Changing English

Studies in Culture and Education

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Teaching the Writing Process

John Keen

To cite this article: John Keen (2017) Teaching the Writing Process, Changing English, 24:4,
372-385, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2017.1359493

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Changing English, 2017
VOL. 24, NO. 4, 372–385
https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2017.1359493

Teaching the Writing Process

John Keen
Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article outlines some cognitive process models of writing Writing; writing process;
composition. Possible reasons why students’ writing capabilities do learning; National Writing
not match their abilities in some other school subjects are explored. Project; product-based
Research findings on the efficacy of process approaches to teaching approaches; revision;
procedural learning; Process
writing are presented and potential shortcomings are discussed. Writing Project
Product-based and process approaches to teaching writing are
compared, with discussion and analysis of examples of writing that
resulted from the two different approaches. The article draws out
principles for teaching and learning, concluding that an approach
to teaching writing that focuses on students’ learning rather than on
text outcomes may help to improve students’ attainment in writing
composition.

Some process models of writing composition

David Holbrook (1964) in English for the Rejected in the UK and Herbert Kohl (1967) in
36 Children in the USA helped to legitimise the analysis and exploration of written com-
positions by students in schools as a productive area of academic research. Their studies
may also have laid the foundation in some respects for Emig’s (1971) case studies of the
composing processes of eight Grade 12 (aged 17/18 years) students in US schools using
think-aloud protocols. These included an in-depth exploration of the ‘elements, moments,
and stages within the composing process’ (33) of Lynn, a very able writer, enabling Emig
to show that the way young writers create texts is ‘laminated and recursive’ (33), and in
particular that for Lynn
…the composing process does not occur as a left-to-right, solid, uninterrupted activity with an
even pace. Rather, there are recursive, as well as anticipatory, features; and there are interstices,
pauses involving hesitation phenomena of various lengths and sorts that give Lynn’s composing
aloud a certain – perhaps a characteristic – tempo. (57)
Flower and Hayes (1981) also used think-aloud protocols to access information about
writers’ composing processes but more systematically and on a larger scale than Emig.
From these data they also derived a general account of what may happen when somebody
writes something that codified challenges to the assumption that writing composition is
essentially linear.

CONTACT John Keen john.keen@manchester.ac.uk

© 2017 The editors of Changing English
 CHANGING ENGLISH  373

In the 1981 Flower and Hayes model, writing consists of the task environment, which
includes the task itself, the knowledge and experience held in the writer’s long-term memory,
the composing processor, which consists of the processes that writers have to go through
to produce a text, including planning, transcribing or writing down and revising, together
with a monitor that coordinates these components – ‘the mechanism that determines for
the writer when to switch from one process to another’ (Clark and Ivanic 1997, 92). The
task environment and the writer’s long-term memory provide resources which are drawn
on by the composing processor where ideas in the planning component are interpreted
then turned into language on the page. This is reviewed and, if necessary, revised based on
the writer’s reaction to what she or he has written so far.
Various theorists have amended or developed Flower and Hayes’s model while main-
taining the principle that writing is non-linear. Grabe and Kaplan (1996), for example,
added ‘contextual factors which strongly shape the nature of writing’ (229) to the writer’s
composing processor and the writer’s knowledge and experience of the topic.
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) posited that non-expert and expert writers employ
qualitatively distinct writing strategies and on that basis constructed idealised descriptions
for each of the corresponding composing processes. Non-expert writers tend to side-step
complex compositional problems, sometimes by writing down ideas about the topic under
discussion in the order they occur in the writer’s mind or by ‘retrieving content from mem-
ory on the basis of topical and genre cues’ (344). A 12-year-old student quoted by Bereiter
and Scardamalia sums up the topic-association aspect of this approach:
I have a whole bunch of ideas and write down until my supply of ideas is exhausted. Then I
might try to think of more ideas up to the point when you can’t get any more ideas that are
worth putting down on paper and then I would end it. (9)
More expert writers may address the difficult aspects of writing by reshaping text content
as it is being written through ‘a two-way interaction between continuously developing
knowledge and continuously developing text’ (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987, 12). Such
knowledge can include feedback, particularly from peers. As Richards (2010) observes in
her account of a classroom-based project to enable Key Stage 3 (aged 11–14 years) students
to engage in multiple drafting of their writing, revision can ‘be conceptualised as a process
of enquiry, shared between young writers and their peers’ (80).
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) emphasise that the knowledge-telling strategy is used
across the range of ages and abilities, that it frequently results in perfectly coherent and
informative texts, and that the more complex knowledge-transforming approach is not lim-
ited to people with a talent for or commitment to writing (11). The term knowledge as used by
Bereiter and Scardamalia, in line with the discourse community of psychologists generally,
is not limited to declarative or factual knowledge but includes any outcome of any cognitive
process including understanding and procedural skills. In terms of writing composition
it equates roughly to what is held in the mind of a writer of a text under construction,
including understanding of textual features such as genre conventions and the ability to
spell and punctuate, and draws on mainly intuitive knowledge of the lexical, grammatical,
semantic and pragmatic systems of the language, as well as knowledge of facts and events.
Speakers have very detailed and complex procedural or implicit knowledge of their native
language of a kind that could not be learnt through explicit teaching. Speakers of English,
for example, know that it’s fine to say both ‘Ellen was more angry than Holly’ and ‘Ellen
was angrier than Holly’ but that while it’s OK to say ‘Ellen was more angry than frightened’,
374  J. KEEN

