What does it mean to plan for writing; and how exactly does one engage in pre-writing? These questions baffled me immensely as I had never engaged myself or been exposed to such practices. Writing procedures were fast and furious in those younger student days where a good writer was one who was just able to write. Creative ideas, full of imagination and flair were self-generated and a testament to writing ability. Yet this behaviourist approach has left many inspiring and developing writer's without support and scaffolding for personal growth. As stipulated by NCTE: perhaps everyone may not create a masterpiece; but everyone can improve in terms of how they write.
Gatz (2004) Pre-Writing Strategies are:
Key to good essay writing and a key component of the writing process.
A way of organising ideas in preparation for writing
Comprise a delineation of of a topic to be written about
Guide an organised outline of possible ideas/topics and or comments
Different from drafting, revising and editing.
Planning for Writing incorporates brainstorming activities that help stimulate and generate ideas for writing and follow the process not product approach to writing.
Students should be encouraged to: pick a topic that interests them. This can be done through use of media and technology; personal experiences; dreams; visual representations; think, pair, share; discussions and even free writing.
Free writing is an appropriate follow up once students have selected a topic. It focuses on having students to practice writing without focusing on the mechanics of the language; it is the thoughts and ideas generated, not the mechanical structure that is of value at this point and many ideas can be generated through the use of this technique. The key is to write and mute the internal editor and check ideas after at least 10 minutes using this strategy; it surprises all of us how difficult it is not to critique while writing as well as how good some of these free writing ideas can be.
A flexible and multidimensional tool that can assist a students' planning to write is the Graphic Organiser. It allows students to organise ideas in a logical manner. It is an illustrative way of representing students' thoughts and caters especially to the visual learner. It associates the visual diagrams with written ideas. It can be a useful tool for scaffolding because of its perceptual properties; helps writer organise and chunk information; diagnose and solve identified problems. It is more effective if students create/generate the graphic organisers themselves; but if students are not properly trained in how to use these tools it may negate their purpose.
Questioning, another strategic pre-writing tool helps stimulate students ideas through prepared questions and students' responses. Students can respond to the questions and use the ideas that best suit their purpose for writing: those ideas that can cater to their writing.
In the hand-out "Brainstorming" I thought it was interesting that the author listed keeping audience and purpose in mind when writing. How often do we ourselves as writers and critical thinkers take this into consideration? Also as English teachers do we help students identify purrpose in their own writing as well as the works of others? We engage students in quite a lot of "comprehension: activities while at the same time ignoring a writer's purpose and his intended audience. These key factors can help both reading and writing but are ignored in the classroom.
Whereas Sloane's "Ten Steps to Better Brainstorming" recommends that students have the opportunity to practice extensively the art of brainstorming without the discussion of the actual merit of ideas generated. It gives students the opportunity to come up with diverse ideas, which may help them to think outside the box or norm of a topic (divergent thinking). Ideas that are irrelevant or inapropriate can be later discarded but to stop the freeflow of ideas to discuss their merit may hurt the process as it interrupts student's thinking.
Enthusiasm on the part of the teacher is key. We sometimes come to our classes as though we are slaves who have been commanded to do it. If we are uniterested in English and uninterested in writing and generating ideas for writing it is unlikely that our students will be. Teachers must be certain to praise students when they come up with creative ideas, let them know that they are on the right track and encourage them even when they miss the mark, then they will be eager to work and master the writing game. Often students fail to try because of learned helplessness and negative experiences with failure: teachers should utilise the self-fulfilling prophecy in a positive way to help students build confidence in their skills as writers. Reinforce the importance of student's ideas by giving them ample opportunity to make suggestions, participate and engage in peer critiquing. Planning our lessons before hand can help ensure that we deliberately incorporate these brainstorming and pre-writing techniques so that students have ample opportunities for participation.
Lastly Sloane (1998) gave an appropriate caveat. We are to select topics that will aid not impede our ideas. Those topics would be one that takes student's interests prior knowledge and background experiences into considerations. This means we must take time out to know our students. An easy way to do this is to conduct an interest inventory. It is hardly possible that we can always take into consideration the interests and experiences of each child; in this situation, class discussions can help stimulate brainstorming. One student's ingenius idea may just spark another less knowledgeable student's thought patterns.
Engaging in all these activities shows our students that writing is important and that each of them are capable of good writing through the use of planning and pre-writing stgrategies. And although we use these colloborative strategies to build students' writing abilities, our ultimate goal should be to develop competent, independent, strategic and creative writers. This can be aided through the use of Self-regulatory strategies that assist students in deliberately engaging in metacognitive process through goal instructions, self-instructions and self-monitoring. This of course is possible in our secondary schools as students are now at the stage of formal operational thought and are therefore developmentally prepared to engage in this strategised thinking.
Though these readings were extremely long, they helped reinforce the ideas that I have been exposed to here at DTEEA. It seems an almost insurmountable task to plan to implement all of these ideas into the classroom as a novice teacher. However there are a number of ideas that seem feasible which have begun to that I have begun to form a credo in my mind as a future English teacher. This credo is to use the process approach to stimulate good writing techniques in the classroom.
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