Model-based materials for consciousness raising in an advanced-level textbook.
It encourages and guides learners to explore the key lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features of a text and to use this knowledge to construct their own examples of the genre. Two very different ways of using models for consciousness raising are shown in Figure 4.2, a task for post-graduate students, and Figure 4.3, an intermediate EFL exercise.
Typically students examine several examples of a particular genre to iden-tify its structure and the ways meanings are expressed, and to explore the variations that are possible. Materials used as models thus help teachers to increase students' awareness of how texts are organized and how purposes are realized as they work toward the independent creation of the genre. As far as possible the texts selected should be both relevant to the students, representing the genres they will have to write in their target contexts, and authentic, created to be used in real-world contexts rather than in class¬rooms. So chemistry students, for example, would need to study reports of actual lab experiments rather than articles in the New Scientist if they wanted to eventually produce this genre successfully. An effective way of making models relevant to learners is to distribute and analyze exemplary

The roles of materials in the writing class 89
Models or examples can help you with what to write and how to write it.
- Look for models of the kind of writing you want to do.
- Keep a file of these so you will have them when you need them.
- Think about the content (the information included, the questions asked, the ideas mentioned).
- Look closely at the language used. Underline or make notes on any useful expressions.
- Look closely at the organization of ideas.
The model on the left was useful in writing the advertisement on the right.

BABYSITTER required to mind 8-year-old boy before and after school, 3 days/wk. Preferably with other school-aged children. Lewisham area. Phone Jim after 6pm, 71 3029.

Mor required to help with fnfifh after$p.m., niihtiM. Preferably in my horn. Smmrff/ll ares. Phone Ming after 4.30 p.m. j comparison, problem-solution, hypothetical-real, and so on, and to construct the linear or hierarchical structure of their texts. Not all learners are able to do this, however, and some, like Maho, a Japanese

132 Tasks in the L2 writing class
Explore a topic through these different viewpoints:
1. Describe or define it. What is it?
2. Compare and contrast it. What is it similar to? What is it different from?
3. Associate it. What does it remind you of? What comes to mind?
4. Analyze it. What parts can it be broken down into? What is their relationship?
5. Apply it. What can you do with it?
6. Argue for and against it. Why are you in favor of it? Why are you against it?
Figure 5, JO: Cubing activity for pre-writing.
student, even find it counterproductive: "I know that my writing is quite bad. Even I write in Japanese it still does not make sense sometime. I think because I don't make a plan. Why I uy to make a plan, my ideas disappear" (Mario, quoted in F. Hyland, 1998: 275). Some students therefore just want to get their words onto paper and leave organizational matters until later, a process referred to as zero drafting. Others work better with rough plans that are fluid and open to change as drafting progresses. These allow writers to pull their ideas and data into a tentative structure for development with the freedom to discard, expand, and alter as they progress.
Getting started on a draft can be difficult for students even when they have an outline, and they may need encouragement to get beyond the first words and keep going. Strategies can involve rewriting the first sentence and continuing, or helping students to start later in the text and return to the opening sentence afterward. Tasks should also push students to the end of the first draft, with timed exercises, for example, to encourage them to keep going through a draft and correct errors and fill in difficult spellings or blocked-words later. Students can read their drafts to each other to encour¬age sharing and to listen for problems. Similarly, some of the scaffolding tasks discussed above can be used to practice and develop revising skills. Models can be compared with weak texts to target particular items, and poor or inappropriate texts can provide learners with opportunities to target par¬ticular areas: reordering or linking sections together, removing repetitions, combining sentences, or reducing long sentences, changing the formality, rephrasing, correcting spelling or grammar, and so on.
Extended writing. Independent, extended writing is really the goal of the L2 writing class, for while writers do not learn to write only by writing, they cannot learn to write without writing. Some advantages of extended writing tasks are shown in Table 5.3. It helps novice L2 writers if they can have class time to conduct at least one complete multiple drafting sequence. This provides supported practice and a chance to draw on their teacher and

