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What Does Teaching Writing as a Process Really Mean?

Antonia Chandrasegaran
National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract

For most teachers, teaching writing as a process consists of having students write a draft
and requiring them to re-write it after peer editing. This write-rewrite process may
benefit students who are already familiar with the rhetorical structure and linguistic
characteristics of the expected text. But for students who are not, more systematic
teaching of specific composing skills seems to be needed. This paper argues for a process
approach that integrates the explicit teaching of specific cognitive processes involved in
writing with a deliberate consciousness-raising of the social-cultural dimension of
writing. Such a social-cognitive approach would first demonstrate, and then provide
practice in, the decision-making operations in writing with reference to the social goals
of writer and target reader. The underlying theoretical framework draws on cognitive
models of writing as well as genre theory, particularly the notion of texts as situated in a
discourse community‟s social practices. Some classroom research will be reviewed for
evidence of the potential benefit of integrating the teaching of cognitive writing
processes with the teaching of genre practices as socially situated discourse behaviours.
The paper‟s penultimate section offers three principles for guiding the planning of
lessons to teach the thinking and social interaction processes in writing.

Introduction

The process approach to teaching writing, advocated with evangelical zeal in the 1970s and
1980s by writing teachers (e.g. Brown & Mathie, 1991; Graves, 1983), is familiar to many
English language teachers. As most teachers understand it, the process method has students
writing a first draft, usually without any or much intervention from the teacher, followed by
peer review or peer editing, and ending with students re-writing to produce, hopefully, an
improved draft. The 2001 English language syllabus for Singapore schools 1 , for instance,
assumes the process method as the desired pedagogy when it stipulates that students are to be
1
The 2001 English syllabus for Singapore schools is to be replaced by the 2010 syllabus which lists, in the
writing section, specific language skills and cognitive strategies that students will be taught to enable them to
produce the types of texts they are expected to write.

Zhang, L.J., Rubdy, R., & Alsagoff, L. (Eds.). (2009). Englishes and Literatures-in-English in a
Globalised World: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on English in Southeast Asia (pp. 338-351).
Singapore: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.
©Copyright 2009 A. Chandrasegaren
“taught the processes of planning, drafting and editing” at the primary level (Ministry of
Education, 2001, p.8), and at the secondary level students are to “draft, revise and edit a text
with peers/individually” (p.73).

Though teacher assistance in the writing, reviewing and re-writing process may sometimes
be provided, there is generally no systematic intervention targeted at shaping students‟
thinking processes or their attitudinal approach to writing. In some classrooms, the teacher
may conduct an idea-generation activity, such as brain-storming or group discussion, to
produce a collection of ideas as a solution to the problem of „what to say‟ in the essay.
However, students generally have to rely on their own resources for the selection and
deployment of ideas available from the list generated with the teacher‟s help. In the process
method, as commonly practised in schools, the assumption appears to be that “writing is
essentially learnt, not taught”, and as a result the teacher‟s role is to be “non-directive and
facilitating” (Hyland, 2003, p.18) rather than interventional in the students‟ composing
processes of meaning evaluation, selection, and organisation. The teacher may allocate class
time for peer review of essays, for example, but may not provide any demonstration of the
process of evaluating main points against the writer‟s rhetorical intention, the reader‟s
expectations, or the requirements arising from the social context of the writing. As a result,
most peer review is little more than a hunt for surface errors in grammar and spelling. It is
not possible to identify with any certainty what thinking strategies or writer-reader
interaction skills students have learnt or not adequately learnt through the process method of
teaching, practised in a non-directive manner.

Although research has identified some of the cognitive processes underlying successful
writing, such as global goal-directed thinking (Flower and Hayes (1981, 1980) and
knowledge transforming (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987), these processes are not explicitly
taught in most process writing classrooms as “many teachers still favour less explicit forms
of instruction” (De La Paz, 2007, p. 249). Less explicit instruction may arise from
insufficient appreciation of the value of attending to students‟ thinking and attitudinal
processes during writing, possibly because many teachers view poor writing as bad grammar
or dearth of good ideas rather than as the result of ineffective decision-making or
inappropriate attitudes towards audience and writer role. Vanderburg (2006) has argued for
the need “to understand how helpful the understanding of cognitive deficiencies is for
teachers” (p.375). Such an understanding would point teachers to the thinking strategies that
need to be explicitly described and practised in writing lessons.