it isn’t OK to say ‘*Ellen was angrier than frightened’ (Giancarli 1999). You don’t need to
know any grammatical theory to know that the last utterance is something you wouldn’t say,
but you do if you want to start trying to understand why this utterance is ungrammatical
(and so by convention in linguistics marked with ‘*’). Whatever may be the reason that we
can’t say ‘*Ellen was angrier than frightened’, when we speak normally we aren’t explicitly
aware of the complex principles behind our linguistic choices but depend on our procedural
knowledge to say what we want to say.

Writing as discovery
One significant characteristic of writers who engage in knowledge-transforming forms of
composition is that ‘their understanding of what they are trying to say grows and changes
in the course of writing’ (Galbraith 1999, 79). Galbraith builds on this and similar insights
to propose a model of writing as a knowledge-constituting process that may help to account
for the mechanisms responsible for writing as discovery in the composing processes of some
writers, ‘revealing the hidden decision-making lying behind what seems like a spontaneous
process’ (81). He quotes from professional writers to support the view that ‘writing is dis-
covery’, including E. M. Forster: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ and
Robert Bolt: ‘Writing a play is thinking, not thinking about thinking’ (80).
Galbraith (1999) proposes a process in which linguistic outputs such as written statements
emerge from a network of concepts, any salient sub-component of these being referred to
as ‘the writer’s disposition’ (84), which are then fed back recursively into the network itself,
leading via a complex dialectic between new written statements and the writer’s existing
disposition to the generation of new ideas, a process experienced by the writer as discovery
of the ideas.
Galbraith (1999) concludes that:
The knowledge-constituting model claims … that when ideas are produced in the course of the
dispositional dialectic, they will have a greater ‘organic unity’ than ideas which are retrieved
separately from memory. … Of course, this is not to say that the dispositional dialectic will
lead to perfect text on the first draft; indeed, given the potential of the dialectic to produce
conflicting trains of thought, one might expect the initial draft to be disorganised and hard to
follow. Rather, the claim is that such text will provide better raw material for revision and for
subsequent drafts, and that, in consequence it will lead, ultimately, to more coherent text. (91)
On Galbraith’s account, much of the problem-solving associated with written composition
focuses less on planning or content-generation and more on revision and redrafting, though
the efficacy of these sub-processes also depends on the writer having produced a draft text
that has potential for links between ideas as well as links between each individual idea and
the text topic.

The current state of teaching writing in England

In 2012, 42% of Key Stage 2 (aged 7–11 years) students achieved level 5 for reading but only
20% for writing. Separate national figures for writing for Key Stage 3 (aged 11–14 years)
and Key Stage 4 (aged 14–16 years) are not available because the numbers are aggregated
into a generic ‘English’ result in much the same way that international studies such as the
Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) and the Progress in International
 CHANGING ENGLISH  375

Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) use indicators from reading as generic measures for
literacy and do not include writing separately in their assessments. However, a 2012 research
report for the UK Department for Education (DfE 2012) states that writing ‘is the subject
where pupils perform less well compared to reading, mathematics and science’ (7). In par-
ticular, at Key Stage 1 (aged 5–7 years) ‘pupils performed less well in writing in comparison
to the other core subjects’ (8), and at Key Stage 2 (aged 7–11 years) ‘pupils perform less well
in writing compared to other subjects’ (9). The report adds: ‘There is no evidence on why
pupils perform less well in writing in comparison to reading and the other core subjects’ (26).
Detailed findings gathered by Elliott et al. (2016) indicate that students taking IGCSE
(International General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams in 2014 at age 16 who had
been in English primary schools (aged 5–11 years) during the period when the teaching of
writing was dominated by the National Literacy Strategy (NLS), approximately 2003–2011,
were more accurate punctuators than those who took IGCSE in 2004 if they were higher-at-
tainers, were no better or worse at spelling whatever their level of writing attainment but
showed a decrease in the qualities of writing that related to craftedness, pace and narrative
perspective in their writing. In other words, the NLS produced 16-year-olds whose writing
was a little more accurate in terms of punctuation but less effective overall than students
whose school experience mainly predated the NLS.
In the absence of evidence about the reasons for these patterns of reduced writing attain-
ment compared to other subjects and over time, we can only speculate on the basis of our
experience about why pupils perform less well on writing than might be expected.
For example, it might be that current methods, described by a DfE (2011) review of the
NLS as ‘a widely-accepted model for the teaching of writing’ (16), in which students analyse
then emulate model texts supplied by the teacher, have taken a lot of the struggle out of
writing. The short-term effects of providing models, writing frames, lists of features to be
covered and ready-made plans may be better written products than students could produce
independently at that point in their development, but by taking significant elements of
challenge out of writing tasks this level of scaffolding may prevent students from engaging
sufficiently with the difficult rhetorical challenges that they need for their learning to be
fully internalised over the longer term.
One of the main differences between expert and novice writers identified by Flower
and Hayes (1981) is that experts have accumulated a wider range of experiences in find-
ing solutions to rhetorical and compositional problems and in implementing these when
they produce texts, so that their writing is characterised by a continual dialectic between
‘elaborate networks of goals which are so well learned as to be automatic’ (379) and explicit
instructions to themselves which give them ‘greater conscious control over their own pro-
cesses than … poorer writers’ (377). Novice writers will only accumulate the compositional
experience and expertise they need to become experts themselves by grappling with and
finding resolutions to textual problems. The final test of the different approaches to teaching
writing is not whether a student produces a coherent and engaging text but what the student
has learned procedurally about how to compose such a text.
Another contributory factor might be that the genre-based model of writing, introduced
with the National Curriculum in the 1980s and continued in most departmental schemes
of work in UK school English departments up to the present, has taken away some of the
opportunities for progression that good English teachers may have adopted intuitively. For
example, an English teacher who was responsive to students’ capabilities and limitations
376  J. KEEN

might do lots of work on writing stories and personal accounts with Year 7s and Year 8s
(aged 11–13 years) to build fluency and clarity of expression and enjoyment of writing,
add writing projects on hobbies and interests with Year 9s (aged 13/14 years) to sustain
the personal elements but introduce more structure and organisation, maintain narrative
and exposition but also set more reflective writing about social issues with Year 10s (aged
14/15 years) as a way of encouraging development of ideas then build on all these skills
by introducing more analytical writing at Year 11 (aged 15/16 years), with possibilities for
building on these foundations for Year 12s and 13s (aged 16–18 years).
In this way, teachers may have enabled students to engage with less functional kinds of
writing like personal narrative as a way of developing basic compositional skills and confi-
dence in written expression which could then also be deployed for composing transactional
texts. But as recent UK National Curriculums and initiatives have framed writing on the
basis of genres and purposes, teachers and curriculum planners have felt obliged to cover all
text types at each phase, whether students have the prerequisite skills and interests or not.

Teaching using writing processes – evidence and potential shortcomings

Product approaches to teaching writing often start with reading of a model text followed by
students identifying features of the genre which they then instantiate in their own writing.
Such methods may be useful for teaching aspects of textual form, especially for texts with
well-defined and easily explicable generic features, but they may also lead to a concern with
textual products at the expense of learning processes. Students do need to be familiarised
with genres they have not encountered before, but to learn to write effectively they also
need the freedom to solve compositional problems in their own ways.
In process approaches to teaching writing, composition consists of overlapping processes
and sub-processes used recursively, including prewriting, drafting, revising and celebrating.
The key principle is that as far as possible writing starts with, follows and may contribute
to the development of students’ own experiences and ideas.
The prewriting – drafting – revising – celebrating process is not meant as a straitjacket and
nothing could be further from the spirit of the approach than a forced march through these
sub-processes as if they were invariable stages. Prewriting and exploring are opportunities
for a student to generate and weigh up different possibilities while they are writing as well
as before they start writing. Drafting can take some of the weight of expectation off students
by enabling them to get something written down that can then be crafted into a text that
is worth reading. Revising is an important part of that crafting, and while it is challenging
for many students, who may prefer simply to make surface alterations, it can be the point
in the process where writers most fully engage with the composition of their text and
where they make some of the most interesting discoveries (Keen 2010). And celebration,
perhaps the most neglected aspect of the writing process, is to students what publication is
to professional writers, a chance to share experiences and values that find resonance with a
listening or reading audience, providing motivation for the next compositional challenge.
There is evidence, particularly from research and surveys in the USA where process
approaches to teaching writing in schools are more common than in the UK, that greater
emphasis on processes in writing composition is associated with more effective teaching
and with greater proficiency in students’ writing.
 CHANGING ENGLISH  377

