The Power of Multiple Drafts in Writing Classes

Rodney E. Tyson

The English Connection, 3(4), 1,6. July 1999.

PDF version of this paper:
http://www.kotesol.org/tec/tec_9907.pdf

        The traditional approach to teaching English composition in Korean universities has been to focus on grammar rules and the production of grammatically correct sentences. In a typical writing class, students are required to write one or more compositions each week, and the instructor corrects all of the mistakes in the assignments and returns them to the students, who often take just enough time to glance at the grade before throwing the paper away. One result of this approach has been that, after many years of study, very few Korean students--even English majors--graduate with the ability to write a coherent English paragraph, let alone a longer essay, a business letter, or a research paper. Another result has been that students often consider writing in English to be boring and hopelessly difficult, and instructors dread the thought of being assigned the extra work of teaching composition classes.
        There is another way to approach the teaching of composition, however, which allows students to go beyond the sentence level and helps to "demystify the task of writing in a foreign language" (White & Caminero, 1995, p. 323). This approach, which has been around for a couple of decades already and is very common in other parts of the world, is often referred to as the "process approach" or "process writing." Although some research suggests that "teachers actually have strongly differing ideas as to what process writing is" (Caudery, 1995, p. 1), Brock (1994, p. 52) provides a concise description of the major components of a typical class in which the process approach is used:

[S]tudents first explore a topic, write drafts, receive feedback from classmates and the teacher works throughout to make their meaning clearer. When marking, the teacher might evaluate more than the final product, considering as well the process that led up to it.
        It is the use of multiple drafts which is perhaps the main identifying characteristic of the process approach. Rather than requiring students to try to express their ideas perfectly on the first attempt (or the first "draft"), the process approach allows students to receive feedback from both the instructor and other students and to revise and rewrite at least once or twice before submitting a "final draft" for a grade. In this way, students have a chance to develop their ideas in some depth, benefit from the suggestions of interested readers, and revise and rewrite the parts of their compositions that are difficult for this very real "audience" to understand. In other words, rather than just writing grammatically correct sentences for a grade, students actually learn something about how to go about the very difficult task of producing a real piece of writing in a foreign language.
        Since the instructor acts more as an interested reader than simply a judge of correctness, using the process approach transfers much of the responsibility for error correction to the students who are more likely to spend more time revising and rewriting in order to get their meaning across effectively. Both students and instructors often enjoy this creative process more than the traditional approach of writing once, grading, and moving on to the next assignment. In addition, although the emphasis is shifted to the process, the finished products are nearly always much better (in terms of both content and mechanics) than could be expected from compositions written in one draft. Just like writers working in their native languages, student writers are often excited when they finally "discover" what it is that they really want to say through this type of process. One of my junior students had this to say at the end of a process-oriented composition class I taught a few semesters ago: Writing is . . . hard work! But frankly I waited [for] the day I received my former writing. To find faults in my writing is one of the most interesting things in this class as well as the most useful. I appreciated the opportunity of correcting my errors. Through it I felt my writing improving and gaining better structure and grammar. I learned writing is a course completed through correcting. And in writing again, I could express my opinion more exactly. Finally, here are a few suggestions for using the process approach successfully in writing classes for Korean students based on my experience: 1. Using language your students can understand, explain what the "process approach" is and why you are using it. Explain the benefits of multiple drafts.

2. Not every assignment needs to be written in multiple drafts, but give your students a chance to revise and rewrite at least some of their compositions before they receive a grade.

3. Give fewer, but longer writing assignments to allow students to develop their ideas more fully. If you have them write three drafts each of a few 2-3 page essays rather than a one-page essay every week, for example, they will have at least as much writing practice during the course and will also end up with a few essays they can really be proud of.

4. Ask students to hand in preliminary drafts along with their final drafts so they can "see" the improvements they have made.


NOTE:

Since space is limited here, I have prepared a page of links to some resources on the World Wide Web related to teaching writing and using the process approach. It is available at the following URL: http://english.daejin.ac.kr/~rtyson/writing.html.
 

REFERENCES:

Brock, M. (1994). Reflections on change: Implementing the process approach in Hong Kong. RELC Journal, 25(2), 51-70.

Caudrey, T. (1995). What the "process approach" means to practising teachers of second language writing skills. TESL-EJ, 1(4), A3, 1-16. Retrieved May 31, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ejo4/a3.html.

White, A. S., & Caminero, R. (1995). Using process writing as a learning tool in the foreign language class. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 51(2), 323-329.
 

THE AUTHOR:

Rodney E. Tyson (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is an associate professor at Daejin University in Pocheon, Kyeonggi-do where he teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the Graduate Program in English Education.

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