Composing tasks 133
Table 5.3: Advantages of extended writing assignments
• Provides practice in entire writing process: planning, drafting, formatting, editing, and polishing.
• Encourages students to get started and maintain momentum via deadlines and classroom support.
• Provides opportunities for students to create a textuaily cohesive, stylistically appropriate, and ideationally coherent piece of discourse for an audience.
• Offers students the chance to develop and express ideas in response to the ideas of others or to a real-world/realistic situation.
• Provides opportunities for students to create a text product on which they can receive feedback.
• Provides learners with the experience of an independent performance in which they combine a knowledge of content, process, language, context, and genre.
• Provides teachers with a means of determining whether students have achieved a required level of competency in the genre.
their peers to develop confidence in planning and polishing a piece of work through several drafts. However, scaffolding and heuristic development con¬sume a considerable amount of time and students typically must do a great deal of writing out of class.
Extended writing assignments are typically based on an input stimulus of some kind and a rubric instructing students about what is required. Teachers need to take care in providing rubrics which are not only clear and unam¬biguous in specifying what students should do, but which also engage all learners and offer them an opportunity to both display and extend the skills they have learned (see Chapter 8). Such extended writing tasks typically require learners to respond to a reading text or visuals or to collect and synthesize data collected from out-of-class sources such as the library, the internet, and so on.
Extended writing assignments therefore need to be carefully designed to ensure that they both draw on the skills that have been taught and that they contribute to course goals. Reid and Kroll (1995) suggest the following guidelines for the preparation of effective writing assignments:
• The context should be clearly stated so that students understand the purpose of the assignment.
• The content should be accessible to students, feasible given their knowl¬edge and abilities, and allow for multiple approaches.
• The language used should be unambiguous and comprehensible.
• The task should be sufficiently focused to allow for completion in the given time and length.
• The task should draw on and extend students' knowledge of the genre and the topic.

134 Tasks in the L2 writing class
• The task should require a specific and relevant genre and indicate a specific audience.
• There should be clear evaluation criteria so that students know how their work will be assessed.
Reflection 5.11
Consider these rubrics for extended writing tasks. What are their strengths and weaknesses? How might you improve them using the guidelines above?
1. Choose a well-known legend or fairy tale and rewrite it. You can:
- Imagine a different or unexpected ending;
- Write it from the point of view of another character (e.g., a minor one);
- Give the tale another context or background (making it a "Fable for our Time," as Thurber did);
- Use the new story to make a point, political or social, etc.
(Grellet, 1996:58)
2. Culture shock happens when a person has to operate within a new set of
cultural rules and values. Write a text, for American travellers to your
country, alerting them to the existence of "culture shock," and giving
them some advice on how to cope with it. Before you begin planning
your essay, discuss the following texts with two or three other students
(texts omitted).
(Hamp-Lyons and Heasely, 1987: 122)
As noted above, not all extended writing is done in the same way and students may also have their own preferences for writing. But while mul-tidrafting tasks should not be prescribed as a rigid sequence of invariant steps, many teachers find it useful to plan for a series of drafts, each of which focuses on a separate aspect of writing, such as revising for rhetor¬ical organization, for grammar and vocabulary, for content and voice, and for audience. Not all assignments or students require a separate draft for each feature, however, and targeting different elements in different assign¬ments is a good way of varying the writing experience for learners. Nor do students need to be thrown entirely back on their own resources when com¬posing. Teacher or peer feedback on intermediate drafts (see Chapter 7) can encourage students to expand or compress parts of their text, to reorganize it, or to develop ideas in different ways.
An important element of drafting and editing is considering one's au¬dience, the ability to see the text through another's eyes, and therefore