The process approach was disseminated across regions of the USA by the National
Writing Project (NWP) during the 1970s and 1980s, having begun as a local initiative, the
Bay Area Writing Project, which involved a number of schools around the University of
California Berkeley. The reforms emphasised prewriting, planning, writing several drafts,
revising, peer evaluation, and defining audience and purpose. The NWP continues and
thrives to the present day, with key components, such as the five-week summer institutes
often used to train teachers in process writing approaches, having a demonstrably positive
effect overall on the confidence of teachers to support students’ writing development:
[A] major outcome of the Summer Institute is increased confidence for teachers, the self-as-
surance to trust and even argue for and defend their own professional judgements. …
[T]his change in confidence was not merely a superficial ‘ego boost’ for teachers but was instead
tied to a process of serious enquiry into and adjustment of ways of thinking about teaching,
learning, writing and life. (Whitney 2008, 178)
Several medium- and large-scale studies provide support for the efficacy of process
approaches for US school and college students’ writing capabilities. Pritchard (1987) inves-
tigated whether or not students with teachers trained in the process writing model used by
the NWP achieved more highly on average than students whose teachers used other writing
programmes. In her detailed account of teaching and assessing writing in the Ferguson-
Florissant School District in St. Louis County, Missouri, she records the following findings:
• students of teachers who had been trained in process approaches achieved the highest
average scores;
• students with teachers who had worked with the first group of trained teachers but had
not themselves been trained (the ‘spin-off group’) received the next highest average
scores;
• students in the group whose teachers had received no training and had not worked
with trained teachers (the control group) received the lowest average scores.
Pritchard’s (1987) comments on the main outcomes were as follows:
Data analysis showed that, overall, the experimental group demonstrated the most positive
achievement gains, followed by the spin-off group and then the control group. Furthermore,
the data demonstrated that there was a ripple effect of trained teachers transferring their
philosophy and skills. (55)
Pritchard also described a number of other studies that included findings on the effects
on students’ writing of training teachers in the process model. In each example students
of trained teachers outperformed students whose teachers had not been trained in using
process approaches.
The effects of the dissemination of process approaches were also evaluated by a survey
of American schoolchildren conducted in 1992 by the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NEAP) programme which was based on about 30,000 students’ responses to a
variety of writing tasks (Applebee et al. 1994). One key finding of the NEAP report was that
greater emphasis on process-oriented activities such as planning, drafting and revising was
associated with higher levels of writing ability.
A summary of 16 separate studies, published in 2010, commissioned by the NWP, reported
that in these studies conducted in seven US states, 103 of 112 comparisons showed positive
results in writing achievement favouring students in classrooms of teachers who were NWP
participants and that the improvement of students taught by teachers who participated in
378  J. KEEN

