Although the process approach has been considered to be one of the most successful methods for teaching English writing since it regards the skill as a developing, complex,
38 cognitive, and recursive process (Farooq et al., 2012; Silva, 1990), “The term process writing has been bandied about for quite a while in ESL classrooms” (Seow, 2002, p. 315).
Perceptions of the process method changed as a consequence of the dissatisfaction regarding the product approach (Silva, 1990). There was a shift from seeing compositions as finished products to seeing compositions as techniques and stages by which composing can be improved (Hassan & Akhand, 2010). According to Li (2013), the process approach depends “on communicative theory and stresses the writers’ interactive principle” (p. 1), and
psycholinguistic cognitive theory (Guleff, 2002). The issue here is that there is no universally accepted definition of such an approach (Sun & Feng, 2009), nor is there agreement regarding the major processes that students must undergo before handing in their written texts. For example, Montague (1995) defined the process method as the following:
…a teaching approach that focuses on the process a writer engages in when constructing meaning. This teaching approach concludes with editing as a final stage in text creation, rather than an initial one as in a product oriented approach. The process oriented approach may include identified stages of the writing process such as: pre-writing, writing and re-writing. Once the rough draft has been created, it is polished into subsequent drafts with the assistance of peer and teacher conferencing. Final editing and publication can follow if the author chooses to publish their writing. (p. 15)
Murray (2011) interpreted the process approach generally as the following:
...the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we fell about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about out world, to communicate what we learn about out world. (p. 4)
With respect to the structure of the process approach, Badger and White (2000)
contended that there were various opinions regarding the stages. For example, various authors suggested two, three, four, or even eight stages in the process approach (cf. Alodwan & Ibnian, 2014, Barnett, 1989; Bayat, 2014; Farooq et al., 2012; Flower & Hayes, 2011; Hassan & Akhand, 2010; Li, 2013; Murray, 2011; Sun & Feng, 2009; Tangkiengsirisin, 2006). The reason for this disparity could be that some researchers consider sub-stages to be major ones. In any case, for the purposes of this paper, the major stages are four: prewriting, writing, revising, and rewriting.
In this approach, the process of learning to write revolves around students’ status as subjects. This means that in the classroom, the students are the center of attention. The teachers’ role, on the other hand, is that of a facilitator whose aim is to guide the students through the stages of writing (Li, 2013; Nordin & Mohammad, 2006; Tangkiengsirisin, 2006). A typical class using such an approach—as explained by Badger and White (2000) and
39 Hassan and Akhand (2010)—would begin with the teacher assigning students a topic. The students would then be asked to generate ideas, organize them, and plan the structure of their writing. As soon as students finished writing, they would be required to self-correct and/or peer-correct their texts, and then to rewrite them based on feedback. Ultimately, these drafts would be corrected by the teacher, who would then ask the students to follow the instructor’s suggestions and comments when redoing their writing for the last time.
Barnett (1989) summarized some of the advantages of the process approach by stating that students eventually change their perspective of teachers in such a way that they stop seeing teachers as proofreaders and correctors, whose concern is primarily the proper or grammatical usage of the language, and begin to see them as specialists who read their writings in order to understand them and to help the students fix the issues that might impede communication. The hope is that since this process means more to the students, too, the students will write more. The teachers will also find the process gratifying, since their suggestions and comments will encourage the intellectual evolution of the students, thereby improving the students’ critical thinking and reasoning skills. In other words, in the short term, students will be able to more intelligibly express their thoughts and ideas, while, in the long term, they will be capable of using critical thinking.
However, this approach has many disadvantages. Silva (1990) argued that this method does not tackle the fundamental issues of L2 writers properly, nor does it prepare them for academic work. According to Reppen (2002), the process method is focused on the stages of writing, and thus usually excludes compositionally correct forms, as well as the conventions and writing styles of various genres. This problem is accelerated when the learners are characterized as EFL and have different cultural backgrounds or when the learners’ knowledge reflects poor mastery of modes of writing. The irony is that while even though principal writing features (and sometimes grammar rules, as well) are excluded from the teaching, students’ evaluations are still often based on their mastery of such things (Reppen 2002). Seow’s (2002) observation was that the method “in the classroom is highly structured as it necessitates the orderly teaching of process skills, and thus it may not, at least initially, give way to a free variation of writing stages” (p. 316).
Johns (1986) emphasized that when strictly following the major stages of such an approach, instructors could be doing a disservice to the students, since the approach must be tested based on the tasks learners are required to execute. Breuch (2011) stated that post- process researchers believe that the processes of writing (i.e., prewriting, writing, and rewriting) no longer accurately explain the act of writing, since the act of writing is
40 minimized by this paradigm to sequences of codified stages that can be taught. Flower and Hayes (2011) highlighted the fact that the method has no “clean-cut stages,” which means that learners can engage in the stages simultaneously and that when teachers make sharp
distinctions between the operations of these processes, they “may seriously distort how these activities work” (p. 255). Li (2013) asserted that the weakness of this approach is that it will partly limit the production of writers’ free creativity, as instructors are viewed as the role models of standard answers. Hammill (2014) maintained that the two aforementioned approaches (product and process) “are not mutually exclusive,” since the emphasis on composition procedures “does not necessarily preclude a consideration of the nature of the final product” (p. 32). Nonetheless, because the process method ignores the academic, social, and cultural settings in which writing takes place (Al-Khairy, 2013; Nordin & Mohammad, 2006), and since it lacks a focus on teaching students that certain types of writing are performed for specific purposes (Farooq et al., 2012), the genre approach was developed.