Jimena Azua Guerrero Dr.

Troy Crawford December 7th, 2013 Writing Activity On this paper I describe my writing activity. First I give a general introduction to the activity as a whole. Then, I describe the five steps of the activity and provide the theoretical framework of each step. Finally, I conclude analyzing some problems the activity might have, and I suggest solutions. The activity was designed for my EFL students who are in level 300. In the EFL program where I teach, the students in level 300 are introduced to academic writing. They are asked to produce academic essays of 100-120 words. The students are mainly college and high school students from the University of Guanajuato. This activity aims to give explicit instruction in text structure and organization, to practice the rules of sentence length in English, to give feedback on sentence structure, and to provide a real audience. It is an activity which is focused mainly at the micro level (sentence punctuation), but it also contains characteristics of the macro level (organization, audience) (Ur, 1996). The purpose of this activity is to teach students some of two of the principles used on American English writing: sentence structure (emphasis on sentence type 4) and essay organization. I chose those two topics because it is useful for them to start adapting to the American Rhetoric. This EFL class is used to write using the Mexican Rhetoric. Becoming familiar with the sentence types will help them to avoid making run-on sentences. Knowing how essay organization works will help them to write in a clearer and in a more structured way. It is an activity to scaffold writing and it follows the process approach. This type of writing process can help students develop effective invention, drafting and revising strategies, awareness and control, expressivity and fluency (Casanave, 2004, p. 76). It teaches the students how to write like the experts.

This activity is balanced between writing for content and form. It is based on content because the learners can express their ideas and convey a message to a reader who is interested on reading the sentences. It is also focused on form because it aims to teach punctuation and sentence structure (Ur, 1996). Bean (2001) described writing as a way of discovering, making and communicating meanings that are significant, interesting and challenging (p. 38). This activity aims to fulfill those characteristics. Note: The students must know all the instructions first before doing the activity. 1. Brainstorm ideas as they listen to music. The students are asked to play a song on their mp3 player with headphones. They must play any song which brings ideas to their minds (images, memories, stories, plans, objects, ideas about their job, etc.). Then, as they listen to the music, they must brainstorm any ideas that come to their minds. The teacher can indicate the types of ideas she is looking for according to the lesson (simple present, present perfect, future). The purpose of the music is to distract the students from focusing on the brainstorm task, which might at times be boring to do. By having the students select their own music, they will be motivated to perform the task because they will be listening to the music that they enjoy. The idea of brainstorming with the music they choose is beneficial because that helps to activate their schema. When the students are familiar with the topic, they write more. Moreover, Ur (1996) comments that students are generally motivated to write and read about personal experiences. According to her, writing can be a potentially satisfying, absorbing and enjoyable task. The requirement is to make it satisfying is to write on a topic that is worthwhile or interesting to write about. I consider that writing about their favorite music can in fact be engaging for students. Personal essay writing, with topics which emerge from students own lives instead of topics assigned by the teacher which are supposedly of general interest, allows the students to express something important and meaningful in a creative way. Personal writing

contributes to in-depth thinking, a quality which can help the students in more formal academic writing (Casanave, 2004). The idea of using music to do a brainstorm comes from my own experience as an EFL student of CECI. Whenever I had to write an essay, I would listen to music in order to brainstorm random and sometimes surreal ideas. Doing so usually gave me a lot of motivation to write. Then, I would have fun while writing my paper. 2. Make a diagram to organize ideas. The students must organize the brainstorm by using a diagram. This is done in order to write sentences later in a structured way. To do so, they can select one of two different diagrams which the teacher provides. One diagram consists of circles (see appendix), and the other diagram consists of journalists questions (see appendix). The teacher has to hang a poster with the template of each diagram. The diagram will help the students to make an outline for an essay. The purpose of the diagram is to teach the students that an essay would be composed of those four ideas they have in the diagram, and that each concept would represent the main idea of a paragraph. The diagram also indicates that the concepts on the diagram are used to write topic sentences. The diagram provides the students with an outline to scaffold their writing. It will be used as a template which will allow them to start writing, to connect their ideas properly and to concentrate on the topic. This is the second step on scaffolding writing, where the writer plans the ideas in order to write the first draft (Hyland, 2004). Mexican students often have trouble with text structure and organization. They tend to consciously deviate from the topic their writing about, and they like to write with rollo. Rollo means adding more ideas to a paragraph to make it bigger. The reason why they do it is because they are used to Mexican Spanish rhetoric, where they can be repetitive (Crawford, 2010). The diagram will raise awareness on the rhetorical structure used in English.

