“Organizando ando”

This study had two major purposes: 1) to explore the role of ESL teachers when using the writing process approach in teaching writing in English as a second language to five fifth grade Saudi Arabian ESL students and the strategies, techniques, skills they incorporate when teaching this approach; and 2) to identify the impact of using the writing process approach on five fifth grade Saudi Arabian’s writing development.

Qualitative methods, including observations, interviews with the students and the teachers, student think-aloud protocols and students’ writing samples were used to collect data during the study. Notes from observations and transcribed interviews and student think-aloud protocols were analyzed to obtain an in depth description and understanding of the influence of the writing process in developing Saudi Arabian elementary ESL students’ writing skills.

In Chapter Four, I described how the four ESL teachers, Mrs. Cook, Mrs.

Zimmerman, Mrs. Phipps, and Mrs. McCain, who participated in this study, employed the writing process approach in their writing classrooms and what writing techniques,

strategies, and skills they utilized when teaching writing to five fifth grade Saudi Arabian ESL students. This description was obtained from the classroom observations I made and the teacher interviews I conducted. I designed guidelines to assist me to have

comprehensive and in-depth observational data (Appendix A). This chapter discussed four main elements for each of the participant teachers: classroom climate; stages of the writing process incorporated when teaching writing; specific writing strategies and techniques; and ESL teachers’ skills and structure they employ when teaching writing to five fifth grade

Mrs. Cook

Mrs. Cook was an ESL teacher who held a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Kansas with an emphasis on teaching English as a second language. She had twenty years of teaching experience, including teaching fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth, and twelfth grades. She was teaching fifth and sixth grade ESL students writing, reading, social studies and science. Mrs. Cook had a passion for teaching in general, and she particularly enjoyed teaching ESL. She showed an appreciation for her students’ native languages and cultures. Although Mrs. Cook was not Hispanic, she spoke fluent Spanish, and she had used Spanish sometimes to clear up misunderstanding of vocabulary with Hispanic students. She received a Fullbright grant to study in Costa Rica for five weeks and has been able to travel to several other countries. She also was familiar with a few Arabic words: Marhaba (Hello), Maalslamah (Good-Bye), and Shokran (Thank you). More information about Mrs. Cook was previously provided in Chapter Three. I observed Noof and Najah in Mrs. Cook’s writing classroom, from 9:30-10:00 once a week, from December 2007 to the end of April 2008.

Classroom Climate

For this study, classroom climate was defined as the type of environment that was created by the school, teachers, and students that contributed to the effective delivery of writing process instruction and student writing products. Classroom atmosphere is a wide spectrum that encompasses variables ranging from the physical setting, the teacher-student interaction, to the rules and formal setting of this environment (Creemers & Reezigt, 1999, Freiberg, 1999). Borich (1996) identified three different classroom types that a teacher can

create: competitive, co-operative and individualistic. Students in competitive classrooms are encouraged to compete with one another. In such a classroom, the teacher is usually in control with little independency by students. Competition is naturally motivating to

students, and teacher-led classrooms can enhance achievement. In co-operative classrooms, the students and the interactions among them are the main focus. In this context, the

teacher intervenes to guide and direct students towards learning goals. The effectiveness of cooperative classrooms is in their ability to develop students’ learning skills which in turn will enhance their achievement. In an individualistic type of classrooms, the emphasis is on individual student work with minimum teacher intervention. Such a classroom may help in development of independent learning skills. Overall, an effective teacher balances and correlates classroom climates with his or her preset goals. Mrs. Cook created a competitive and co-operative classroom.

When I walked through the classroom’s door, I immediately perceived the tone of the classroom environment that had been established. Mrs. Cook’s classroom was inviting and warm. The way she physically arranged the students’ desks and tables encouraged her students to participate with her and with their peers. She decorated her classroom by displaying students’ work, educational posters, maps, and pictures of different countries. She organized her room so that materials were easily accessible and labeled shelves and containers so students could easily return things to their proper places. Mrs. Cook also had book shelves where she kept books of different genres.

Mrs. Cook was continually striving to make her classroom a positive place where student learning was maximized. In her classroom the students felt safe to express their

their full potential. Mrs. Cook had a small ESL classroom of five students. During my observation period in her classroom, she was always calling her students by their names, which signified a positive relationship between her and the students. She also encouraged her students to call each other using their names and to make sure to pronounce them correctly. When someone mispronounced a name, laughter would fill the room. Mrs. Cook’s classroom established an unthreatening environment where students could share their stories and freely talk about subject matter. Mrs. Cook believed that her attitudes in the classroom definitely impacted her students. Despite her unstable health condition, she always tried to be enthusiastic and cheerful.

