The Teaching of Writing: Process Versus Product

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The Teaching of Writing Process Versus Product
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Pedagogical strategies

• Advantaging or disadvantaging students outcomes
• Interaction and Risk-taking
• Writing is meaningful rather than
  error-pinpointing

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A Review

• Controlled Composition
• Accuracy
• Mechanical exercises substitution,
  transformation expansion and completion

4
Current Traditional Rhetoric

• Logical construction of different forms of
  discourse
• Paragraphing elements
• Essay development elements
• Patterns narration, description, exposition and
  argumentation
• Writing is perceived as fitting ss to prescribed
  patterns

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English For Academic Purposes

• Genres and the nature of the writing task
• Discourse Community
• The writer is pragmatic

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The Process Approach

• Writing is not a linear process it is rather an
  exploratory recursive and generative process
• Writing is no longer a mechanical process
  thinking and conveying meaning through
  collaborative work
• Writer is the centre of attention

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Product Versus Process

• Product Approach
• 1960s
• Focus is on usage and grammar, topic sentence,
  paragraphing and rhetorical patterns of moulding
  the text
• Formal Accuracy and correctness
• Modals
• Writing is a multi-stage linear process leading
  to gradual evolution of the text prewriting,
  writing and rewriting

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• Mechanical drilling rather than creativeness and
  innovation drills, fill ins, substitution,
  transformation, completion, identifying the topic
  sentence and reordering scrambled paragraph

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Classroom Interaction

• Teacher assumes the authority
• Source of knowledge
• Judgement
• Students receive information
• No collaboration
• No creativeness
• Practicing some grammatical syntactical and
  rhetorical issues

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Criticism of the Product Approach

• Focus on accuracy From has stolen the lime light
  by the time little attention is paid to meaning,
  function and purpose
• Artificial teaching mechanical drills and
  imaginative topics. Topic, purpose and audience
  are ignored. Non-functional grammar.
• Misleading students establishing a narrow notion
  of the writing process and its functions. No
  creative thinking as a result of students
  awareness of teachers emphasis on syntactic and
  grammatical errors.