A Process Genre Approach to Teaching Writing: Its Principles and Implementation in the Classroom

A.    Defination of Writing

Writing is part of four skill in English. Writing needs not only the knowledge on the linguistic organization of written discourse but also the creativity of the writers to move from concepts, ideas to written texts (Richards, 1990:100). Therefore the teachers should give the students some practices to move their concepts, and ideas to written texts.

B.     Theoretical Basis

In the context of EFL,there are commonly three approaches to writing (Badger and White, 2000).

-          Product Approaches

Product approaches are named so because the focus is essentially on the ability to produce correct text or “products” (Richards, 1990: 106). In these approaches, learning to write mainly involve linguistic knowledge and the vocabulary choices, syntactic patterns. Controlled writing, guided writing and free writing are some techniques used in the teaching of writing. And also the teacher preparing topic for his students.

-          Process Approaches

When product approaches concentrate on the form and structure of writing, process approaches focus on how writer create writing that has form and structure (Richard, 1990: 108). In the process approaches, the teaching of writing involve a number of writing stages, namely prewriting, drafting, revising and editing.

-          Genre Approaches

According to Agustien (2006) In the genre-based approaches, the teaching of writing there are 4 stages.

1.      BKoF (Building Knowledge of the Field) where teachers and students build cultural context, share experiences, discuss vocabulary, grammatical patterns and so on.

2.      Modeling of Text (MoT) where students are exposed to written text to develop reading skills.

3.      Join Construction of Text (JCoT). At this stage they try to develop written text with their peers and with the help from the teachers.

4.      Independent Construction of Text (ICoT). At this stage they write texts independently in the stage.

C.    Process Genre Approach

According to Badge and White (2000: 157-158) In process genre approach, writing is viewed as involving knowledge about language (as in genre and product approaches), knowledge of context in which writing happens and especially the purpose for the writing (as in genre approaches), and skills in using language (as in process approaches). The  process genre approach model also describe that writing development happens by drawing out the learner potential (as in genre approaches) and by providing input to which the learner respond (as in product and genre approaches).

D.    Implementation of Process Genre Approach in the Classroom

Principally, the stages in implementing process genre approach are divided into three stages.

1.      Modeling of Text, where students are exposed to a reading text by which students can be facilitated in understanding the context and the purpose the writers address. The function it’s make students understand the form and functions of language in a text.

2.      Joint Construction of Text, where teacher would draft a text on the board with the sentence coming from the students, and would give confidence to students that their opinions are meaningful. Given such as a demonstration, the students learn how to make a draft.

3.      Independent Construction of Text, the students to write independently.

Posted in: WRITING