Abstract:

The purposes of this study were to investigate the feasibility of teaching writing program based on balancing process and product approach. The participants consisted of six teachers from an elementary school in Hsinchu City. The researcher and teachers discussed systematically to establish the teaching steps of writing based on balancing process and product approach. And, this study employed collaborative action research. Through exploratory teaching of teachers, the feasibility of this teaching program would be examined by class observation, interviewing teachers, students' articles, students' questionnaire survey, and other documents. The study has been conducted for one and half year, three cycles of action research, from empowerment of teaching knowledge, experimental teaching, to motivate more teachers to participate in the trial. Based on class observation, teachers would guide students to consider their writing goal, using graphic strategy, generating and organizing ideas of writing. In revising stage, students participated in revising groups where they provided feedback to classmates how to improve their drafts. Teachers also taught and modeled the types of revisions in miniature course, and they asked students to examine and classify the revisions they did. In addition, teachers could include substantive revision a requirement on their assessment rubrics. In editing stage, students proofread their compositions to locate and mark possible errors. Teachers developed editing checklists and used editing centers to help students focused on particular types of errors as they proofread their compositions. In publishing stage, high-ability students and low-ability students paired up to share their articles. Through interviewing with teachers, teachers said: Balancing Process and Product in students' writing performance is very helpful, but time-consuming is the biggest problem. Overall, two of the six teachers were formally conducting a teaching experiment in the second and third cycle of action research. Three teachers also tried to think about thinking maps for reading and writing. But one of teachers still insisted on using extreme one-way lecture about the teaching methods. Student writing survey results showed that: more than 70% of the students believed that the teaching program helped them to plan before prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing stage. And 72.73% of the students expressed their willingness to continue participating in the teaching program. The reason is this teaching program did help to enhance writing performance, and learned a lot of writing skills and strategies. The students’ articles also showed that this teaching program could help students to enhance the modifying amount, the length, and the quality of articles.

Keywords:

balancing process and product approach, writing, writing process, writing strategy