NWP programmes exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Caution
is needed as the NWP had an interest in the results of the study, but there were safeguards,
including external review of the research process and external review before publication.
However, good principles may get put into practice badly, and implementation of the pro-
cess approach is not without potential shortcomings. Applebee and Langer (2006) express
concerns about the difficulty of defining the concept and the resulting range of interpreta-
tions applied to it in US schools and colleges:
…while process-oriented writing instruction has dominated teachers’ reports at least since
1992, what teachers mean by this and how it is implemented in their classrooms remains
unclear. The consistent emphasis that emerges in teachers’ reports may mask considerable
variation in actual patterns of instruction. (28)
Some of these patterns of instruction are clearly detrimental to rather than supportive of
students’ writing development. McCarthey (1993) gives a detailed case study of a teacher
of a Fourth Grade (aged 9/10 years) class, Ms Meyer, who had undertaken training in
process writing and implemented many of its procedures, but who limited her students’
writing development by insisting that they only write personal narrative focused on family
relations, that they restrict themselves to a narrow range of forms, notably letters to family
members, and that their writing conforms to a very specific style in which imagery and
figurative language play a significant part. McCarthey concludes:
Anxious to implement the new developments in the Project related to qualities of good writ-
ing and writing notebooks from personal experience, Ms. Meyer focused on those aspects at
the expense of some underlying principles of the Project. In addition, the force of her own
authority may have created students’ compliance with her ideal rather than active participation
through their own choice. In a sense, we can view Meyer’s enactment of the Writing Process
as an innovation gone awry. (12)
Delpit’s (1988) critique of approaches to teaching writing contains some salutary reminders
that without constant vigilance teachers using process approaches can slide into an abdi-
cation of their responsibility to help students to learn. The issue can become particularly
acute when students come from cultures where direct instruction is the norm:
A doctoral student of my acquaintance was assigned to a writing class to hone his writing skills.
The student was placed in the section led by a White professor who utilized a process approach,
consisting primarily of having the student write essays and then assemble into groups to edit
each other’s papers. That procedure infuriated this particular student. He had many angry
encounters with the teacher about what she was doing. In his words:
I didn’t feel she was teaching us anything. She wanted us to correct each other’s papers and we
were there to learn from her. She didn’t teach us anything, absolutely nothing. (287)

Comparison between product-based and process approaches to teaching

writing
Most English teachers in UK primary and secondary schools currently use a product-based
approach supported by genre-based strategies and occasionally one or two elements of
process approaches, usually prewriting activities of some kind, to teach writing. Drafting
and revision hardly figure beyond exhortations to proofread for spelling, punctuation and
expression.
 CHANGING ENGLISH  379

Some key differences, including differences in likely long-term effects on students’ writ-
ing capabilities, between product-based approaches and process-centred approaches can
be seen through a comparison between two ways of teaching non-fiction writing. One is
recommended by Lewis and Wray (1995). The other was carried out in 2013 by a colleague
who contributed a writing scheme to the Process Writing Project, an initiative that aimed
to give students themselves ownership of the topics and choice of audience and purposes
for their writing.
In Lewis and Wray’s (1995) example writing scheme, several procedures are combined
to enable students to produce a piece of non-fiction writing of the required kind: ‘recount,
report, procedure, explanation, persuasive argument, discussion’ (63). This begins with the
teacher modelling the task. The student is then promoted from spectator to novice as she
or he writes with the teacher supported by writing frames to complete the task. The case
for the method is justified by comparing examples of pieces of students’ writing, some of
which are more successful than others, and by invoking a version of Vygotsky’s ideas about
children’s learning, notably that ‘learners first experience a particular cognitive activity in
collaboration with expert practitioners’ (55). Underlying this method is a taxonomy of text
types, or genres, each accompanied by an analysis of its defining language features, including
structural as well as small-scale linguistic characteristics, which teachers are expected to
enforce and students to implement in their own writing.
The example that follows of a process-based approach to teaching non-fiction writing
to Year 10 (aged 14/15 years) students is taken from the Process Writing Project. Having
explained the principles of process writing to the students, the teacher enabled them to
draft a non-fiction article or blog, which they then peer assessed and revised, reading out
completed versions at the end to celebrate their texts. Students were familiarised with the
conventions of blogs by discussing examples, some chosen by themselves, some by the
teacher. This was followed by the task specification: Write a blog for your local newspaper’s
website about a cause that you are passionate about.
Students planned using bullet points and spider diagrams, then wrote a first draft, which
was peer assessed and revised. This was followed by a second wave of peer assessment with
third drafts being typed up and displayed. The teacher commented that: ‘Overall, students
showed a clear improvement during the drafting and revision phase, particularly after the
first, sometimes perfunctory, draft.’
One difference between process- and product-based approaches lies in how texts emerge
from them. For Lewis and Wray, the student writer’s hand, and mind, is guided, directly
or indirectly, by an expert adult and by a writing frame or similar scaffolding device. Some
of the content may be the child’s but much of the text structure and many of the linguistic
features are imposed, subtly or not, from outside. In the process approach, the finished text
emerges more organically from interaction with the teacher and among students themselves,
so that the growth of the writer’s developing text is more complex and less predictable than
that promoted by Lewis and Wray’s model.
Differences between product-based and process approaches can also be seen in the way
they each characterise outcomes that are less than adequate or which have evident shortcom-
ings. Lewis and Wray (1995) cite two examples of Year 2 (aged 6/7 years) students’ responses
to a task inviting them to write instructions for sowing and growing cress seeds: ‘Kim wrote
a straightforward recount … Robert … produced a procedural text’ (51). Kim’s account is:
380  J. KEEN

We had some seeds and Mrs Lewis gave us some seeds in our hands then we sprinkled the
seeds on the plate then Mrs Lewis gave us a piece of paper to cover the seeds.

