Reflections on Developing Language Skills in L2 Writing Classes

1. Self-Reflections on Literacy Development

                  Thanks to my career choice in Applied Linguistics and TESOL, I find myself constantly paying attention to language use issues in anything I read and write. I especially like to spot on ungrammatical sentences and usage errors. Comma splices make me uneasy when I see them in formal writings or media publications. I also have little tolerance when I encounter language errors in an email request.


2. Acquisition of Language Knowledge in Professional Reading & Writing

                  I attribute my acquisition of language knowledge to extended exposure to professional reading and writing. After spending the majority of my previous life in academic contexts, I have formed a habit of academic reading and writing on a daily basis. This is what I do for my career! In addition, my favorite literacy practices every day include browsing news and different posts online and writing journal entries.

3. Ongoing Language Developments for Advanced Learners

                  Advanced acquirers need to shift their language focus from ensuring simplistic and accurate structures to exploring more stylistic and complex structures. At this stage, they have passed basic composition courses and are perhaps practicing writing for their own academic endeavors. It is important for advanced writers to realize the purpose of their writing and to examine more sophisticated linguistic choices used by professional writers in their field.

4. Developing Linguistic Knowledge of L2 Writing Students

                  As a writing instructor, I feel the most important thing in developing linguistic knowledge of my students is to make the connection among different language skills. Many view writing as a separate skill; however, writing development cannot be isolated from the development of reading, vocabulary, and grammar. In an ESL teaching context, realizing this integration of different skills may be a bit tricky, depending on the curriculum focus of the program. If the students are taking separate skill classes from different teachers, the writing teacher need to communicate with grammar and vocabulary teachers on the major points being covered in their classes in order to make possible connections.

Thoughts on Error Treatment in L2 Composition

1. Self-reflection on Linguistic Accuracy

                I tend to correct major structural and mechanical errors while I am drafting. This typically does not take too much of my time, and in the meantime, I use this quick and on-going checking as a point for myself to brainstorm on what to say in the next line. However, my systematic proofreading does not start until I finish writing the entire draft. Depending on the weight of the assignment (a formal paper vs. a blog post), I use different tools to edit my work. If it is a paper I’m writing for a considerable amount of course grade or for publication, I usually check all language-related issues that seem suspicious and consult grammar books and online corpora for solutions. If it is a piece of informal writing, I typically just use my own knowledge and occasionally google words/phrases that I feel unsure of.

2. Evaluation of My Editing Approach

                My editing approach generally works well for coursework-related purposes. It does not work for errors that become fossilized, however. For example, there are certain prepositional and article usages that I constantly have trouble with. Many of them are not exactly grammatical mistakes but are stylistic preferences. Referring to online corpora tools may help to solve this type of problems; however, this takes lots of time, and often I don’t feel worthwhile to invest time to do this.

3. Challenges in Providing Error Treatment

                Every teacher may encounter the same temptation at the beginning to try to comment on every major errors that occur in students’ drafts, although most of us know that we are not supposed to do that. I find it challenging to define the specific types of errors I focus on in commenting on a whole class’s drafts because students’ errors differ in types and frequencies. For example, some students may need treatment on every single major type of errors that I have on my list, while others may only have one or two. I often ended up providing feedback on some other issues (e.g., format) for those students who don’t have lots of major language errors. Also, it is extremely important to communicate our purpose and approach of error treatment to our students. If we don’t say anything after providing grammatical feedback, they may quite likely view that they need only to correct the things we have pointed out for them. Word choice errors are also challenging for teachers to comment on, especially if some of us are a big fan of indirect feedback. Without the cultural and language knowledge, students simply cannot get how to correct word choice errors by themselves even if they are being pointed out. Thus, we need to be cautious in simply circling a word choice issue without any explanations. If we want our vocabulary feedback to be truly helpful, we need to proceed one step further in providing rationales and giving examples.

4. Best Ways to Teach Self-editing

                Keeping an error log is a good way for students to keep track of the major error types they have made in previous drafts. Students need to be trained to become responsible in editing their own drafts. I also think it is worthwhile to provide mini-grammar-lessons on a weekly basis to help student writers build their self-confidence to do self-editing. Compiling typical ungrammatical sentences from the drafts submitted by the class on a word document is a good way for teachers to provide targeted grammatical feedback. I often make copies of these sentences that I collected from the students’ drafts and distributed to the class for daily editing practice. My students love them! And you can clearly see they become better in correcting the same type of mistakes after a few rounds. 

