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.
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