We are going to leave them to grow. Every day we will check the seeds to see if they have grown.
Robert’s account is as follows:
How to sow the seeds

Put the seeds on a plate with a wet tissue and sprinkle them on the plate then put a piece of
paper over them.
Clearly Robert has got the idea of writing direct instructions using the imperative whereas
on this occasion Kim has not. Lewis and Wray’s (1995) suggested explanation for Robert’s
ability to use this form is that he may have picked up its features, presumably including use
of the imperative, from his reading of similar forms such as ‘the sets of rules that accom-
pany games, the simple recipes they try out, the school fire drill notices’ (52), and so on.
The authors observe that some other children, presumably including Kim, continue to use
personal narrative instead of the appropriate genre form, but with no explanation for why
this might be so. We might speculate that Kim, at the age of 6 or 7, may still be at the pre-
operational stage of cognitive development and may be unable yet to decentre (Piaget and
Inhelder 1956); or the quality of her non-school interactions with peers and family may be
such that she is limited to language codes that are more or less context-bound (Bernstein
1971), in which case remediation may involve enriching relevant aspects of her language
experience. The solution put forward by Lewis and Wray (1995) is to use writing frames
‘to help children practise the generic structures’ (53).
However, the process approach suggests an alternative way of conceptualising both pieces,
Robert’s as well as Kim’s; that is as drafts, in which shortcomings, inconsistencies and infe-
licities are expected. Robert’s text has got the impersonality appropriate for an unknown
audience, including the use of imperatives, put … sprinkle … put, with connectives and …
then to indicate the order. But the with of with a wet tissue is too vague; the seeds should
be sprinkled onto the wet tissue not directly onto the plate and the account omits any
instructions for monitoring the seeds’ growth. Kim has got more of the content but less of
the form. In her account the actions are in an appropriate order signalled by then. Her use
of cover in cover the seeds hints at an explanation for this procedure. She includes reference
to monitoring the seeds’ growth. However, she omits an important procedure, putting a
wet tissue on the plate, and she uses narrative past tense rather than the imperative that
is required for proper instructions. Her text is also embedded in the context of her own
experience compared to Robert’s more universal account.
Kim may have further to go than Robert in mastering this particular impersonal form,
but given the will and the opportunity they could both learn from each other. The key is
to treat each version not just as a successful or a failed attempt but as a draft that provides
opportunities for review and revision, if necessary scaffolded by the teacher but ideally
carried out as independently as possible by the students in order to maximise their learning.
In this case, for example, Robert might learn from Kim’s account that growing cress doesn’t
end once you have sown the seeds and Kim might start to find ways of revising her draft to
bring it nearer to Robert’s use of imperatives, for example by detaching her text from the
particulars of what Mrs Lewis did as well as making relevant grammatical transformations
such as from then we sprinkled the seeds to then sprinkle the seeds. More comprehensive
 CHANGING ENGLISH  381