Thoughts on Responding to Student Writing

1. My Memories of Teacher Responses

                  When I was a student writer, one of the most useful things I found in teacher responses was in the end comments of a paper. Right now, I still remember some of the meaningful end comments my professors made at the end of my paper many years ago and they keep reminding me what I am supposed to do as a good writer. I am not a big fan of grammatical corrections from others on my drafts, especially on prepositional and article usages. Let’s face it: I can correct all grammatical mistakes by myself if there are clear rules defined somewhere on a grammar book. If I cannot correct them myself, they become almost “untreatable” errors to me, unless the instructor is smart enough to come up with a way to teach me how to do self-correction. In my opinion, fixing grammatical errors in all pages is just busy work and does not really show sufficient care from the instructor.

2. Appropriate Feedback for L2 Writers

                  I am also an L2 writer, but I would not prescribe the feedback I received from my instructors to my own students. Content feedback is always useful as long as the students understand what the teacher is commenting. This is constantly a problem because many times students don’t really understand what we have written on the page. How can we expect them to revise based on our comments if they don’t understand our comments? These years, I started to modify my approach to responses and incorporate more oral feedback on my students’ papers. This year, I decide to also try recording my oral feedback to students’ papers by using screencast recording tools (e.g., Screencast-O-Matic). Of course, giving sometime for students to look at teacher’s feedback and answer questions during class time is always useful. Compared to content feedback, form feedback needs to come relatively later unless there is a persistent structural problem that interferes with meaning. I am a big fan of indirect feedback on grammatical issues, and I only comment on grammatical issues within the reach of my students. For example, if the students have never learned about verb phrases in their classes, I would not expect them to produce correct verb phrases in complex sentences.

3. Questions/Concerns Regarding Teacher Responses

                  As all teachers who give written feedback, I am also afraid that my work is being ignored. There are many ways to create opportunities for students to interact with teacher feedback: We can spend a few minutes at the beginning of each class when commented drafts have been returned, and students can use this time to ask individual questions about the feedback they have received. We may also assign revision/editing logs as regular assignments for students to keep track of how they handle their own writing progress via incorporating feedback.
                  As a writing teacher, I need to provide not only marginal feedback but also end comments on my students’ writing. Sometimes, I found myself spend too much time in providing details in the margins but not enough time in giving quality end comments. End comments are something that quite likely accompany the student writers for a long time in their professional developments. This is something I need to continue working on.

















4. Reflections on Peer Reviews:

I have used peer feedback both as a student writer and as a composition instructor. Despite many years of experiences, I still view peer feedback as one of the trickiest things in L2 writing. The following are six common scenarios that I have to deal with peer review as a writing teacher. Can you think of a solution to each one?

1. You asked the students to bring their rough drafts to class for peer review. On the peer review day, you had pre-assigned all the groups, but some students did not bring their drafts. What would you do in this under this situation?
2. During a peer review workshop, an international student got into a verbal fight when another international student in his peer review group regarding a grammar mistake in his paper; he thought he did not make a grammar mistake and the other student was just being arrogant by pointing it out. What would you do under this situation?
3. You decided to adopt a more open-ended approach in a peer review workshop by asking students to write marginal comments on content and organization of their peers’ drafts. The students had learned about the different content elements of the assigned essay as well as typical organization styles through previous class instruction. However, some of them did not write any comments on their peers’ drafts. When you asked them, a typical response was: “The draft looks perfect. I don’t know how to point out any mistakes.” What would you do as a teacher?
4. You have a writing class dominated by Arabic-speaking ESL students, with only a few students coming from other L1 backgrounds. When you assigned peer review groups or had the students form their own groups, it’s unavoidable that you always had groups with the majority of students sharing the same L1. You noticed that although the majority of your students communicated in English in their peer review discussions, there were always a couple of students speaking in Arabic throughout the activity. What would you do as a teacher? 
5. You had both NES and NNES students in your writing class. After a mixed group peer review workshop, one of your NES writer complained to you that there were too many grammar errors in her NNES partner’s essay and that she spent the majority of her time fixing these errors. What would you do as a teacher?
6. You had both NES and NNES students in your writing class. After a mixed group peer review workshop, one of your NNES student told you that he did not feel comfortable commenting on his NES peer’s draft because he thought NESs have more knowledge about English writing. What would you do as a teacher? 

