Course paper on the theme: contents of teaching writing in secondary schools

Conclusion
No one is a ‘native speaker’ of writing. Teachers need to let students know that there are no ‘native-like’ standards when it comes to academic writing. In teaching writing, we need to explicitly teach the writing processes and the specific strategies to enhance students’ writing competence. It is useful for writing teachers to learn the various approaches to teaching writing. However, teachers need to understand that helping students in idea generation and in planning as well as teaching the rhetorical moves of the particular genres alone are inadequate in helping students improve their writing. Teachers also need to teach students the socio-cognitive approach to writing, which takes into consideration readers’ expectations, socio-cultural contexts, and thinking processes involved in planning, organizing, and writing/revising the essays. Teachers need to make clear to the students that writing is a recursive, complex activity. In order to move forward, we need to re-read and revise our writing. A good piece of writing has to go through multiple times of revision. This applies not only to novice writers, but to experienced writers as well. Understanding this can help clarify a misconception that many students may have – that only non-proficient writers will need significant revisions to their work.
The socio-cognitive approach to writing ensures that students will establish the macro-rhetorical goal of the essay, and all the information in the essay contributes to achieving this purpose. For the readers, they will be able to grasp the one thing or one key message that they can take away from the essay. Given that many students are quite tech-savvy these days, teachers may consider using peer assessment software to implement the peer review activity. The computer-mediated peer feedback system may motivate students by allowing them to give and view peer feedback on multiple drafts of their writing anytime and anywhere when there is Internet access. More importantly, computer-mediated feedback solves the problem of saving ‘face,’ which can be an issue if peer reviews are carried out on a face-to-face basis. With the use of the peer assessment software, students’ names could be anonymized. Thus, they are more likely to give their honest peer feedback as their names would not be disclosed to their peers. The computer-mediated feedback may motivate students socially to revise their written work, since this feedback is generally obtained from a wider readership that includes not only the teachers but also a peer group of significant size. Students, indeed authors in general, will pay more attention to their writing because of a broad readership.
Writing teachers should emphasize to students that a good piece of writing cannot be produced in one draft; it has to go through multiple times of revision. It is also very important for students to adopt self-editing strategies in all their written work. They can read aloud their writing so that they can detect the problematic parts of their writing. They have to start to plan their writing
early and finish their writing early so that they have sufficient time to revise their work.
During the self-editing process, they would need to revise both the surface level errors such as grammar and mechanics, as well as issues at the discourse level, such as how they present themselves in their writing, the tone they use, the development of ideas, the contextualization of ideas, and the
use of language, data, and evidence that their readers find persuasive. Self-editing would result in student ownership of and responsibility for learning.