Interactive Writing in the EFL Class: A Repertoire of Tasks
María Palmira Massi Universidad Nacional del Comahue (Río Negro, Argentina)
Writing in the EFL Situation: Theoretical Perspectives
Writing plays an important role in our personal and professional lives, thus, it has become one of the essential components in university English for General Purposes (EGP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) curricula. Its multifarious pedagogical purposes range from reinforcement, training and imitation (generally in the early stages of instruction) to communication, fluency and learning (at intermediate and more advanced levels) (A. Raimes 1983, 1987). In this article, we will concentrate on the last three purposes, namely, communication, fluency and learning, since we consider writing as a tool for the creation of ideas and the consolidation of the linguistic system by using it for communicative objectives in an interactive way. From this perspective, writing implies the successful transmission of ideas from an addresser to an addressee via a text, and this exchange of information becomes a powerful means to motivate and encourage the development of language skills (C. Boughey 1997).
We favour a process approach to teaching the writing skill from the outset (T. Hedge 1988, R. White and V. Arndt 1991, A. Raimes 1993) since its social orientation becomes visible and highlights the writer-text-reader interaction, thus purpose and audience are all important in the production of discourse while the functional dimension of communication is reinforced. As students need to be familiarised with specific discursive conventions and constraints when addressing a new or unfamiliar readership, we also adhere to a genre approach to the teaching of writing (J. Swales 1990). The social purposes of a communicative event exert a powerful influence on the textual choices a writer makes and, for this reason, the students should be made aware of the sets of schemata which determine both the content and the form of the texts they will be asked to produce. So preparation for the tasks will comprise exposure to authentic material plus a thorough discourse analysis of the different genres before they set out to develop their own texts . Recent analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the process and the genre approaches reveal the convenience of adopting a complementary position which combines the tenets of both theoretical orientations (R. Bamforth 1993, R. Badger and G. White 2000).
In the traditional paradigm, a preoccupation with `the composition` and `the essay` at the expense of other types of writing, plus a strong concern for usage over use seemed to be the golden rule. Our contention is that positive results accrue from the implementation of a discourse-oriented writing approach once our students have acquired an effective command of the foreign language in a range of familiar situations and have a good operational performance--intermediate level or beyond. In this context, assigning tasks which pose `real` problems to solve is a challenging option to keep their motivation high and create a sense of achievement (C. Tribble 1996). By generating and encouraging interactive writing, not just texts per se to be read and graded by the teacher, our students will gain self-confidence, fluency and autonomy, and they will be stimulated to express their own authentic voices in the process of text production.
Making Writing Interactive
Writing is an interactive process by nature since it evolves out of the symbolic interplay between writer, text and reader. By making conditions more `authentic` than the ones in traditional classroom tasks, an awareness of audience, purpose and intentionality is reinforced. While planning a written piece, the writer is constrained to consider the audience and to adopt a reader-oriented approach so as to achieve a persuasive, emotive or objective function. Interactivity can be promoted in the writing class by implementing some of the suggestions that follow (adapted from L. Hamp-Lyons and B. Heasley 1992):
Group-brainstorming on a given topic
(i.e. Students work cooperatively and write down all the ideas that come to mind in connection with a topic).
Whole class discussion of how a particular text might need adjustment according to the audience it is addressed to.
Collaborative writing
(i.e. Students work together to write a previously agreed text).
Whole class text construction and composing on the blackboard.
Writing workshop or in-class writing
Students consult each other and co-construct texts while the teacher moves around listening to their comments, providing feedback or answering questions on grammatical patterning, lexical items, the force or validity of an argument, the order of presentation of the information, organizational aspects, use of detail and so on. The teacher keeps track of their progress and works out a record of most frequent questions, doubts and inaccuracies for a future `error analysis session`.
Group research on a text topic
Students divide out the responsibility for different aspects of the information-gathering stage on a certain topic. They then pool their results and work together to plan a text, which may be collective or individual.
Peer-editing
Students exchange their first drafts of a text and point out changes which are needed to help the reader (e.g. better organization, paragraph divisions, sentence variety, vocabulary choice