 

Reflections on L2 Writing Assessment

1. Writer’s Experience with Instructor’s Assessment

                  I started taking composition courses in an English Department when I began my first study-abroad program in 2003. Both of my composition instructors used portfolios to assess writing. The portfolios were mostly graded based on a checklist of items, including the rough drafts, peer review feedback forms, revised final drafts and self-reflections. One thing that I wish that I had seen back then is a grading rubric for individual paper. Many professors in humanities that I had back then seemed to be not really fond of the idea of using a rubric; therefore, writing an essay and expecting a grade largely became a guessing game for the students who were new to the class.

2. Washback Results of L2 Writing Assessment

                  While my composition instructors were perhaps too generous to me by assigning me straight As throughout the two courses I took in college, I was not lucky to continue to be an A-level student in the eyes of my literature professors, most of whom gave me Bs for my literary analyses due to my limited language skills. I think both scores (A and B) enhanced my learning and mastery of composing skills in different ways: With the As and encouragements from my composition instructors, I acquired the multi-draft writing approach from the beginning and did well in improving my writing quality along the way. The Bs, however, were more like a reality strike on me when I continued to write in my major area. This was the time when I understood the importance of language skills and that they are often viewed as the most important thing in a piece of literary work. Thanks to all the professors who gave me Bs in my literary analyses, I learned how to edit my essays, ensuring they were not only grammatically correct but also stylistically pleasing to the readers.

3. My Greatest Challenge in Evaluating Student Writing

                  I often find myself in a paradox while grading students’ final drafts. Because I typically provide detailed comments on students’ rough drafts, like all teachers who do this, I expect to see students address the things I pointed out in their final drafts. Therefore, I tend to be more lenient in my grading if I see a final draft that is carefully revised based on my comments. On the other hand, I struggle to provide positive feedback and good grades to students who simply seem to ignore my comments. I think this is perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of human raters: We are too subjective and tend to be controlled by our feelings. This paradox also connects to the on-going debate on whether teacher feedback is useful to students’ writing improvement: We all like to believe that whatever we are doing is useful to our students, but what if it’s not?


4. Formal Assessment in L2 Writing

                  Formal assessment should take important roles in the teaching of composition, because they are well-planned and can be used to track students’ learning progress. By providing a writing prompt and grading rubrics to our students at the beginning stage of their writing, students can use this information to guide their entire writing process. Formal assessment also creates a venue for students to discuss their writing skill improvements with the instructor because records have been kept along the way of each writing cycle. However, we must also realize that formal assessment cannot be all that we do in assessing students’ writing. Students also need spontaneous feedback from their instructors in writing tasks they do during class time, as well as peer feedback from their classmates and tutors.

5. Portfolio Assessment

                  Portfolio assessment is a useful tool to depict an overall picture of a student writer’s achievements throughout an entire course. It matches the principle of the process-oriented approach and tracks the individual growth of a writer. Moreover, the completion of a portfolio should make a student writer rather proud and may be used as a showcase of writing skills to school/job applications. I see more benefits and potential of using portfolios with advanced-level students than with beginners. Portfolio assessment, for example, would be more motivational to senior-level undergraduate students and graduate students because they can use the final products they have compiled for real-world purposes. (e.g., The students in ENG697 can use their final portfolio to apply for Ph.D. programs and ESL-writing related jobs.)

Reflections on Course Design & Lesson Planning

1. Key Aspects of Syllabi/Course Outlines

Course syllabi and outlines are useful tools that I used as a student to make future plans and keep track of my own learning progress. I view the parts on class assessment and daily agenda as the most critical information from a syllabus. Because I like to make outlines of the entire semester and write down major due dates on my personal calendar, this information always helps to make my planning easier. In a writing course especially, I appreciated receiving information on assignment descriptions and the due dates of different drafts. I used this information to plan my own writing process and find time to make additional appointments with writing center tutors or the class instructor.

2. Course Plan, Students’ Needs, & Institutional Goals

One of the key functions of a literacy course is to accommodate students’ sociocultural and educational needs. Instructors need to take students’ background into consideration before assigning reading and writing tasks. For example, it would not be motivational for a group of EFL students who have no interests in studying abroad to read texts only about American pop cultures. It would also not be appropriate for international F1 visa students to write argumentative essays on U.S. presidential elections if they are not into American domestic politics. Moreover, students who have specific educational needs need to be addressed in a literacy course, e.g., writing cover letters and C.V.s.
A good course plan should also reflect an educational institution’s requirements and philosophy. Most higher institutions have a core curriculum requirement on basic literacy course on academic reading and writing. Depending on where this course is held, the ways reading and writing are introduced may also differ. For instance, a literacy course held in the English department may structure in a completely different way compared to one held in the linguistic department or a separate composition program. Attention to individual students also varies depending on the size of the institution; smaller institutions usually have a small student-to-teacher ratio in a writing class and therefore are able to realize more student-teacher interactions.

