Zemelman and Daniels: The Writing Process Paradigm (5)

The benefits to students include these:

1. Teachers who understand and appreciate the basic linguistic competence that students bring with them to school, and who therefore have positive expectations for students’ achievements in writing

2. Regular and substantial practice at writing.

3. Instruction in the process of writing—learning how to work at a given writing task in appropriate phases, including prewriting, drafting, and revising.

4. The opportunity to write for real, personally significant purposes.

5. Experience in writing for a wide range of audiences, both inside and outside of school.

6. Rich and continuous reading experience, including both published writing and the work of peers and teachers.

7. Exposure to models of writing in process and writers at work, including both classmates and skilled adult writers.

8. Collaborative activities that provide ideas for writing and guidance in revising drafts in progress.

9. One-to-one writing conferences with the teacher.

10. Inquiry-oriented classroom activities that involve students with rich sets of data and social interaction, and that focus on specific modes or elements of writing.

11. Increased use of sentence-combining exercises which replaces instruction in grammatical terminology.

12. Mechanics of writing taught in the context of students’ own compositions, rather than in separate exercises and drills.

13. Moderate marking of the surface structure errors in student papers, focusing on sets or patterns of related errors.

14. Flexible and cumulative evaluation of writing that stresses revision. The teacher’s comments include a mixture of praise and criticism, with praise predominating.

15. Writing as a tool of learning in all subjects across the curriculum.