prewriting activities with closer attention to content as well as form, such as discussing
some of the conditions for germination, might have enabled both students to give clearer
instructions for sowing the seeds in their initial drafts.
While discussion of how Robert and Kim might have revised their accounts are nec-
essarily speculative, the following example of a revision of a piece of writing from a Year
10 non-fiction scheme shows how limited is the explicit control that can be exercised by
teachers over the more creative aspects of the writing process. A first draft of the final par-
agraph of a blog about racism in football by a student who will be referred to as Edward
would likely be considered inadequate on product-based criteria.
D1 Racism in Football First Draft (D1)
As you can see it is a worldwide problem that will grow day by day if not acted on. 1 in 2 play-
ers feel that they get abused by fans. I think the solutions for this will be stricter laws, more
publicity and advertisements to end this plague once and for all.
But after peer response the student produced the following version:
D2 Racism in Football Second Draft (D2)
The question needs to be taken seriously, both by FIFA and UEFA, along with the national FAs.
Whether it is done by harsh punishment, as suggested by Rio Ferdinand, along with others, or
heavily improved education for those involved in the game needs to be worked out. For me,
it will take a combination of both. The strongest punishments for players is being suspended
for football matches, not fines for these professional footballers. For so many football fans,
you can only have your fingers crossed that racism is kicked out of football and done quickly!
Experience of similar group interactions in classrooms suggests that peer feedback tends
to be in the form of general goals like You need to make it more convincing or You need
to set your arguments out more clearly rather than as suggestions for the use of specific
language features of the kind often associated with the more scaffolded genre-based, NLS-
type approaches commonly employed in UK classrooms. Once such general goals have
been internalised by the writer, they often get realised through shifts in perspective and
amendments to linguistic characteristics that could not have been predicted even by the
writer him- or herself, being recruited as they are from an extensive repertoire of linguistic
procedures that are stored non-consciously and which may take the writer considerable
cognitive effort to access (Keen 2010). Modelling and the use of writing frames, both of
which may require the emulation of some quite specific structures, styles and devices,
largely relieve the writer of the need to find their own solutions to the rhetorical challenges
set by their peer response partners. Models and writing frames may help young writers to
achieve creditable end results but at the cost of taking the struggle, and therefore much of
the learning, out of written composition.
Edward’s revision is characteristic of what happens when a writer engages actively with
the process of changing or developing a draft text, with revisions of global features as well
as linguistic details. In the sense that the writer is not doing any of these things deliber-
ately and yet something creative happens that can be identified through careful analysis of
lexical, grammatical and textual patterns, such revisions can stand as a proxy for written
composition generally.
The transition from Edward’s quite cursory first draft to his more sophisticated revised
version is realised in a number of ways that can be categorised as lexical, grammatical and
textual.
382  J. KEEN

The simplest lexical revisions involve shifts in grammatical class, which in this case create
a tendency towards greater informality in the revised phrases. So D1 I think becomes D2
for me, D1 solutions becomes D2 worked out and D1 to end becomes D2 kicked out.
In another set of lexical revisions the broad semantic relations between original and
revised terms is maintained while meanings and ramifications are altered, perhaps reflecting
some rethinking by the writer as part of the process of revision. So D1 problem becomes D2
question; a problem is easily identified and stated, but a question needs to be formulated and
refined. D1 stricter laws becomes D2 harsh punishment as punishments can deter people
in ways that laws, however strict, cannot. D2 heavily improved education may have had its
origins in D1 more publicity and advertisements as they share such concepts as dissemi-
nation of ideas and attitudes and promotion of desirable practices. The implication of an
ideal that may be unattainable in practice suggested by D1 once and for all is replaced by
a perhaps more realistically attainable objective but still with a connotation of urgency in
D2 and done quickly.
A further set of lexical revisions increases the specificity of reference of certain words
and phrases. So D1 worldwide becomes D2 FIFA and UEFA, along with the national FAs,
replacing a single very general term with three names of football associations organised
into a hierarchy covering the world, Europe and individual nations, respectively. The ref-
erence to D1 players is turned into the name of one individual player, D2 Rio Ferdinand,
as representative of his interest group, giving readers an actual person they can identify, so
helping to make the issues more concrete and perhaps more real. At a cognitive level these
alterations may have provided some priming for the change from the indirect D1 this plague,
with its use of metaphor and anaphoric reference to ‘Racism in Football’ in the heading,
to D2 racism which spells out the main theme of the text by naming it directly. This shift
towards lexical specificity contributes to a greater sense of precision and may help to make
the writer’s argument more convincing.
Revisions in lexis relate to grammatical changes in some respects. Once the general term
D1 this plague has been sharpened into D2 racism, the term is promoted from object of
a non-finite to-clause – to end this plague – to subject of a subordinate that-clause – that
racism is kicked out of football – for rhetorical effect.
In D1 the main focus is on the phrase a worldwide problem, complement of it is and
subject of the active that-clause that will grow day by day. In D2, the passive sentence The
question needs to be taken seriously … by FIFA and UEFA, along with the national FAs
parallels D1 in having The question as a grammatical subject but takes advantage of the
fact that the passive places the by-phrase in sentence-final position, throwing emphasis on
the organisations responsible for answering the question, FIFA … UEFA … national FAs.
The revised version of this paragraph alters the relationship between reader and text
in a number of ways. One effect of the increase in informality of some words and phrases
combined with elaborated grammatical structures, such as the rhetorically patterned use of
repeated passives with D2 The question needs to be taken seriously and D2 Whether … needs
to be worked out, is that the revised text is more intimate with and at the same time more
distanced from the reader, with elements of formality energised by the effects of speech and
the use of implied meaning – D2 not fines for these professional footballers.
The revised text refers explicitly to its readers through direct address, D2 you … your,
reinforced by the colloquial idiom D2 fingers crossed. In both texts there is an opposition
between fans and others involved in football, but whereas in D1 the reader is invited to
 CHANGING ENGLISH  383