This paper proposes a social-cognitive approach to teaching writing that would address the
above limitations of the conventional process method without abandoning a process
orientation. The main thrust of the argument will be for an integration of explicit teaching
of specific thinking processes with efforts at raising student awareness of the social-cultural
context of a writing task and deploying elements of that context in exercising the thinking
processes. Before this social-cognitive approach is presented, we should first inquire into the
adequacy of the genre view of writing for pedagogical purposes since genre-based pedagogy
is widely regarded as the answer to the shortcomings of the cognitive process approach (e.g.
Hyland, 2007, 2003; Coe, 1994; Martin, 1993; Henry & Roseberry, 1998). This inquiry is
the subject of the next section, which is followed by a review of research that supports the
viability of a pedagogical approach that treats writing as a thinking activity and as a social
interaction process at the same time. The section following the literature review offers three

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principles for guiding the translation of a social-cognitive view of writing into classroom
activities.

Teaching writing as teaching genre

Since the early 1990s the genre approach to teaching writing has been advocated by writing
researchers and teachers (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Hyland, 2003; Martin, 1993; Coe, 1994;
Veel, 2006) and applied in classrooms with reported success (Henry & Roseberry, 1998;
Martin, 2006; Pang, 2002). Genre-based pedagogy has been advanced as a solution to the
shortcomings of the process approach which, as Bizzell (1992) points out, overlooks the fact
that the thinking that generates writing “takes place in society, in interaction with other
individuals, and this interaction modifies the individual‟s reasoning, … and writing within
society” (p.76). Genre-based writing instruction is typically characterised by teacher-led
deconstruction of texts to draw student attention to organisational and linguistic features
conventional of a type of text (e.g. Pang, 2002), student-driven “textual discovery tasks”
which have students analysing texts to discover generic moves and language forms regularly
occurring in the genre (Cheng, 2006, p.282), and teacher-led scaffolded writing such as joint
text construction with the teacher before students undertake independent writing (Rothery,
1996).

The provision of model texts, often with teacher-guided analysis of the models, may be
limited in effectiveness if it is assumed that students can discover for themselves the thinking
processes that lead to successful realisation of the moves and patterns of organisation in a
genre. In a review of classroom-based studies of genre instruction, Tardy (2006) notes that in
one study by Charney and Carlson (1995) “the availability of models did not seem to help the
writers discriminate between necessary and unnecessary details” (p.90), a result that should
not surprise us as genre-based pedagogy tends not to include explicit teaching of thinking
processes such as those involved in vetting details. Gene-based instruction focuses primarily
on the what rather than the how. Students learn what stages typically make up the
organisation framework of a genre and what linguistic structures are recurrent, but not how to
think their way through the selection of meaning and linguistic structures to construct the
typical stages. Knowledge of typified structures does not easily translate into ability to write
especially for students who have insufficient exposure to the required genre or are in need of
teacher assistance in acquiring the cognitive processes underlying the production of generic
features. In an investigation on the effect of genre instruction on writing in which the study of
genre in reading lessons was followed by writing, one student told the teacher, “You must
teach me how to write like that [like the genre studied]” (Sengupta, 1999, p. 307; cited in
Tardy, 2006). Genre-based instruction may have more impact on students‟ writing if it
incorporates explicit teaching of the thinking processes that generate the typified
organisational and linguistic structures of a genre.

Without attention to the cognitive dimension of writing it is easy for teachers to slip into
teaching a genre as if it were a template with labels for its different parts (e.g. „setting‟,
„complication‟ for the story genre). Figure 1 shows an example of the potential of genre
teaching, as practised in many classrooms, to result in “restricting freedom of expression”
(Coe, 1994, p. 158) as some anti-genre critics have charged. The writer of the story in Figure
1, a Singapore primary school student, began his story with a setting that sought to capture
the reader‟s interest with a dramatic incident (the protagonist reacting to a centipede bite). In
his teacher‟s mental script for the story genre, however, the setting is restricted to the naming
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of location, characters and time (My friends and I were at East Coast Park … at noon…),
hence the instruction to the student to move Paragraph 3 to the beginning of the story,
although the student‟s original setting does introduce the protagonist as well as the event that
sparked the rest of the story. Genre-based teaching, when founded on a template view of
types of texts, can fail to recognise creativity such as that displayed by the Primary 6 student
writer in Figure 1.

