What the "process approach" means to practising teachers of second language writing skills
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Tim Caudery
University of Aarhus, Denmark
<engtc@hum.aau.dk>
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Abstract
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The article reports on a survey conducted on TESL-L aimed at
discovering whether ESL teachers have similar concepts of the
"process approach" to writing, or whether the concept has now
evolved in different ways in different places. The survey results
show that teachers actually have strongly differing ideas as to what
process writing is. Such divergence may be typical of teaching
approaches which have been in use for some time; but in this
instance the changes may have been accentuated because the
process approach was originally developed in and for the L1
classroom, and has been adapted for L2 teaching. It is suggested
that some of the heat which characterized the initial debate on
process writing may have cooled a little, making the time ripe for
fresh discussion of what we have learned about teaching writing in
L2 and possible ways forward in the future.
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Keywords: ESL composition, electronic discussion, process approach
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