Composing tasks 135

A B C D
What do i know What does my What does my What is my
about the topic? reader already reader not know? reader's attitude
know about it? likely to be?
Customer bought Customer bought What the company Customer is
some biscuits. some biscuits. will do about it, probably very
There was There was e.g., apologize, annoyed. She wili
something hard in something hard in refund the price. expect
one of them. one of them. compensation.
Source: White and Arndt, 1991: 32.
Figure 5.11: An audience awareness heuristic.
anticipate where the message might be unclear. Novice writers often find it difficult to anticipate their readers' comprehension needs and cannot flesh out a mental image of their readers in the same way as experienced readers (Flower and Hayes, 1980). Peer review may assist learners here, but they may also need practice to shift their attention from their topic and language to consider readers as real people. Elbow (1998) encourages teachers to de¬sign assignments that provide "intended" readers other than the teacher in order to "adjust the transaction" between themselves and the reader, while Schriver (1992) recommends asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then provide them with detailed reader responses gathered from think aloud protocols.
One major source of potential miscommunication is misjudging the knowledge and attitudes that writer and readers share. White and Arndt (1991) suggest a simple checklist to sensitize students to the importance of attending to shared knowledge with an example response to a letter of complaint (Figure 5.11). Most centrally, however, students need a clear con¬text for writing. Professional and academic environments typically oblige writers to present arguments or information to known audiences, and Johns (1997) suggests that students can be asked to research the interests and ex¬pectations of such readers. Assigning tasks that involve interviewing clients, colleagues, content subject teachers, experts, and so on, can improve stu¬dents' writing through a better understanding of the interaction between their purposes, the interests and values of real audiences, and the genres that are appropriate for specific contexts.
Another technique that has been widely used to encourage students to think of their reader and to write freely is that of dialogue journals (Peyton and Staton, 1993). Originally developed for children and adult literacy learn¬ers, teachers in L2 classrooms have found journal writing a fruitful means

136 Tasks in the L2 writing class
of building confidence, fluency, and audience awareness among writers, particularly in early stages of writing proficiency. While journals can form the basis of an entire course and represent an alternative way of conceptu¬alizing writing curricula (e.g., Vanett and Jurich, 1990), they more usually form a small part of the daily activity of the class, allowing students the opportunity to select and discuss topics they care about rather than ones assigned to them.
This approach has been found to enhance communication in L2 classes by providing students with the motivation to write and to express them¬selves clearly through private interaction with the teacher. This can improve students' writing abilities, their competence to handle rhetorical and gram¬matical forms, and their capacity to reflect on writing. Clearly, dialogue journals can do little to familiarize learners with particular academic or professional genres, but they represent an interesting and effective way of encouraging writing and providing a context for exploration, meaning, and the exchange of ideas.
Reflection 5.12
One consideration when setting extended writing tasks is whether to offer stu-dents a choice of topics. A single prompt has the advantage of providing practice with a focused theme and with a restricted set of rhetorical and grammatical patterns, while a choice may encourage a more motivated response. What is your view on this? In what circumstances may one work better than the other?
Sequencing writing tasks: the teaching-writing cycle
An important issue for teachers is how to organize their syllabus to form a coherent progression of tasks. There is no single "right way" to sequence learning tasks, however, and several possibilities are suggested in the lit¬erature. Nunan (1989), for instance, proposes that activities can be graded according to the cognitive and performance demands they make upon the learner, moving from comprehension-based activities through controlled production to tasks that require engagement in communicative interaction. In the L2 writing class this psycholinguistic processing approach is similar to the task-structure cline shown in Figure 5.2, which presents categories of writing activities as simultaneously utilizing and extending the skills learned at the previous stage. For Breen (2001), tasks are about meanings rather than the accumulation of forms, so sequencing is determined by the

