A Didactic Proposal for Boosting Students’ Linguistic-communicative Skills through the Writing Process

Abstract

[eng] Academic composition is reportedly a difficult competence to master, taking into account that teachers tend to provide more opportunities to write without effective instruction instead of promoting guidance and practice of writing in the classroom, as Dean (2010) states. However, writing is a crucial competence to facilitate L2 acquisition and development (Williams, 2012), apart from many other benefits provided by the act of writing. In addition, scaffolding and collaborative learning in the classroom are essential factors when it comes to supporting practice as “interactive dialogues'' between teacher and students enhance students’ communicative skills (Wong et al., 1997, as cited in Dean, 2010). Accordingly, the present thesis intends to reinforce the idea of taking into deeper consideration and monitoring the writing process by both teachers and students. In order to approach this topic, this didactic proposal aims at (1) proposing a digital blog to foster cooperative work and learning as well as provide students with explicit instruction in the writing process, supported practice and assessment tools as a foundation to engage students in writing tasks and help them monitor the process, (2) to boost students’ linguistic-communicative skills by supplying them with a list of sentences and a ‘code mistake table’ to encourage students to spot mistakes, and (3) to “nurture'' a positive attitude towards composition by giving and receiving feedback among writers. Thus, guided writing instruction in a collaborative environment through the use of a classroom blog will be the prime strategy to carry out this didactic proposal. Peer feedback shall also be relevant to encourage students’ communicative skills due to social discourse as a natural concomitant of composition (Vogel, Reiss & Strohmaier, 2018). Writing issues, follow-up process and feedback will be taken into consideration when providing the tools as well as the communicative goal.