3. Select a reader (audience). As the students do the previous steps, the teacher writes the name of the song of every student on the board. Then, every student select one of the songs that are written on the board in order to read the sentences that will be written about that song later. Next to every song written on the board, the teacher writes the name of the student who wants to read about it. This is done with the purpose of assigning a reader who is interested on the topic that the students will write about. It is very important to have a real audience; an audience who is interested on what the writer has to say (Hyland, 2004; Tsui, 2003; Ur, 1996). The responses of the audience are an essential part of writing because they are seen as a social construction of meaning (Connor, 1996, p. 165). Without an audience, writing becomes purposeless. Bean expressed it better when he wrote the problem with traditional writing instruction was that it led to a view of writing as a set of isolated skills unconnected to an authentic desire to converse with interested readers about real ideas (2001, p. 17). By having a real audience, it is easier to decenter, which means thinking like a reader instead of a writer (Bean, 2001). On this stage, the students will be given three questions (Bean, 2001) to take into consideration when they write their sentences: -Who are my intended readers? -How much do my readers already know and care about my topic? -What is my purpose of writing? What do I want them to know, believe, or do? Expert writers think about their audience since the first stages of the writing purpose. They decide if their purpose is to inform, to explain, to analyze, to persuade, to reflect, to entertain, etc. The benefits of doing this type of questions are that they help the learners to develop a conceptual view of writing which will be useful in any communicative context (Bean, 2001).

Moreover, it has been stated that students tend to use a novice style when they assume that the audience is the teacher. By having a real audience it would be possible to make and communicate meanings that are significant, interesting and challenging (Bean, 2001). The idea of selecting a reader who would like to read about that song comes from my own experience as well. When I listened to music to brainstorm ideas, I tried to select a song which the teacher might like. That way, the teacher might have fun reading my essay. My purpose writing was to entertain the teacher with my essays; this gave me motivation to write. 4. Write sentences. Using the information on the diagrams, the students now have to write a sentence for every element on the diagram. To write the sentences, the students must stick to the patterns of the Seven Basic Sentence Types in English. However, they are asked to write as many sentences as possible using sentence type 4. A poster or sheets with the structure has to be available to the students, so that they can consult it as needed. The activity allows the students to work with the first six sentence types, but it makes a special emphasis on the sentence type number 4. The reason of focusing on sentence type 4 is because the learners in level 300 must master the use of linking words. Since this activity mainly aims to teach sentence structure, the students will not write paragraphs. However, they are told that these sentences would be considered as topic sentences. That means that, if they were to write a complete essay, each sentence would indicate the content and topic of each paragraph. This is useful to start teaching paragraphing and essay structure. The reason of teaching sentence structure with a poster with the model of the sentences is because it is essential to make the target structure explicit. Instead of letting the students discover the sentence structure, we can deliberately show it to them so that they can consciously manipulate language. Since the students already have writing skills, they will want to transfer them to English writing. The poster shows them the new way in which they should structure their sentences, and it will also empower the students (Hyland, 2004).

