The Effect of Process Writing Activities on the Writing Skills of Prospective Turkish Teachers

Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, Issue 52, Summer 2013, 189-210 The Effect of Process Writing Activities on The Writing Skills of Prospective Turkish Teachers Şükran DİLİDÜZGÜN* Suggested Citation: Dilidüzgün, Ş. (2013). The effect of process writing activities on the writing skills of prospective Turkish teachers. Egitim Arastirmalari -Eurasion Journal of Educational Research,52, 189-210. Abstract Problem statement: Writing an essay is a most difficult creative work and consequently requires detailed instruction. There are in fact two types of instruction that contribute to the development of writing skills: Reading activities analysing texts in content and schematic structure to find out how they are composed and process writing activities. The reading activities in Turkish textbooks are thought to be insufficient in this aspect, and although process writing is adopted, it is not put into practise with such activities as writing on the text read or a proverb giving students a list of writing rules. Purpose of Study: This study aims to determine the effect of process writing activities on the writing skills of prospective Turkish teachers as well as to equip them with the writing strategies to apply when teaching writing and to propose several activities in this context. Methods: One-group pretest-posttest experimental design was used. Thirty-four first-year students at Istanbul University Education Faculty Turkish Department taken as sample wrote essays as pretest on a topic of their choosing from a presented list. They were then asked to write essays on the same topic as posttest after a 24-lesson process writing instruction. The pretests and posttests were evaluated by three experts using the “Writing Assessment Rubric” developed from the criteria for assessing written texts in the field and the activities done in the class as a base. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability factor is found to be ,953 for the rubric. The students were also asked to answer a questionaire with open-ended questions to support the research in a qualitative aspect. * Assistant Prof.Dr., İstanbul University, Faculty of Education, Turkish Department,Turkey, [email protected] 189 190 Şükran Dilidüzgün Findings and Results: The results of paired samples t-test are found significiant at (p<0.01) level in all writing skills constituting “Writing Assessment Rubric”. Conclusions and Recommendations: The activities are especially important for prospective Turkish teachers since in addition to improving their writing skills, they also learn how to teach writing. In the questionnaire the students claimed that they learned a planned method of writing, they could understand and evaluate the texts more easily analysing how they have been written, they gave more importance to title, unity, and coherence and they knew what to write and how to write. One student’s comment, “I have learned to look not only at the texts I read but also at current events from different perspectives”, indicates that process writing also improves thinking. Keywords: Process writing activities, comprehension activities, writing skills, prospective Turkish teachers. Language is a communication tool that has evolved as a neccessity of social life. Communication is a reciprocal process between the sender and the receiver, and receptive skills are a kind of decoding of language use while productive ones are related to coding. Competency in linguistic communication requires development of the strategies peculiar to both. In fact, since there is always a listener who tries to understand a narrator and these basic skills process simultaneously, there is a parallelism between the strategies (Akyol, 2006). Writing skills can be improved by determining the features of texts in the context of content, form, and construction via sufficient comprehension activities. The researches in the field remark that the readers do not comprehend written texts as authors compose them whereas something in text structure, for example the structure of paragraphs, topic sentences, and the order of supporting ideas reflects for readers how authors have constructed them (Uzun-Subaşı, 2000). As writers are supposed to cluster related ideas, associate the paragraphs, and organize the ideas to realize a communicative function, writing needs to be taught. A benefit in the use of the word ‘literacy’, rather than simply ‘reading and writing’ is that the term recognizes the essentially related nature of the two activities of reading and writing. It carries the important pedagogic implication that the two should be taught as intimately related, breaking what had been some time-honoured practices of teaching the two as separate activities (Christie, 2006, p. 51). McCabe and Whittaker (2006, p.1) point to the importance of writing with Olson’s (1996) argument that in developed societies, understanding of our world and of ourselves is to a great extent the result of our ways of creating and interpreting written texts, and with Walter Ong’s (1982) explanation that without writing, the literary mind could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. Writing calls for more complicated cognitive processes than speaking. In speaking an organizational plan is Eurasian Journal of Educational Research 191 not necessary as the communication gaps are completed during speaking whereas in writing, ideas are organized coherently within a plan in such a way that readers can relate them to each other to reach the general meaning thorough the reading process. If the idea is not configured in the mind of the writer, the expressions are likewise vague. Since writing is associated with the arrangement of knowledge and the transmission of the meaning, it is an essential part of generating ideas “which involve drawing upon long-term memory which consists of three main kinds of memory store: Episodic memory, which is devoted to events, experiences and visual and auditory images; semantic memory, which is devoted to information, ideas, attitudes and values; unconscious memory, which includes emotions and feelings (White & Arndt, 1991, p. 17)”. Writers pass thorough a complicated cognitive process to analyze/evaluate the world from different aspects and then express their comments for readers in a comprehensible unity using language. For that reason writing is a matter of process not only a matter of product. Writing is for discovery of learning, not just demonstration of learning (Raimes, 2002, p. 309). So how should writing be taught? Two approaches for teaching writing are product-based and process-based. In the conventional product-based approach writing is regarded as the recording of ideas: Related information is gathered and written in an argumentative, compare and contrast or problem and solution manner and generally evaluated in terms of formal criteria such as grammar, vocabulary or punctuation. What is important in such an approach in which writing and evaluation works mechanically is the correct use of writing technique (Dilidüzgün, 2011). Studies in the 1980s tend to focus on process writing. In a process approach, of course the product and accuracy and grammar are important-they are just not the first and only thing that is important. A principled process approach always pays serious attention to the product-but an appropriate stage in the process (Raimes, 2002: 308). The target of writing studies should be to teach not what to write but how to write and help students discover how a text is constructed analyzing the text. After that they apply the same process while they write their own. Christie (2006, p. 52) emphasizes the role of the teachers as a guide not an evaluater referring to the statement of Mackay et al (1989) that “Our most immediate task was to invent materials that would place learners in continuous control of the written language they were producing in becoming readers and writers”, while Hairston (1994) says that writing is not linear but recursive. Pre-writing, writing, and revising are overlapping activities that constitute each other. As Seow (2002, p. 319) points out teachers should model the writing process at every stage and teach specific writing strategies to students through meaningful classroom activities and as students go through the various stages of writing, they understand what kind of product is expected at each stage. Uzun-Subaşı (2007) remarks that being competent in a language does not faciliate writing. Writers find themselves in a problem-solving situation in which they should care about the content and the audience, organize the parts of the text in unity, to convert sentences into utterances using appropriate vocabulary, conform to writing criteria, and define and solve the problems they face during the writing process. Byrne (1988) summarizes the complication of writing under the three headings of psychological, linguistic, and cognitive. 192 Şükran Dilidüzgün The comprehension activities in Turkish textbooks are thought to be insufficient in this aspect. The students are generally asked to answer questions to get the information in the text not to find out how the writer composed the text to give this information. Furthermore, although process writing is adopted, it is not put into practise with the activities such as writing on the text read or a proverb giving students a list of writing rules (Dilidüzgün, 2011). The Steps in Process Writing Writing, unlike speaking, provides us with a way not only to generate ideas before presenting them to an audience, but also to scrutinize the ideas and language we produce. This seeing again lets us receive feedback from ourselves and others and, learning as we go, make changes and corrections (Raimes, 2002, p.309). Process writing mainly incorporates the four basic writing stages- planning, drafting (writing), revising (redrafting) and editing- and three other stages externally imposed on students by the teacher, namely, responding (sharing), evaluating, and post-writing (Seow, p. 316) as in Figure 1. Planninggng Drafting Respondin Revising Editing Evaluating Post- g Writing Figure 1.

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