3. Different Planning Strategies in a Composition Course

A composition course usually requires different planning than a major content course due to different student population. Students enrolled in composition courses usually come from different academic areas (unless it’s a specialized writing course for one major, which needs to be treated differently). In designing a course which fits the needs of all students, the composition instructor needs to be flexible. Providing different types of texts and tasks for reading and writing can be a good start. Instructors should also remember to add a few options to the writing prompt or even leave some topics completely open. This, of course, may be viewed as a bit risky. You may ask, what if I leave the students to decide their own topics and they end up writing something I don’t understand at all? Well, it might happen, but that’s why composition instructors need to be more strategic. I often just say it frankly that I will not be able to understand complicated academic subjects outside my major area; therefore, it is the students’ responsibility to realize audience awareness—a nice concept for them to keep in mind from the beginning.

4. Components of a Successful Lesson

A successful writing lesson always starts with activating students’ prior knowledge. A warm-up activity in connection to the previous lesson is often a good idea. I like to provide my students an overview of the lesson before we get started (and I often write it on the board). Lecture time should be kept to its minimum. I always remind myself while planning a lesson that anything that I say longer than 20 minutes will not be getting into my students’ brain anyway. Having some activities built into daily instruction is also important, so students can practice the concepts that they have read/listened about right away. Finally, a successful lesson should end with a summary note. This is something I am still working on to do better—it’s all about time management. A ticket-out activity is another ideal way to end a lesson: In the last 5-10 minutes, stop the lesson and ask the students to take out a piece of paper, or you can give them notecards for them to write on to keep them in a more organized way. On the paper/notecard, ask students to write down a short reflection on what they have learned and what remaining questions they still have. This becomes the student’s “ticket” to get out from the classroom.

5. Hallmarks of Effective Classroom Instruction

Managing a composition classroom is somewhat different from other classrooms due to the fact that everything we do in composition is related to students’ completion of writing tasks. It is important to start a sequence of instruction in each writing cycle and follow it throughout the course (e.g., prewriting-writing-revising-editing-sharing). Instructors need to be well planned for daily lessons but also flexible to face unexpected changes. For example, what would you do if half of the class simply did not read the assigned reading before class time? Although this is disappointing, it actually happens to me quite often. Assigning reading-related homework is one way to solve this problem, e.g., a blog entry. In-class summary task is another option for teachers to use as a way to ensure their students read the text before coming to class, especially if they are told they cannot read the text while doing the summary. Creating an encouraging environment is also very important; often times we are too busy to remember providing sufficient positive feedback, but we need to remember that they are extremely important and sometimes work as miracle for student writers’ motivation and writing improvement.

Reflections on Reading & Writing Connections

1. Reading & Writing
                  Chinese writing places a huge emphasis on reading first, and reading a lot. To me, reading definitely serves as a valuable input for all writing projects. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I am capable of writing without rich reading experiences. I think this works the same way in English writing. It is unfortunate to see that many L2 writing classes do not have enough emphases on reading exposure. Students need to read different types of texts, which serve as models for their own writing. For multilingual writers especially, these model texts provide useful social and cultural concepts as well as new linguistic information for them to learn and apply in their own writing projects.

2. Learning from Genres

                  I encounter a variety of written genres on a daily basis, and the most common ones include the following: news articles, emails, journal articles, academic papers, recipes, and online posts (e.g., BBS, facebook, etc.) The following table summarizes the features of the above genres.

