Exploration of self-expression to improve L2 writing skills

Abstract

Keywords: expressive writing, self-expression, qualitative methods, journal entries, social aspects, cognitive aspects, noticeable students and distinguished students. POINT OF DEPARTUREWriting is often perceived as a difficult and complex activity by the current generation of students. Caught in a world of electronic gadgetry, visual culture and information overload, they neither appreciate the educational value of writing nor do they understand the sense of personal gratification it may instil in them.We are aware that learning to write often begins with the mastery of producing legible letters and basic spelling (Abbott, Berninger & Fayol, 2010) and that once these skills are attained, young writers attempt to master basic grammar and sentence structure. This is to suggest that writers begin to focus on text cohesion (McCutchen, 1986;Witte & Faigley, 1981), syntactic structures (Hunt, 1965; McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982), and cognitive strategies such as planning and revising (Abbott et al., 2010;Berninger et al., 1991). Based on these insights conventional wisdom dictates that teachers should follow a process approach to writing by following the stages of planning, drafting and revising: in that order. However, we were not convinced that the various stages mentioned above and their concomitant procedures and parameters (within which learning to write takes place) could serve as a motivation for students to express themselves in writing. To the contrary, these procedures and protocols (text cohesion, syntactic structures, cognitive strategies) appeared to overemphasize students' adherence to conventionality, grammaticality and linearity in their writing, thereby

Double responsibility of foreign language teachers: Primary student-teachers’ perceptions of linguistic and cultural content

“…The skill of writing is viewed as causing such trouble for learners that they would appear to benefit from "in-and-out" writing tasks and activities (Guzmán--Alcón 2019;McClure 2015;Pfeiffer & Sivasubramaniam 2016), such as writing a book report or review, describing a person, place or event, or preparing instructional material (Ur 1991: 159). It must be noted that language skills cannot function separately and that the proficient mastery of one of them does not guarantee meaningful use of the target language.…”

Una experiencia para fomentar la escritura en los estudiantes por medio de la multimodalidad

“…In doing so, it is noticed that learners are more concerned with learning the grammatical component of the target language than understanding writing as a means of self-expression and communication (Bilton and Sivasubramaniam, 2009;Pfeiffer & Sivasubramaniam, 2016). It has led students to feel unmotivated and with little creativity when writing in English.…”