If the teaching of the genre conventions is accompanied by the teaching of socially-situated

cognitive processes relevant to the genre, the outcome might be more positive for both
teacher and learner. If the teacher in Figure 1 had considered the student‟s opening paragraph
in terms of the social purpose of stories and the writer-reader interaction in a story‟s setting
stage (How do stories entertain? What kind of events would awaken curiosity in a reader at
the setting?), he/she might have commended the student for a creative beginning, and the
student would have felt encouraged to attempt further efforts at creativity. Teaching the
organisation framework and linguistic forms of a genre without attention to the underlying
thinking and social practices could lead to template-fixated, uninspiring writing especially
among students who, unlike the student in Figure 1, are not fortunate enough to have already
acquired the necessary cognitive skills and social-cultural knowledge for narrative writing.

Figure 1: Genre-based teaching: Applying a story template

Teacher‟s
correction Extract from a Primary 6 student‟s story

Para 2 I felt a sharp bite on my leg. ”What sort of an insect is this” I Student‟s
thought. To my surprise, it looked like a centipede! setting

It dug its poisonous claws into my flawless skin. “Ouch!” I

shrieked. The centipede was dark red and big. I guessed it was when
Para 3 I was sitting on the grass mat eating and it climbed onto me. People
near me was looking at me with strange weird looks on their faces.

My friends and I were at East Coast Park, having a picnic under a

shaded, huge tree. The sun at noon was high in the sky casting the Teacher‟s
Para 1
tree’s shadow on the hard ground. The place was crowded. Some of setting
then were cycling, others building sandcastles on the
beach. ……………………….
Note: Story has not been edited. Teacher‟s corrections within the text have been omitted.

While the process approach to teaching writing, as conventionally practised, fails to provide
explicit guidance on the conventions of organisation and language use expected in the kinds
of texts students are tasked to write, genre-based methods tend to provide descriptions of
conventions without showing students how to think their way to the production of those
conventions. An integration of the two approaches would give us a social-cognitive model
from which to devise a more effective pedagogical approach to teaching writing. The next
section explains how writing can be viewed as a synthesis of cognitive and social processes.

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A social-cognitive view of teaching writing as process

Like Flower and Hayes‟ (1981) cognitive process model of writing, a social-cognitive model
would view writing as a thinking, decision-making, goal-setting activity. But unlike the
cognitive process model where the environment of a writing task is conceived as just the
“writing assignment” and “text produced so far” (Flower and Hayes, 1981, p. 370), a social-
cognitive view sees the thinking, decision-making and goal-setting as always sited in a social-
cultural context created by the conventional practices, beliefs and value systems that shape
the roles played by writer and reader and the interaction between them. “Cognition is socially
situated” says Kostouli (2005, p.18). Hence the mental strategies for deciding what to say or
omit, how to organise propositions, and what words to use or avoid cannot be detached from
“the genres and the communities within which these strategies operate and which they help
construct” (Kostouli, 2005, p.18). The thinking operations in arguing a thesis in an essay, for
example, must include reference to the valued verbal behaviours and tacit assumptions of the
academic discourse community represented by the teacher-reader and assessor.

The notion of genre and the discourse community in which a particular genre is used is
integral to a social-cognitive model of writing. To be useful as a concept in writing
pedagogy, genres should not be regarded as inert structures made up of labelled stages
and conventional linguistic features, this being “an incomplete and misleading view of
genres” (Bazerman, 2004, p.317). Rather, genres should exist in the minds of teacher
and students as living, evolving phenomena “embedded within structured social
activities” (Bazerman, p.311) and imbued with the values, beliefs, and typical recurrent
practices that govern the conduct of those social activities. Applied in writing
classrooms, genre-inspired teaching must therefore go beyond the mere observance of a
template of steps and linguistic structures to socialization of student writers into the
practices and mindsets of the people who use a genre to interact with each other in
social contexts associated with that genre.