Genre	News articles	Emails	Journal Articles	Academic Papers	Recipes	Online Posts
Location	website like NPR	email system like gmail/hotmail	library database	student assignments	website	websites
Topical focus	current news/events	school-related business	academic/applied linguistics & TESOL	ESL/applied linguistics	recipes	various topics
Layout	headlines first & click to see full articles	subject & click to see the content	title, abstract & click/download to see the full article	Print-out & stapled or presented online	ingredients; procedure; picture(s)	headlines first & click to see full posts
Length	less than 1 page per article	1-2 paragraphs	10-30 pages	1-60 pages	less than 1 page	less than 1 page
Rhetorical arrangement	Short/no introduction; no conclusion	greetings-main message-salutations-signature	Introduction-literature review-research questions-methods-results-discussion-conclusion	Introduction-body-conclusion	ingredient list followed by procedure	organization varies; may lack introduction and/or conclusion
Participants	news writer & readers	email writer & receiver(s)	researcher/author & readers	student writer & teacher/classmates/tutor	recipe writer & readers	post writer & readers/responders
Functions	to inform current/local events	to request/inform/apologize/discuss/invite/congratulate	to report/inform/explore/present	to complete class assignments	to instruct how to cook	to discuss/inform/entertain/share
Style & Register	Formal & concise	Mostly informal & concise	Formal	Formal	technical	informal
Grammatical features	third person; past tense; short sentences; appositives	first person; present tense; short sentences	third person; long sentences; noun phrases; abstract nouns/jargons	third person; long sentences; noun phrases; abstract nouns/jargons	imperative sentences	first person; past tense; short sentences;
Lexical features	proper nouns	mostly basic words; may contain acronyms in a shared context (e.g., TAMUC, TESOL,  etc.)	nouns more than other parts of speech	nouns more than other parts of speech	numerical numbers; no-tense verbs	mostly basic words;may include common online acronyms (e.g., LOL)

3. Selecting Instructional Materials
                  Good instructional materials should well-reflect the goals and content of instruction. While selecting materials, I pay attention to the structure and key concepts mentioned in them and their readability to the proficiency level of my students, as well as the publication date and venue. It is important to select the newest publications when it comes to instructional content that’s time-sensitive, e.g., using CALL applications in teaching compositions. A good composition textbook should follow a process-oriented approach and provide models for each step of writing. It does not necessarily need to be comprehensive, however. Since no textbook is perfect, it is expected that teachers find their own supplementary materials to accompany the textbook.

4. The Uniqueness of L2 Literacy/Composition Textbooks

                  L2 composition textbooks need to fulfill at least three functions: 1) provide writing instruction in steps; 2) present model texts for reading; and 3) highlight targeted grammar and lexical features of specific genres. In a sense, these textbooks are combinations of rhetorics, readers, and grammar guides. We rarely see any other textbooks like them in other disciplines.

5. When to Use Supplementary Materials

                  I think a teacher should always use supplementary materials under any conditions, no matter how wonderful a textbook may be perceived. Supplementary materials can be used in a variety of ways, including adding important concepts to textbook discussion, introducing a relevant task/assignment, providing more background knowledge in an area briefly mentioned in the textbook, etc. Supplementary materials do not always need to be provided as required reading materials, however. They could be offered as a list of optional reading materials for class discussions and research projects.

6. Activities for Inexperienced and Experienced Writers

                  For inexperience writers who just enter a writing class, class activities need to focus on scaffolding; teachers need to model a lot after introducing a new concept and check for understanding before asking the writers to start writing on their own. Depending on the particular step of the writing process writers are in, teachers may lead the class to analyze a model essay using graphic organizers, discuss key vocabulary items and sentence structures, or write a reflection based on reading discussions. Outside-class activities need to be tightly structured and written in simple steps for students to complete. Reading logs are good outside-class activities, and inexperienced writers can benefit more from explicit prompts and demonstrations.
                  Experienced writers have already had some extensive instruction on writing and thus can be led to explore more things on their own. Teachers who favor the expressivist approach may start the class with freewriting. I’ve used one-day-a-photo in my advanced writers’ workshop before and students love it.  At the beginning of each class, I project a photo (related to the theme of the class) on the screen and ask students to write about it. Then, this freewriting naturally becomes the transition to the main class discussion and can also serve as a starting point for students’ major writing assignments. For grammatical instruction, instead of following a deductive approach, I adopt an inductive approach by compiling students’ erroneous sentences from their drafts into one word document and ask students to figure out solutions to their own errors. Similarly, instead of presenting the grammar rules to experienced writers, I use concordance lines from online corpora to show them multiple examples and ask them to discover the grammar rules based on these examples. Outside-class activities for experience writers can be a field research project, which requires the students to go outside to conduct interviews on a topic of their interest, gather their own data, look for library research support, write up a report, and share the results with the class community. 

