Comparing Teacher and Student Responses to Written Work

Abstract

E In the past 2 decades, ESL writing instructors have become interested in the process approach to writing, which they borrowed from their colleagues in L1 writing. The process approach argues that writers create and change their ideas as they write and that writing is recursive: When and how often writers rework things depends on their personal writing style as well as the writing task and context. Early proponents of the process approach asserted that the most important task of writing instructors was helping students develop the skills needed to come up with ideas, explore ways of expressing them, and examine and refine their writing. In practice, this meant working on prewriting, drafting, and analyzing and rewriting techniques, including peer response (where students read and comment on each other's papers.) In the mid-1980s, the process approach came under attack from professionals who claimed that due to the emphasis laid on the students' discovery of their personal ideas and the neglect of the sociocultural context (Silva, 1990), did not prepare students for academic work. Critics responded by offering English for academic purposes (EAP) courses which aimed to give students skills in finding out what is expected and trying to approximate it (Silva, 1990, p. 17) and content-based ESL courses focusing on reporting and commenting on academic material rather than personal discovery (Raimes, 1991). However, this was not a rejection of the ideas of the process approach but a shift in focus, and process writing techniques are used by most writing instructors and EAP textbooks (e.g., Brookes & Grundy, 1990; Leki, 1989; & Reid, 1985). Although there has been a significant amount of research on the processes individual writers go through (for summary, see Krapels, 1990),

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