There are cognitive processes at work whenever we participate in the social activities
that create an instance of a genre, because “learning to carry off a literate practice or
participate in a discourse community often depends on learning distinctive ways of
thinking grounded in the social purposes of the practice” (Flower, 1994). The writing of
an email requesting for action or information in a workplace setting, for instance,
involves the cognitive operation of setting a rhetorical goal (e.g. Convince the reader
that the requested action is advantageous to her/him), a cognitive process that must
include attending to the social-cultural norms operating in the writer‟s/reader‟s context
(e.g. norms governing interaction between participants of unequal status). Throughout
the writing of a text, the mental operations of vetting propositions against the writer‟s
rhetorical goal, addressing anticipated reader response, and selecting meaning and
language have to be orchestrated with a view towards alignment of the resulting text
with the social practices of the discourse community. Teaching writing as a process
must therefore mean the teaching of the cognitive strategies, attitudes and mental
postures that enable the student writer to enact the social practices mediated through the
target genre. De La Paz (2007), in a review of studies on cognitive strategy instruction,
concluded that “cognitive strategy instruction programs have consistently been found
effective in promoting impressive gains in students‟ writing performance” (p.262). The
next section provides some research evidence of the feasibility and efficacy of teaching
genre-relevant cognitive processes.
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Research supporting a social-cognitive approach

The term „social-cognitive‟ seems an apt label for describing a process approach to teaching
writing that acknowledges the role of social and cultural factors in the thinking operations
that drive writing. The term is justified by the title of Flower‟s (1994) book, which reads in
part: “A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing”. In this book she argues the view of literate acts
like writing as participating in social acts that require not only “knowledge of social
conventions” but also “individual problem solving” (p. 22).

There are a number of studies that show us how a social-cognitive approach to teaching
writing can be translated into classroom activities with beneficial results. These studies,
reviewed below, combine instruction in cognitive strategies for decision-making in writing
with the explicit teaching of genre knowledge (e.g. Graham, Harris & Mason, 2005) or with
socialization-type activities to raise awareness of key discourse practices in a genre
(Reznitskaya, Anderson, & Kuo, 2007).

The integration of the social and cognitive dimensions of the writing process is generally
achieved through describing or modelling the thinking operations leading to the production of
the desired features of a genre. Dobson & Feak (2001) describe a method of cognitive
modelling, employed “successfully with NNS undergraduate students ... at the University of
Michigan” (p.189), whereby the teacher helped students to perform the complex mental
procedures that experienced writers employ as they prepare a written critique. Students were
nudged towards the target thinking activities through a set of questions that guided them to
perform mental acts such as framing the issue in the article they had to critique, and
evaluating the quality of the evidence the author provides to justify his/her conclusions on the
issue. Performing such mental acts equipped students with the know-how to go beyond mere
narration of the article‟s content, a common flaw in students‟ critiques, to the making and
supporting of the student‟s own evaluative claims about the article and the synthesizing of
competing claims – traits recognised in academia as characteristic of well written critiques.
Cognitive modelling was supplemented with the provision of sample critiques “to
demonstrate various topic-comment configurations” (p.196) which reflect a common practice
in critique genres – the practice of first raising some aspect in the article and then
commenting on it. Combining cognitive modelling with study of sample critiques socialized
students into the academic discourse norms of their assessor-reader to the extent that the
researchers noted that by the end of the study the students had become “aware of the kind of
evaluative criteria … used by members of the academy” (Dobson & Feak, 2001, p.198).

The feasibility of teaching students specific cognitive processes and genre conventions is not
limited to university students as Dobson and Feak‟s paper may lead us to believe. In a study
of struggling third grade student writers, Graham, Harris & Mason (2005) report
improvements in students‟ stories and persuasive essays after genre instruction combined
with explicit teaching of cognitive operations for the production of the two genres. The
genre-based part of the instruction consisted of teaching students the basic elements of stories
and persuasive essays by showing them examples of each element and then having students
identify those elements in good exemplars of the genre and in their own writing. The basic
elements of the genre, presented in a graphic form to serve as a reminder to students, were
incorporated into the teaching of the cognitive processes for writing the target genre. Explicit
teaching of the cognitive processes included naming of the mental steps (e.g. for the
persuasive essay, Tell what you believe, give 3 or more Reasons), and teacher modelling of
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the steps through “talking out loud” while composing and using the basic elements reminder
to demonstrate how each element must be included (p. 217-218).