Sequencing writing tasks 137
logic of chaining tasks to solve a series of problems. Other commentators have sought to integrate pedagogic tasks with more "unfocused" commu-nicative tasks, so Ellis (1987), for instance, suggests two parallel strands where a progression of real-world activities enables students to use the forms they have acquired in an accompanying strand of graded language tasks.
Reflection 5.13
Are the proposals for sequencing tasks sketched in the previous paragraph relevant to L2 writing classes? Which approach seems most effective to you? Why? Are there any other principles teachers should consider when sequencing writing activities?
An alternative approach to sequencing tasks, influential in genre ped-agogy, draws on Vygotsky's (1978) views of collaborative learning and Bruner's (1986) ideas of scaffolding. This approach, as noted in Chapter 1, is often represented in the form of a cycle of teaching and learning designed to make clear to students what is to be learned and assessed and to build their confidence and abilities to write effectively (Rothery, 1986). The main idea underlying this approach is that novice L2 writers are likely to require greater support during the early stages of working with an unfamiliar genre and less later. Learners move toward their potential performance through appropri¬ate input and interaction with a teacher, who contributes what the students are initially unable to do alone, scaffolding their progress by providing in¬formation, appropriate language, and opportunities for guided practice. As they gain control of the new genre, this support is gradually removed and more responsibility shifted to the learners. This cycle therefore suggests how teachers of writing can sequence tasks to achieve particular purposes at different stages of learning. As each stage is associated with different activities, the cycle offers an explicit model of how teachers can move through successive phases of classroom tasks and interaction to develop writing abilities. Feez (1998) represents these phases diagrammatically (Figure 5.12).
It is possible to enter the cycle at any point, and instruction can therefore be modified to suit the needs of individual learners, skipping stages if they do not need them or returning to stages for review. In most cases, however, especially when a genre is being introduced for the first time, teachers and students work through them all. As we can see, a whole section is devoted to building students' understanding of the context in which the target text is


138 Tasks in the L2 writing ciass

Source: Feez, 1998: 28,
Figure 5.12: Stages of the teaching-learning cycle.
used. This can be a crucial step for learners in foreign language learning or new migrant contexts who may have little idea of the cultural and situational aspects of the genre. Here teachers establish the purpose of the text, the roles and relationships of those who use it, and generally build an understanding of the social activity in which it is used. In learning to write a job application, for example, students might read newspaper advertisements, research company publicity documents, visit prospective employers, build up vocabulary lists, and study how relationships between prospective employers and j ob-seekers are structured.
During the modeling and deconstruction stage, the teacher's role is again strongly directive as he or she presents examples, identifies the stages of the text, and introduces activities to practice salient language features. Learners' attention is drawn to the structure and language of the genre through the different stages of language scaffolding tasks, moving from consciousness-raising through model manipulation and controlled compo¬sition exercises. Here, then, tasks assist students to learn the grammar they need in the context of relevant and purposeful teacher-directed activities. In the joint negotiation stage the teacher begins to relinquish responsibility to the students as they gain control of the genre and confidence in writ¬ing. Students' growing understanding allows them to create a target text in collaboration with the teacher and their peers. They are guided through all steps of the planning and drafting process, developing a text together

Summary and conclusion 139
through composition heuristic tasks and teacher questions which shape the text (e.g., Where did we go first? What did we see? Where did we go next? Then what happened?).
During the independent construction stage, the scaffolding is removed to allow students to create texts by themselves. Students individually con¬struct the genre, basing their drafts on notes and summaries they have made in researching a topic, working through several drafts consulting the teacher and peers only as needed, and evaluating their progress in terms of the char¬acteristics of the texts they have studied. The teacher no longer directly intervenes in learning but withdraws to a more encouraging and monitoring role, advising, assisting, and providing feedback on drafts. Achievement assessment can be conducted at this stage of the cycle or following it. At the end of the stage links are made to other contexts, either to compare the use of the genre in other situations - sales letters in different companies for instance, or other genres in the same situation - such as orders, customer complaints, and so on. Tasks here can draw on the same familiarization activities used at the beginning of the cycle.
Reflection 5.14
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching-learning cycle as a way of sequencing tasks to scaffold L2 writing. In what ways might the use of the cycle depend on the specific teaching context? Is this an approach you would feel comfortable using in your teaching? Why or why not?
The model offers both teachers and learners clear pathways in learning to write. It gives students clear goals and a sense of how language, context, content, genre, and process are connected and relate to their work in the writing class. For teachers it provides a principled way of planning writing activities and sequencing tasks without restricting them to one particular teaching method or set of tasks. Each stage of the cycle allows students to focus on different aspects of writing and makes it possible for teachers to interact with students in different ways and use different types of writing tasks. Table 5.4 summarizes these points.
Summary and conclusion
Tasks form the heart of writing teaching. Not only are they a funda-mental planning tool for teachers uniting syllabus goals, materials, and