Mrs. Cook was concerned to learn as much as possible about her students including their home language, religion, culture, and social life. She did not hesitate to speak in other languages or to learn new vocabulary from her students. Before she started her class each day, the first thing she usually did was to greet the students and ask about the way they felt that morning and how they were after they went home. Whenever she noticed any illness in her students, she would send them immediately to the school nurse. One day, one of her students was sick with a cough, and she was sneezing and coughing everywhere. Mrs. Cook told her in a nice way to sneeze appropriately by sneezing into her arm instead of spreading the germs into the class and among her peers. All other students liked this technique, and I observed them afterward doing the same thing when they sneezed. Advising her students with positive attitudes and behaviors was one of her admirable characteristics.

Mrs. Cook was also concerned with establishing a foundation through which students fulfilled their emotional needs. Throughout my observations, I found that she

liked to teach her students four basic elements: relationship, enjoyment, freedom, and control. She taught them how to admire themselves and others. She believed that having fun during the lessons was an excellent strategy to engage students in learning. The final two elements she believed to be effective in creating a positive classroom were that Mrs. Cook gave her students freedom and control by allowing them to make choices about assignments and other lesson planning. She liked to engage her students in the learning process and make them feel the responsibility and the accountability of their choices.

The relationship between classroom environment and the development of writing is an intimate one. The classroom climate influences students’ achievement, self-confidence, self esteem, freedom of speech, and academic success. Establishing a positive and sound rapport between teacher and students was of great significance for the creation of an effective environment. In Mrs. Cook’s classroom, a positive classroom climate was successfully built. She showed interest in students’ backgrounds, home languages, cultures, and emotions. The way she physically arranged her classroom reflected her teaching philosophy and accommodated her learning activities.

Stages of the Writing Process

There are eight writing process stages that were observed to determine if they were employed by the teacher: prewriting, planning, drafting, pausing, reading, revising, editing, and publishing (Williams, 1998). In this section, I define and describe each stage and how the teacher employed it in her classroom.

• Prewriting. This stage involves generating ideas, strategies, and information for a given writing task. Prewriting activities take place before starting on the first draft of a paper. They include discussion, outlining, freewriting, journals, talk-write, and metaphor.

In Mrs. Cook’s class, prewriting activities could be observed in her writing lessons. In this stage, Mrs. Cook brainstormed with her students to have them come with as many ideas and as much information as they could. She usually asked them questions or asked for their opinions on a specific topic to stimulate their thinking. When students finished their discussion about a subject matter, Mrs. Cook helped them to categorize these ideas and put them in units so they could use them later as guidelines when they wrote. In order to do so, she encouraged them to draw diagrams, charts, pictures, webs, or maps.

• Planning. This stage involves reflecting on the material produced during prewriting to develop a plan to achieve the aim of the paper. Planning involves considering the rhetorical stance, the rhetorical purpose, the aim of the text, how these factors are

interrelated, and how they are connected to the information generated during prewriting. Planning also involves selecting support for a claim and blocking out at least a rough organizational structure.

Planning as described above was employed by Mrs. Cook. In her fifth grade

classroom, students were taught that writing was not about producing a text. It was rather a matter of following specific stages through which students organize their ideas, write them down, and return to them from time to time for polishing and editing. They comprehended that before they started writing they had to brainstorm and draw a diagram or a web to help them generate, gather, and write down their ideas. Therefore, planning was considerably

embedded within the first stage of writing. Mrs. Cook used the planning stage when she asked her students to plan for their task and set a purpose or an aim for it.

• Drafting. This stage involves producing words on a computer or on paper that more or less match the initial plan for the work. Writing occurs over time. Good writers seldom try to produce an entire text in one sitting or even in one day.

This stage could be observed in Mrs. Cook’s classroom every day. In her writing class, students were required to do some writing each day, even if it was only a few words or sentences. Sometimes the thirty minute class period was not enough to apply the prewriting and planning stages in one writing session. Therefore, students would practice the drafting stage the following day by writing their first drafts. Students in Mrs. Cook’s class were writing their final drafts on computers or papers. She made sure she used the computer to follow along with the latest writing teaching techniques. When students typed their pieces on the computers, Mrs. Cook always encouraged them not to use the spell check feature and to try to use dictionaries or ask her in person to help with misspelled words. Besides asking her students to just type the writing assignment, she liked to help them use other features of the Microsoft Word program so they could become more familiar with the writing process by using different fonts, font sizes, or adding pictures. This opportunity gave the students access to learn more about technology, and it helped to produce their writing pieces in a neat and efficient way.

• Pausing. This stage involves moments when writing does not occur. Instead, writers are reflecting on what they have produced and how well it matches their plans. This process usually includes reading. Pausing occurs among good and poor writers, but

they use it in different ways. Good writers consider global factors-how well the text matches the plan, how well it is meeting audience needs, and overall organization.