empathise with the players – D1 players feel that they get abused by fans – in D2 the polarity
is reversed, with fans being set against rather than being included in those involved in the
game. This allocation of responsibility for the problem away from the fans themselves pre-
pares the ground for a radical shift in the way D1 fans/D2 football fans are conceptualised
– as racists who abuse players in D1 but as clearly aligned with the constructed reader’s and
the revised text’s anti-racist values in D2.
The writer was unlikely to have been consciously aware of what was happening at this
level of detail during the act of composition. However, careful analysis suggests that general
goals realised by the lexical, grammatical and textual strategies that were recruited proce-
durally resulted in complex textual realignments which could not have been predicted, and
therefore could not have been achieved by explicit instruction.
But from this largely non-conscious revision process, themes emerge with possibilities for
further development. Between two structural elements, a statement of the issue: Racism in
football, and a closing statement: fingers crossed that racism is kicked out of football…, three
substantive observations are made, on alternative solutions: punishment … or … heavily
improved education for those involved in the game, on the importance of both solutions being
represented: it will take a combination of both, and on possible alternative punishments: being
suspended … not fines. These raise a number of issues that a further draft might address,
such as in what ways education might be improved, which groups are ‘involved in the game’,
and how education and punishment might be combined in practice.
Ideally, the student writing the blog would pick up on these issues himself and revise
his text to address them, but peer review or assessment by the student’s teacher might also
have a part to play. However it happened, the student would learn how to develop his text
by actually developing it rather than by following artificial guidelines.
Scaffolding in the form of a writing frame or a list of prompts might have enabled Edward
to write a more cogent final paragraph for his blog, but this would in all likelihood have
been at the expense of his learning; learning to change words and phrases and to elaborate
a sentence in order to alter the text’s balance of levels of formality, to revise meanings and
implications, to sharpen references, to alter the relationship between text and reader as
preparation for making explicit the main term of the argument and to use a passive structure
to suggest where responsibility lies.
In terms of future writing challenges for Edward, including real-world tasks that he will
have to respond to and manage, if a policy of enabling writers to follow the development of
their own ideas is sustained so that these implicitly acquired skills and strategies accumulate
and are continually recruited and used in new combinations and novel ways, the approach
that enables students to learn for themselves is certain to be more productive in the long
run than one where they follow prior guidelines set, directly or indirectly, by somebody else.

Implications for teaching and learning

Approaches that place more value on the finished products of composition rather than on
the opportunities they create for students’ learning currently dominate classroom teaching
in the UK, often supplemented by genre-based methods that may also reduce the scope for
learners to recognise and resolve compositional challenges.
As with any aspect of language, most of the skills implicated in writing composition
are too subtle, complex and unpredictable to be teachable or learnable through explicit
384  J. KEEN

instruction on any realistic timescale. It is therefore likely that students who learn to write
effectively will do so despite rather than because of teaching approaches associated with
product- and genre-based approaches.
However, models of how writing might happen from the point of view of a writer’s cogni-
tive processes can indicate some useful directions for the development of a more productive
writing curriculum for schools and colleges. These suggest that effective writing schemes
should take into account the following principles or criteria, among others.
Writing schemes should give students opportunities:
• to explore and discover ideas and experiences as well as recording and transcribing
them;
• to compose their texts in ways that reflect the complexity of the writing process;
• to use and develop their procedural knowledge of language in drafting and revising
their texts.

Conclusion
Teaching approaches that emphasise longer-term learning are more likely to lead to improve-
ments in students’ writing capabilities than those that focus on immediate outcomes. And
engagement with compositional challenges within a framework that supports young writers
without doing their thinking for them is the most effective way for them to secure mastery
of the writing process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
John Keen is a senior lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester and Project Director for the
Process Writing Project. He taught for a number of years in schools and colleges of further education.
He has published extensively on language study in education, including Teaching English: A Linguistic
Approach; Language for Talking, Living and Learning and Language and the English Curriculum.

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