The improvements observed in students‟ writing in Graham, Harris & Mason‟s (2005) study
must be regarded as impressive considering that the third grader participants had been
identified as “at-risk in writing” (p. 213). The texts of the students in the treatment groups
included a significantly higher number of basic elements of the genre (for both story and
persuasive writing) than those of their counterparts in the comparison group. Holistic scoring
of essays revealed significantly higher scores for essays in the treatment groups, leading the
researchers to conclude that students in these groups “wrote qualitatively better stories and
persuasive papers (the two instructed genres) than their peers in the comparison condition”
(p.231). The positive results indicate the effectiveness of integrating the cognitive and genre
dimensions of writing in the writing classroom.

The promise offered in a social-cognitive approach may lie in its conceptualization of writing
lessons as opportunities for the socialization of student writers into the conventional practices
and ways of thinking of a genre. In a study on the teaching of argument conducted by
Reznitskaya, Anderson, and Kuo (2007), fourth- and fifth-grade students were socialized into
the genre practices of argument through participation in small group “collaborative-reasoning
discussions” (p.456) on moral dilemmas featured in stories. Familiarity with the conventional
argument practices was cultivated by having students identify and label propositions from
their discussion according to an argument schema consisting of these elements: position.
reasons for position with supporting facts. and objection with response to objection
(Reznitskaya, Anderson, and Kuo, 2007, p. 453). The cognitive aspect of argument
construction was not neglected as the teacher provided explicit guidance to direct students‟
thinking, prompting them for supporting reasons, modelling the function of evidence as
support, and challenging students to respond to counterarguments.

In a post-instruction essay task the students who underwent collaborative reasoning

discussion only had “significantly more argument-relevant propositions” in their
compositions than their counterparts in the control group and the “explicit instruction group”
(p. 464) who, in addition to participation in collaborative reasoning, had two scripted lessons
explaining the argument schema, its component parts and the relations among them. It would
appear from Reznitskaya, Anderson, and Kuo‟s results that explicit instruction had no
significant effect on students‟ mastery of the thinking and genre practices of argument
writing. However, it should be noted that students in the explicit instruction group received
only two scripted lessons which merely explained the components of the argument schema
and did not explicitly teach the mental strategies for realising the components in their own
arguments. What Reznitskaya and her colleagues have demonstrated is that there is
significant improvement in argumentative writing when “socialization into argumentative
discourse in dialogic collective settings” (p.451) is accompanied by cognitive scaffolding in
the form of teacher prompts to guide students‟ thinking during argument construction.

If the primary school students in Reznitskaya, Anderson, and Kuo‟s (2007) study benefited
from genre knowledge and related cognitive guidance we would expect secondary school
student writers to show improvement in writing after similar social-cognitive instruction.
Two studies conducted in Singapore secondary schools suggest that this expectation is not
unfounded. In both studies (Chandrasegaran & Yeo, 2006; Chandrasegaran, Kong, & Chua,
2007) the teaching of genre practices was combined with explicit instruction of the cognitive
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strategies for reproducing the genre practices. In the Chandrasegaran, Kong, & Chua (2007)
study, Secondary 3 (Grade 9) students in a typical state school observed in various sample
texts the main genre practices of expository writing: stating and supporting a position,
providing reasons or evidence to support claims, and addressing counter-arguments. The
teacher, through guided class discussion, also raised student awareness of the social
contextualisation of meanings and organisation structure in the texts they studied, directing
students to consider the writer‟s and reader‟s social roles in the context and the social-cultural
shaping of ideational content in texts. Before students wrote their own expository texts they
learnt, through teacher explanation and modelling, and then practised the thinking processes
that would enable them to enact the genre behaviours they had observed earlier. The thinking
processes modelled and practised included the setting of a whole-text rhetorical goal
specifying writer purpose and reader effect, selecting an appropriate support strategy, and
anticipating opposing views. The teaching of these thinking skills was supported by a list of
claim-support strategies, which included answering anticipated counter-arguments for which
teacher and students could refer to another list of strategies for countering opposing views
(e.g. playing down significance of opposing view, offering evidence to discredit an opposing
view).

