Product vs. Process Oriented Writing- by Ruby

I don't know about you. Basically, I was taught completely in product-oriented approach in terms of writing, no matter my L1 or L2 writing. The teacher gave us topics or rarely he/she would allow us to decide the topic we wanted to write. It was us ourselves that had to write the whole articles without any explanation or guidance. We turned in the writing work and when it came back, there would be a score and some comments like: "Too many spelling mistakes (wrong characters)." "Not coherent.", "Not smooth." or just "Good". I don't know about you. Very often, I felt that I just wrote the best article I could write in my whole life and when it came back, the score was much lower than those which I myself did not like very much. A lot of time, I highly suspected whether my teachers could really understand what I wrote or not. (Students' talents and skills of writing are not necessarily worse than the teachers'.) Basically, I have been a good writer in Chinese since I was in the elementary school. I did not suffer a lot from the writing teaching system in Taiwan, but I saw my classmates always struggle a lot about that because they just did not know how to write anything that could appeal to the teachers, the graders. (Is that all writing about? To appeal to the grader??)

I remember I began to write in my L2, English, when I was in high school because there would be a writing part in the English subject of college entrance examination in Taiwan. At first, I could not do it very stably. Sometimes I got very good scores, but not rarely, I got not-so-good results. I felt very frustrated from time to time, but no one had ever taught us how to write in English. All we had were the topics, the results and the bloody grammar errors revisions done by our teachers. I was very lucky that before I graduated from high school, my English teacher required me to write an English article every week to mail to her and she would give comments and revisions and mail it back to me when I was studying for the college entrance exam at home (That was much earlier before the existence of internet). At the end, my English writing score turned out to be very good in the exam.

The first time when I heard and read about process-oriented writing was when I was studying Linguistics and TESOL in my undergraduate program about eight years ago. At first, I could not understand or accept it at all. I thought it was just some tricks invented by Americans. However, as time went by and as I got more and more familiar with student-centered teaching and communicative approach, I understood that process-oriented writing is a very good concept. Traditionally, in writing classes, teachers only look at the final works and students only got the results and comments. Students have never got the chance to discuss or develop the ideas with others. Each of the students counted on his/herself to accomplish the writing. Everybody was so helpless and so alone; whereas in process-oriented writing classes, the teacher will guide the students to explore the possibilities of all concepts that come to their minds. Even the topic itself can be a part of students' creativity. In student-centered and communicative approach language classrooms, teachers share the power with the students. It will be the students themselves that decide what they like or what they want. The teachers just provide the basic rules for brainstorming, drafting, peer editing, revision. It will not be the product itself that matters, but the whole discussing and learning process that really matters. When students are getting used to this process-oriented writing class, gradually, they will develop their confidence of expressing their own thinkings and they will develop independent thinking competence little by little.

As a TESOL graduate student and an experienced EFL teacher, I highly value process-oriented writing. The teacher takes the responsibilities of guide students step by step and the students learn to generate ideas and thoughts and put them into logical writing among peers naturally and gradually. Although it takes time and experience for us to learn how to teach process-oriented writing class, I believe with the appropriate textbooks or other materials, even novice ESL/EFL teachers can do a good job with the students if we know for sure that it is beneficial to students.