Mrs. Cook used the pausing stage in her writing period. When her students finished writing, she would ask them to read what they had written. She gave them two to three minutes to do so. Sometimes she would ask them to read their papers aloud to the class and ask everybody to focus on the ideas and thoughts of the writers.

• Reading. This stage involves moments during pausing when writers read what they have written and compare it to their plans. Reading and writing are interrelated activities. Effective readers are effective writers and vise versa. The reading that takes place during writing is crucial to the reflection process during pausing.

Mrs. Cook usually asked her students to revisit their first draft and read it. The pausing and reading stages were usually completed at the same time; there was no

separation between the two stages. During the pause the students would read their writing and check if they had covered all the ideas and thoughts that came up with in their

planning stage.

• Revising. This stage involves literally re-seeing the text with the goal of making large-scale changes so that text and plan match. Revising occurs after the first draft is finished. It involves making changes that enhance the match between plan and text. Factors to consider usually are the same as those considered during planning: rhetorical stance, rhetorical purpose, and so on. Serious revising almost always includes acquiring suggestions from friends or colleagues on how to improve the writing.

In Mrs. Cook’s writing period, two phases of revision were usually employed: peer conference and teacher conference. These conferences would last five and sometimes ten

minutes depending on students’ length of written texts and accuracy level. In a peer

conference, two students would exchange their papers, read them, and write comments and suggestions. Mrs. Cook participated in this phase by offering some questions for the students to ask themselves during writing. These questions were not written in a check list or a paper, she simply offered them orally. The questions included 1) Is the writing

interesting? 2) Are there enough details? and 3) Are there any unfamiliar terms or words? In peer conferences, students had opportunities to engage in a variety of writing roles. They became idea generators, knowledge providers, and questioners. This engagement helped them to develop their personalities as writers and built their self-confidence. Mrs. Cook also held short and informed teacher conferences with her students to talk about their writing or to help them solve a problem related to their writing. These conferences helped the students to develop their writing by generating ideas, focusing on the subject, and learning sentence correctness, including spelling and grammar.

• Editing. This stage involves focusing on sentence-level concerns, such as

punctuation, sentence length, spelling, agreement between subjects and verb, and style. Editing occurs after revising. The goal is to give the paper a professional appearance.

After students finished their peer/teacher conferences, editing was the following step in Mrs. Cook’s writing class. Students would proofread for the mechanics of writing, such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. In this stage, Mrs. Cook always asked her students to use a pencil--not a pen--to go over and correct the paper. She herself never used a red pen to correct her students’ papers. She also provided them with directions such as

unmatched verb and noun. These directions were also provided orally. There was no

editing checklist.

• Publishing. This stage involves sharing the finished text with its intended audience. Publishing is not limited to getting a text printed in a journal. It includes turning a paper in to a teacher, peers, or the school.

Publishing always occurred in Mrs. Cook’s writing class. It was executed in a variety of ways: sharing the final writing products with classmates, turning the papers in to Mrs. Cook, displaying the final product on classroom bulletin board or wall, or displaying the finished tasks in school hallways or on bulletin boards. If the published item would be displayed, whether in the classroom or in a school hallway, students were encouraged to recopy their finished work to a clean piece of paper and to decorate it with colors and pictures. As an example, Mrs. Cook published the “Snow Flakes” postersher students had created in the technical writing period on a classroom bulletin board. Her students were proud of their work.

Strategies and Techniques

Teaching writing is not an easy task. Creating writers and developing their writing skills required well-designed writing instructions and employment of supportive writing strategies and techniques. ESL teachers should be knowledgeable about how writing can be taught in class, not only as a required activity, but also as a lifetime process. Writing instruction must include generous opportunities for students to write, and students should also be taught to write for different purposes and audiences. In this section, I discuss and

describe the strategies and techniques this ESL teacher employed when teaching writing to two fifth grade Saudi Arabian ESL students.

Throughout my observation in Mrs. Cook’s classroom, I observed a variety of strategies she used when teaching writing to her ESL students. I address each strategy and provide examples below.

• Providing collaborative and cooperative activities. According to Gerlach (1994), collaborative learning is based on the idea that learning is a naturally social act in which the participants talk among themselves; it is through the talk that learning occurs. Collaborative and cooperative activities have been used in Mrs. Cook’s classroom when students worked with each other through peer conferences. They read each other’s papers, wrote their suggestions and comments, and received each other’s feedback. In these conferences they learned and retained more than when they worked independently.

• Providing students with examples to explain unfamiliar terms and words. In Mrs. Cook’s classroom, students encountered new words and unfamiliar terms when they read, during discussions with their teacher, and when they talked to each other. They also did