Reflections on Composition Pedagogies

1. My L1 Writing Experience

                Chinese writing is taught in primary school years and is an inseparable part of the Chinese language and literature class. A beginning Chinese writer is encouraged to read extensively before he/she even starts to write. In the meantime, the writer needs to form a habit of note-taking while reading and writing reflections in journal entries. Until these days, I am still proud of an entire bookshelf of reading notes and journals I had completed throughout my years of L1 literacy development.
                Instead of following a process-oriented approach, Chinese writing focuses more on the final products. Making an outline is encouraged, however, at the beginning. Overall essay structure does not seem to carry as much weight as English writing in general, as long as the author is writing on the topic. Word choices, on the other hand, have traditionally been viewed as a top criterion in becoming a successful writer. Sophisticated words with a hint of zen, idiomatic expressions, poetic lines are all examples of good Chinese writing. Achieving these requires a considerable amount of memorization, as illustrated in traditional Chinese-learning pedagogy: To become a poet, one has to memorize the three hundred famous poems from the Tang dynasty.



                Types of writing beginning writers are asked to write vary significantly depending on the programs and schools they are attending. Typical writing tasks belong to two general genres: business and literary. Business writing is marked by its succinctness and is viewed as on the opposite side to literary writing, which is more elaborated. A standard testing question on business writing in my primary school years was writing telegraphic messages, an essential tool of instant communication in the 1900s (Yes, this was way before the days of emails…)

Literary writing is often connected to a social phenomenon or concept, and students can choose any genre to provide their comments. Different from many English composition courses adopting a genre approach here in the U.S., Chinese literary writing is more flexible in genre specifications and thus encourages more creativity from the student writers.

2. My University Writing Courses

                My first writing course in university was on English academic writing. Because I tested out from the ESL program, I was placed together with native-speaking students in ENG 101-freshmen composition class, taught by an English professor. The major approach she adopted was a process-oriented approach, dividing every writing assignment into different steps, from brainstorming and planning, to revising, editing and sharing. One thing that I remember from her teaching was that we were required to share our work-in-progress with peer reviewers via reading aloud. Personally, this type of oral sharing helped me a lot because it forced me to be more open about my own writing, which was an ideal way for others to keep on the same page and comment on problems on spot.

3. My Discovery of Writing Theories

                In my L1 writing experiences, I can definitely see the heavy influence of product-oriented instructional tradition. My past instruction on English writing varies, although all follows the process-oriented approach. My first English composition professor in the U.S. was more of an expressivist, believing in the writers’ discovery of themselves and their own voices. Others, however, focused more on writing as problem-solving, or cognitivist. (e.g., I would say nearly all my beginning research writing projects were learned in this way.)

4. My L2 Writing Experience
                In addition to what I have commented above, the English academic writing I have learned differs tremendously from my L1 writing in Chinese. I would label my past L1 writing instruction as much broader in scope and less academic-focused. On the other hand, all my formal writing instruction in the U.S. are almost exclusively academic.

5. My Experience as a Writing Teacher
                I follow faithfully to a process-oriented approach in my teaching of writing. I like to use a variety of tasks to help develop students’ writing abilities in different steps. Some traditionally non-writing-related activities can also be incorporated into writing instruction. For example, in teaching revision strategies on reporting verbs and quotations, students could be more motivated in a matching-game/competition setting than simply working through another handout. This game can be easily designed by taking out quotes from students’ drafts and print them on large pieces of paper, taped on the classroom wall. Students then are given a selection of reporting verbs (printed on 5*7 notecards) and asked to use the most appropriate reporting verbs to revise their quotations.
                In line with the cognitivist approach, I believe writing cannot really be taught but rather should be learned. Therefore, it is important for classroom teachers to demonstrate well how different writing strategies can be learned and train students to be self-dependent in this learning process. The data-driven learning (DDL) is a good example of such training, e.g., students are trained to be familiar with online corpora resources in order to edit their own word choices and grammatical mistakes in writing assignments.
The following video, created by my colleage Bek Nurmukhamedov gives a short tutorial on how to use wordandphrase.info to teach self-editing:

6. Understanding Composition Pedagogies

                Understanding different instructional methods in second language composition is beneficial because it helps for a deeper understanding on different ways of teaching writing. Individual instructors may find merits in combining different approaches or design their own approach based on previous works. To me, knowing composition pedagogies is more about adding a little bit of everything to my daily instructional practice. Keeping a balance and finding an emphasis, however, is still the center of every day instruction. Composition pedagogies need to be adaptive to writing contexts. For example, despite all the benefits of peer reviews, they may not work really well in some beginning ESL writing classrooms due to the students’ lack of linguistic proficiency in understanding the tasks.