After 14 weeks of weekly writing lessons, the post-instruction essays of the 137 student
participants showed improvements in quality, measured by number of different argument
moves and occurrence of functional/non-functional topicality, non-functional topicality being
topics brought into the essay that play no rhetorical role in developing the writer‟s overall
stance or thesis. There was a significant increase in the mean number of stance (thesis)
support moves, with significantly more moves in stating support claim, elaborating claim,
and countering opposing views. There was a significant rise in functional topicality
accompanied by a drop in non-functional topicality, which means that the incidence of
irrelevance declined significantly. These results provide ground for concluding that
knowledge of genre practices, awareness of the social context of a type of text, and training in
the relevant cognitive processes can produce gains in expository writing ability. The same
genre cum cognitive instructional approach led to improvements in Secondary 3 students‟
narrative writing in another Singapore study (Chandrasegaran & Yeo, 2006) in which explicit
teaching of two character depiction practices in the story genre and training in the setting of
reader-effect goals led to student generated stories with notable improvements, including a
rise in the number of ideational tokens (expressions that evoke a character‟s personality or
mood by describing a detail of behaviour or appearance, or creating an utterance).

The positive effects of a social-cognitive approach to teaching writing have been

demonstrated not only in school-based writing in the English composition class, as in the
studies reviewed above, but also in writing done by university students to meet requirements
in an academic discipline (Carter, Ferzli and Weibe, 2004). Carter and his colleagues had
university students in a biology course explicitly taught two types of cognitive processes:
scientific reasoning (e.g. hypothesizing the relationship between variables in an experiment
before conducting the experiment, and justifying their hypothesis), and the cognitive
strategies for writing lab reports (e.g. delaying the writing of the introduction until they had
made sense of their data and selected a visual representation for the data). The instruction in
scientific reasoning is a means of socialising the biology students into the ways of thinking of
their disciplinary discourse community. In addition, the conventions of lab reports were
described in a step-by-step guide on writing each section of the report, (e.g. “do not include
any interpretations…about the data in the Results” (p.416)). Not only were the lab reports of
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the treatment group rated significantly higher than those of the control group, treatment group
students showed a significantly more positive attitude toward lab reports. Carter, Ferzli and
Weibe‟s findings demonstrate the effectiveness of situating the teaching of thinking processes
underlying a genre (the lab report, in their case) within the context of performing the social or
professional acts of the community that uses the genre to mediate interaction among its
members. This merging of cognitive and social models in teaching writing as a process would
alert students to the fact that “disciplines have… their own ways of semiotically reconstruing,
reasoning about, and participating in the world” (Ravelli, 2005, p.105), thereby motivating
them to attend to different reader expectations when they are writing different genres in an
academic course of study or in different academic courses.

The research reviewed in this section offers sufficient evidence of the efficacy of adopting a
social-cognitive view of writing as a pedagogical approach. What appears to work is the
explicit teaching of the mental postures and thinking processes associated with the social
functions, values, and accepted practices of the discourse community that uses the genre
students are asked to write. Writing teachers who deliberately shape students‟ cognitive
processes towards audience-aware strategies of content and language choice that aligns with
the social practices of their reader‟s community can be said to be really teaching writing as a
process.

Applying a social-cognitive approach in the classroom

The previous section would have given some indication of how a social-cognitive inspired
pedagogy would translate into teaching/learning activities in the writing classroom. It is
neither possible, in a paper of this length, nor advisable, considering the endless permutations
of student ability and instructional contexts, to describe a collection of classroom activities
for teaching specific cognitive processes leading to genre practices in different types of texts.
Instead this section will offer three principles for guiding lesson preparation and material
design aimed at developing the mental attitudes and thinking skills students need for enacting
required genre practices. The three principles are:
 Identify and name specific cognitive and social interaction skills to teach
 Provide contextualized practice targeted at specific cognitive strategies and
social interaction acts
 Exploit students‟ social knowledge to raise their awareness of the social
context of language use and choice of meaning in a writing task
Explicit teaching of thinking and social interaction skills is not possible without naming the
cognitive and writer-reader interaction acts that construct texts. For example, when writing an
expository essay entitled „Marriage‟, cognitive and social interaction acts to teach may
include those in Figure 2.

