Developing EFL students’ writing skills through the writing process approach and collaborative Llearning

Abstract

[eng] The product approach to writing seems to prevail over the process approach in the English subject in secondary education (ESO). The lack of time to cover all the contents of the curriculum make teachers take writing for granted. Therefore, not much attention is paid to the development of students’ writing skills. It is important to bear in mind that writing a text does not only involve using the language accurately, but it also demands the writer to focus on the way he or she expresses his or her ideas. If the text is not well-structured and the ideas are not well-connected; then, the reader will not be able to understand the message the writer intended to convey with his or her composition. For this reason, the teaching of writing in ESO should not only centre on writing a composition free of errors, but also on teaching students to express their ideas properly taking different aspects such as the audience, the purpose or the structure of the text into consideration. In this sense, the process approach to writing is the best tool to develop this ability in students since they learn that to achieve an appropriate product, they need to go through the pre-writing, writing and rewriting stages. Moreover, if the process approach is combined with collaborative learning, the benefits can increase greatly. In this regard, in the present dissertation, a study is conducted in order to know the opinion of students regarding the teaching of writing in Spain’s secondary education and the process they follow to write a composition in English. The results show that students do not tend to go through all the stages involved in writing. Consequently, a didactic proposal based on the results of the study and the literature review is presented. It is based on a project in which the process approach and collaborative learning are used together to cover the weaknesses of the teaching of writing in ESO and to improve students’ writing skills.