140 Tasks in the L2 writing class
Table 5.4: Tasks and teacher roles in the teaching-learning cycle

Stage Purpose Teacher role Sample tasks
Contextuaiizing Assist students to Initiator/ guide Reading, site visit,
understand purpose, Resource research, library
audience, and context study, questioning, jigsaw reading, brainstorming, vocabulary building, role-play
Modeling Investigate prototypical Instructor/guide Familiarization, model
patterns and Controller manipulation,
language of genre controlled and guided
examples composition tasks
Negotiating Teacher and students Prompter Composition heuristics,
jointly create Resource guided composition
examples of the text work on individual text stages
Constructing Students create texts Observer Extended writing,
independently. Responder planning, drafting,
Performance used for Assessor conferencing, editing,
assessment peer review, polishing
Connecting Students relate work to Observer Guide Journal reflections,
other texts in similar project work
contexts
methodology, they are the ways that students come to understand and de¬velop the abilities to write effectively. This chapter has explored tasks from a practical perspective to help teachers select, design, and plan their use. The key points can be summarized as follows:
• Tasks differ in the extent to which they focus on language, content, context, rhetorical structure, and writing processes; in the cognitive and performance demands they make on learners; in the support they offer writers; and in the emphasis they give to real-world or pedagogic goals.
• Teachers can provide task variety by manipulating the main task compo¬nents: input, goals, settings, roles, and activities.
• Tasks can be grouped according to whether their main focus is graphol¬ogy, language scaffolding, or composing, although teachers should en¬sure that all activities contribute to students' current and target needs.
• Tasks which scaffold L2 novice writers' gradual control of the grammat¬ical and rhetorical features of target texts, can be crucial to their ability to reach potential levels of writing performance.

T
Discussion questions and activities 141
• The development of writing skills is greatly facilitated by the analysis and manipulation of authenic text models and the use of composing heuristics.
• The teaching-writing cycle, which is based on the idea of different in-teractional stages in learning, offers a principled way of selecting and sequencing writing tasks.
Discussion questions and activities
1 Select one task-type from Figure 5.1 and develop materials in order to present the task to a particular group of students. Contextualize the activity by noting who the students are, their proficiency and target goals, and identify the language focus and content of the materials. Write a clear rubric instructing the learners how to use the materials and complete the task.
2 Choose a text you think might be suitable for a group of learners you are familiar with and analyze it to identify its main moves or stages or three salient language features. Now develop language scaffolding tasks that focus attention on these features drawing on the different task types suggested in this chapter. Finally, plan a lesson that uses these tasks.
3 Identify the cognitive and pedagogical benefits of employing a variety of task types to teach L2 writing. What are the advantages for students of different inputs, goals, roles, settings, and activities?
4 What are the main pros and cons of using models in the writing class? Set out your own views on the issue, giving reasons for your position and addressing opposing arguments,
5 Select a writing task from a textbook. What are its five task components and what are the main pedagogic functions it seeks to develop? Could the task be improved to address additional functions, provide more interest, or give greater support to learners? Modify the task and show which components have been changed.
6 Look at the writing prompts below which have been taken from writing text¬books. What pedagogic goals and student roles does each imply and for what population of writers would each be appropriate? Select two and evaluate their potential effectiveness by considering the extent to which they develop control of content, system, context, process, and genre; their possible rele¬vance as real-world rehearsal; and the specification of an audience, a purpose, and a context. What other criteria might you apply to evaluate them?
a. Imagine a friend of yours has either just entered college or is about to enter college. What advice would you give your friend to help him or her cope with the stress of college?