The double headed arrows in Figure 2 underline the inter-relatedness of cognitive and social
processes in writing. It will be explained to students that every decision-making act in choice
of content, organisation and language must take into account some aspect of the social-
cultural context of the writing task, because writing is a channel through which writers
attempt to influence the perceptions of readers, and an awareness of the social-cultural
landscape of target readers and their community can increase the likelihood of success.
Furthermore, it is best that the cognitive and social interaction acts to be taught be couched in
what-to-do terms to focus student attention on the socio-rhetorical dimension of the writing
task rather than on topic knowledge exclusively.
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Figure 2. Examples of cognitive and social interaction acts

Decision-making (cognitive) act Social interaction act

Set a global goal that includes Convince Teacher-reader that I (Student) have a
writer purpose and reader effect considered view on a current issue in the topic of
marriage [e.g. a current issue in some Asian
communities is society‟s concern that highly educated
women are delaying or avoiding marriage].

Anticipate and answer Expect Reader to have concerns often raised in the
arguments/views opposed to that of community about the negative consequences of my
the writer point of view (e.g. that women delaying or avoiding
marriage is not a significant social problem). Give
reasons to persuade Reader that the negative scenarios
may not occur.

Naming cognitive operations and social interaction acts provides teacher and students a
shared meta-language that empowers students to talk about their thinking processes and
social awareness during writing and to monitor their own learning, thus giving them a sense
of control over their development as novice writers. The meta-language and the manner of its
presentation can be adjusted to suit the age and cognitive maturity level of students. For
example, Graham, Harris, and Mason‟s (2005) used the mnemonic TREE (Tell what you
believe, Give Reasons, Examine each reason, End it) to teach third-grade students the
thinking strategies and schematic structure for persuasive writing. However, the explicit
teaching of thinking and social skills for writing, with or without the aid of mnemonics or
diagrams (like the house-shaped argument schema in Reznitskaya, Anderson, and Kuo‟s
(2007) study), may not have the desired effect on writing if the focus of instruction remains at
the level of labels for parts of a template. Students may then be able to recite the labels
without the expected change in their attitudinal approach to writing and without changing
their usual less effective cognitive behaviours during writing. It is the systematic effort at
developing specific cognitive skills and writer-reader social interaction processes that
distinguishes a social-cognitive approach to process teaching from the conventional write-
review-rewrite approach.

The second principle for implementing a social-cognitive approach to writing is that to

achieve change in students‟ composing behaviours, lessons must include contextualized
practice exercises targeted at specific cognitive strategies and associated social interaction
acts. Dobson and Feak (2001), in training students to write critiques, provided “focused
practice on critical reading and evaluative writing” before students were given the critique
assignment (p. 197). Focused practice gives students the opportunity to familiarise
themselves with new ways of thinking during writing and, hopefully as a result, they will
replace their less efficient composing behaviours with more rhetorical, audience-aware
patterns of thought. For instance, exercises in goal- and context-referenced selection of
meaning (i.e. vetting details/facts/ examples/propositions against writer purpose, reader
expectation, etc. as exemplified in Chandrasegaran & Tang, 2008, p.44) could give students
the confidence to adopt this method of content generation in place of the rather common
student practices of knowledge-telling (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987) and associative
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writing – using topics in sentences already written or in the essay prompt to generate the next
clause to grow the text (Bosher, 1998; Chandrasegaran, 1999). Practice in using socio-
rhetorical goals and context awareness to direct content selection would sensitise students to
making attempts at discovering reader expectations and discourse community values
whenever they have to write, even when the genre is unfamiliar as may happen in workplace
writing after they leave school.

