Scaffolding
Students’ Writing in an EFL Class: Implementing the Process Writing Approach
Ekaning Dewanti Laksmi
There were situations when my
students taking a Writing class experienced
difficulties that concern, among other things, subject-predicate agreement,
articles, pluralisation and syntactic errors as shown by meaningfully vague
sentences. I assume such mistakes are the result of their little understanding
of the pre-requisite knowledge for Writing, i.e. grammar. However, it is not
wise to require students to attend all the Grammar classes before they can
start their Writing class. Moreover, writing does not merely mean applying
grammatical rules; it is more students’ learning to communicate their ideas in written
forms. Therefore, and in regards to the idea that writing plays an important
role in shaping one’s mind (
Adopting the principles developed by
constructivism theorists, I introduced “scaffolding” as a means to help
students build up their writing skill. My comments on wrong agreement, improper
use of articles, pluralisation, and syntactic forms as well as vague messages
of students’ writings are the initial feedback. Students use this initial
feedback to revise their writings and so they do this rewrite-revise process
for two or three times before they finally submit their final writings. So, it
is the process from working on drafts until publication of writings that
counts. This approach has to a certain degree encouraged students to write with
confidence; they are not worried about their writings being judged as right or
wrong.
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Laksmi, E. D. (2003, November). Scaffolding students’
writing in an EFL class: Implementing the process writing approach. Paper
presented at the 38th RELC International Seminar,
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