The WRITING PROCESS: FOCUSING on ORGANIZATION

Although students may not like Reading and Writing while they are at high school, there is no doubt that they will have become reasonably proficient in both skills should they wish to go on to tertiary education.  That means, for me as a prep. teacher or hazırlık oğretmenı (in Turkish), I have the opportunity to try and convince my students that if they have the fundemental building blocks for a well-organized academic essay, it will go a long way to support them throughout their high school and university life. Many of you might comment that this way is too restrictive for the creative process, and I would respond that I know it is very prescriptive, and controlling. However, it gives EFL-students the basic blocks for building on their own creative process once they have mastered the organizational model of this framework.  That would be why I believe it is a worthy model to use while teaching the writing process in the early years of high school academic writing.

So, I prepared a powerpoint that goes through each part of the organizational process, and to which I will now make you party via pics.  The original powerpoint can be found HERE

So, how does this work in practice?  I will post snips of a student's work where you can see how she used her online journal, penzuclassroom, to write up a response based on the frmaework described above.  She then received color-coded feedback:

PINK= PUNCTUATION  

BLUE = BAD SPELLING/WRONG WORD

LEMON = LOGIC OR WEAK IDEA  

GREEN = GRAMMAR

ORANGE = ORGANISATION 

post-feedback draft

The drafts were done using teacher feedback and academic organizational models set up and checked by me.  However, what makes it exciting is how this students has managed to transfer the information, and done her own process by producing a superb draft for her final portfolio.  Here it is below, and remember this girl is fifteen, Turkish and had no feedback for this submitted essay.

What makes me very pleased is that Gözde, the student who produced this great work, has taken to the system very comfortably; the system and framework that she can now hone and develop, so as to identify her own academic writing style for the future. If teachers have any doubt that the Writing Process doesn't work, they should just have a wee read of Gözde's essays.