Dedicated practice of specific thinking processes leading to valued discourse acts is more
likely to have the desired effect if students are aware of the social-cultural context of their
writing. The importance of social awareness in the writing process is the reason for the third
principle for guiding the preparation of writing lessons: Exploit students‟ social knowledge to
raise their awareness of the social context of language use and content choice in a writing
task. When student thinking during writing includes consideration of social roles and
conventional discourse behaviours of the participants in the unfolding text, meaning selection,
organisation and language choice are more likely to be more appropriate (even if not totally
free of surface error). Pang (2002) found that engaging in contextual analysis, involving the
study of the social-rhetorical purpose, writer role, audience and register of a genre, resulted in
writing that “included all obligatory moves” of the target genre (p.157). This positive
outcome reported by Pang (2002) and other researchers (e.g. Cheng, 2006) who taught
student writers to do similar text and context analyses suggests that knowledge of genre
practices and awareness of the social-cultural context of a writing task facilitates the
performance of the discourse moves associated with the target genre.

Students bring to the classroom some social knowledge about relationships between
participants in everyday communicative situations, or what is known as “tenor” in systemic
functional linguistics (Halliday, 1985, p.12; Macken-Horarik, 2002, p.24), and about the
social situations that contextualize the kinds of texts commonly required in school writing
tasks – complaint letters, expository essays, stories, and book or film reviews. Much of this
knowledge, acquired through years of social interaction, is unarticulated and waiting to be
activated by teachers through probes such as, using the film review as example: “If you want
your friends to see a film that you enjoyed, what would you say about the film? Would you
tell them how the film ends?” Activating students‟ tacit social knowledge would encourage
them to approach writing as a social-rhetorical event rather than as an exercise in generating
well-formed sentences saying what they know about the topic(s) in the essay prompt.

It has been observed, for instance, that secondary school students‟ informal argument
practices in an online forum include counter-argument management moves that could, with
some explicit teaching, be developed for use in expository essay writing (Chandrasegaran,
2008). Yet when writing expository/argumentative texts students tend not to consider
counterarguments (Nussbaum & Kardash, 2005), or they merely state opposing positions
without addressing them with the aim of maintaining their own position (Hinkel, 1999). The
reason must be the tendency among students to view expository essay writing as a recount of
topic knowledge (English, 1999) rather than as participation in an ongoing conversation in
which they interact with readers to contribute their own point of view on a contested issue.
Teachers can raise student awareness of the social-rhetorical dimension in a writing prompt
by encouraging students to articulate their tacit social knowledge of their role and purpose
with respect to the target reader, the reader‟s role in the context, and the underlying
assumptions governing the writer-reader interaction in the given circumstances. Writing with
a real sense of audience and situation would bring into play some of a student‟s socially
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acquired discourse behaviours appropriate for school writing, for example, withholding
selected information to create suspense in a story or providing details of an unsatisfactory
product to strengthen the writer‟s claim of having been inconvenienced in a letter of
complaint.

Conclusion

In the light of current social constructivist views of writing, the „process‟ in teaching writing
as a process is a sequence of social interaction acts typical of the context in which writer and
reader are situated in relation to each other. To enable students to perform the expected
discourse acts, the teaching must include instruction in the cognitive processes underlying
and leading to the realisation of the moves and organisational structure characteristic of the
genre. Explicit instruction in the cognitive procedures and strategies would encourage
intentionality during writing, thereby reducing the tendency towards mere mechanical
observance of the sequence of stages constituting a genre, which is often the case when genre
is taught as a template of stages and characteristic linguistic forms. By directing conscious
attention to the thinking that impels moves at each stage of the social interaction between
writer and reader, a social-cognitive process approach to teaching writing allows scope for
students to exercise their creativity within the conventions of the genre. A social-cognitive
process approach to teaching writing is “visible pedagogy” (Martin, 1993, p.163) that makes
the writing process visible on two fronts: the ways of thinking that contribute to the
construction of context-appropriate texts, and the verbal social-interaction behaviours that
meet the expectations of the discourse community represented by the target reader.

Author
Dr Antonia Chandrasegaran is associate professor in the English Language and Literature Academic
Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. She teaches writing-
related courses including academic writing for postgraduate students and an in-service course for
teachers on the teaching of expository writing. Her research interests are in the areas of academic
written discourse analysis and the teaching of writing. She has published in these areas in Journal of
Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, and Asian Journal of English Language
Teaching. She is the author of Intervening in the Writing Process and co-author of Teaching
Expository Writing: Genre Practices and Thinking Skills. Email: [email protected]

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