142 Tasks in the L2 writing class
b. Discuss the dangers of smoking and the benefits of exercise.
c. Describe an effective foreign language teacher by explaining what he or
she does or doesn't do.
d. Buy a postcard of the city or town in which you live. Think of a friend
overseas who would like to hear from you. Write the postcard and send
it\
e. Read the newspaper articles given and choose one that interests you. Write
a letter to the editor of the class magazine or the editor of the newspaper
expressing your opinion on the subject. (In your opening sentence, refer
to the letter you are responding to.)
f. You share a small two-bedroom apartment with one other person. You
receive a notice saying your rent will increase by $20 per week. You feel
the rent increase is unfair for the following reasons:
• The apartment is in great need of repair.
• The last rent increase was three months ago.
• You are a very good tenant.
• The increase will mean you have to get a third tenant, and it is a very small apartment.
You write to the agent or a residents' help organization.
7 Rewrite two of the above prompts so that they meet the criteria of effective¬ness you used in question 6. Justify your changes.
8 Select a genre that you consider suitable for a particular target group of learners and write a rubric for an extended writing task to practice that genre. Be sure to specify an audience, a context, a topic, and any other information you consider necessary.

6 New technologies in writing instruction
Aims: This chapter explores the place of the computer in L2 writing instruction and provides a critical overview of its main uses, implications, and practical applications for writing teachers.
Technology has had a massive impact in L2 classrooms over the last decade or so and writing instruction now makes considerable use of computer technologies. Some teachers have welcomed these developments enthusi¬astically, seeing the integration of new technology-based pedagogies as a means of enlivening instruction, improving students' writing skills, and facilitating collaboration and interaction both within and beyond the class¬room. Others have been more cautious, regarding this expansion as an¬other manifestation of the escalating corporatization of education or as a threat to the essentially human interactions on which teaching is based. It is true that many of the early claims and fervor for the medium now seem rather naive, but while unbounded optimism has been tempered by increasing experience of the medium, the pressure on teachers to take up technology is becoming increasingly difficult to resist. It is impor-tant, therefore, that we have a critical appreciation of what computers offer.
This chapter considers the ways that computers are currently used in L2 writing instruction and explores some of the research on their effects. In particular it will examine the following areas:
• The use of word processors in L2 writing instruction
• Online writing
• Internet resources for writing teachers
• Computer Assisted Language Learning materials
• Corpora and concordancing in writing teaching
143

144 New technologies in writing instruction
Orientation
In what ways do computers influence the ways we write? How do you think computers might be used to effectively assist the teaching and learning of L2 writing?
Computers, writing, and language learning
In a world increasingly dominated by electronic Information and Communi¬cation Technologies (ICT), it is unsurprising that writing teachers are often faced with demands to integrate these technologies into their classes. It is also the case that new technologies have had a major impact on writing. They have had a fundamental influence on the ways we write, the genres we create, the forms our finished products take, and the ways we engage with readers. Most significantly, new technologies:
• Influence drafting, editing, proofreading, formatting, and publication processes
• Facilitate the combination of written texts with visual and audio media
• Encourage nonlinear writing and reading processes
• Alter the relationships between writers and readers
• Blur traditional oral and written channel distinctions (e.g., email, ICQ)
• Facilitate entry to new online discourse communities
• Increase the marginalization of writers and texts isolated from new writ¬ing technologies
These developments are very uneven in their effects and are confined mainly to the developed world. They have been sufficiently important, how¬ever, for many observers to talk of a "new literacy" (e.g., Snyder, 1998; Tyner, 1998), and teachers need to come to grips with what this means for them professionally. One important point is that writing, in the sense of making language visible, always involves the application of technology of some kind, whether quill, pencil, typewriter, or printing press, and each in¬novation involves new skills applied in new ways (Lankshear and Snyder, 2000). Writing is, therefore, not fixed but constantly evolving and each new mode of communicative practice requires different skills and understand¬ings. A word processor, for example, offers the writer different opportunities and challenges than writing with pen and paper, and composing an email re¬quires different skills to writing a letter. These effects are still not completely understood.

Second Language WRITING {KEN HYLAND} (ตอนที่ 1)
Second Language WRITING {KEN HYLAND} (ตอนที่ 2)

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