Abstract
The present study describes a small scale project consisting in several workshops to improve the students’ writing in English as a foreign language. The targeted population consisted of first level students in undergraduate programs at a public university in Colombia where low development of writing skills in the students’ foreign language has been constantly observed in the English teaching process. A diagnostic test administered to our students revealed that one of the possible causes of student’s low performance in writing, was the lack of writing activities that serve as training for them to produce writing texts. Students showed the few opportunities they had concerning this kind of activities. The diagnostic data through questionnaires and interviews also revealed the lack of guided and controlled activities which help students to improve the process of writing, and the low motivation as the main result of this lack of activities. Last but not least, after the implementation of this writing workshop, students were more confident, they wrote high-quality texts and writing became an interesting activity for students.Keywords: writing process, motivation, process approach, writing techniques, product approach
Highlights
Writing has often been a neglected area in English language teaching
Giving students motivating and clear instructions and presenting activities that are related to the topics students learnt in class are good strategies
If students are given a model for writing a text it is easier to come up with their own slightly different version
Summary
Writing has often been a neglected area in English language teaching. It has been only recently that some research into writing has been carried out. A recent research study demonstrates that combining strategies to teach writing has positive effects on students’ learning process (Hillocks,1987). The implementation of these skills in the classroom is not successful nowadays, since there is a noticeable gap between theory and practice. Teachers avoid correcting compositions because they are time consuming. Another possible reason is “the absence of well-established or widely recognized models of writing” (Hedge 1988:5)
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