When the students write in English, it is common to realize that they are using the patterns of organization and stylistic and rhetorical conventions which come from their first language: Spanish (Connor, 1996). Mexican students tend to write very long sentences which are considered run-ons in English. Again, they do so because they are used to the Mexican rhetoric, where long sentences joined by commas and additive conjunctions are allowed (Crawford, 2010). The purpose of practicing sentence structure is to get the students used to write shorter sentences and to avoid run-ons. By doing this process repeatedly, the students will be able to start thinking in English. It is important to raise awareness in the students of the different writing patterns which exist in English and Spanish. In addition, it is useful to tell them that English readers have different expectations about writing; they anticipate reading a text which follows their patterns of discourse (Connor, 1996; Crawford, 2010). A nonnative writer who is aware of the reader expectations is more likely to success in the international community (Connor, 1996). 5. Peer correction The students give their sentences to the reader classmate. The reader classmate has to mark any mistake on the punctuation and structure of the sentences; he is allowed to write his opinion about the writers ideas. Then, the reader classmate returns the sentences with marks on the mistakes to the writer. The writer corrects those mistakes and gives the corrected sentences to the reader, who verifies if the sentences are now correct. Peer correction is important because teachers invest a lot of time making corrections which do not really help the students improve. The students do not pay attention to feedback, and they might not understand the teachers comments. Moreover, if the teacher comments on the content, the students could reject it because they consider the teacher an inexpert on the topic. Thus, a form to invest that time in more valuable things is to have the students correct their own writing (Casanave, 2004). Having the student correct each others writing can be seen as a social constructor of knowledge (Hyland, 2004).

Bean (2001) states that teacher should encourage revision. To do so, he suggests: providing opportunities to brainstorm in class, doing peer revision, and giving teacher feedback. Conclusion

Problems Peer review may not be a 100% effective. In first place, it is possible that the students will not be able to make corrections due to their limited language skills. In order to solve this problem, the teacher can provide a checklist with the characteristics that their sentences should content. Then, the students need to mark if the characteristics are present, missing or if they need to be improved (Tsui, 2003). Some students commented about peer reviewing that they did not find it useful because their peers always said the writing was good. Other did not fill the comments seriously. The learners do not take peer revision seriously because they know that the teacher is going to correct the errors at the end (Tsui, 2003). Nevertheless, they mentioned that the simple fact of looking at each others work helped them to improve their writings. The reason was that they became aware of the aspects of writing which they should be reviewing in their own writings. Reading peers writing was a beneficial task itself. It helped them to be conscious of their own mistakes, it reminded them what to include on their essays, it provided them with good writing models to emulate (Tsui, 2003). The solution for this might be to ask the students to review only the first draft, and the teacher can review the final one (Connor, 1996; Ur, 1996). Another problem is that they could feel uncomfortable correcting and being corrected by their classmates, and they might not accept criticism. Mexican students might not have a good attitude towards collaboration (Connor, 1996; Ur, 1996). In addition, if the topic is personal, the students could be unwilling to share it with their classmates. It is important to

make the students understand the value of participating in the process of peer review (Connor, 1996; Ur, 1996). One problem about the activity itself is that it might not be useful for the learners. This activity helps them to learn structure and punctuation, but those elements of academic writing might not fit their target occupational needs. This type of brainstorm leads to creative writing. Creative writing is not academic. Casanave (2004) stated that process approaches neglected the kinds of writing that students needed to do to survive in academic settings, such as essay examinations (p. 78). The writing that is requested in school is academic, and it is evaluated as a product. The activity aims to teach one genre: academic writing. Whenever the students are asked to write an essay, they bring their schematic knowledge about essays. The problem with this is that schema does not match with the expectations of the task (Hyland, 2004). By mastering sentence structure and English rhetoric, the students will be able to join a particular discourse community (Hyland, 2004). Despite of the fact that personal writing is not academic, we can still say that it leads students to deepen on their thinking, and that it starts training the students to use academic writing (Casanave, 2004). Moreover, it increases their fluency.

References

Bean, J. C. (2001). Engaging ideas: The professor's guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass. Casanave, C. P. (2004). Controversies in second language writing: Dilemmas and decisions in research and instruction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press. Crawford, T. (2010). ESL Writing in the University of Guanajuato: The Struggle to Enter a Discourse Community, Universidad de Guanajuato. Guanajuato, Guanajuato: Universidad de Guanajuato. Hyland, K. (2004). Genre and second language writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tsui, A. (2003). Understanding expertise in teaching: Case studies of second language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix