Abstract:

Over the past two years, our research team has looked into the writing practices of universities and high schools in Estonia with writing-related surveys for both students and teachers. Our key finding is that despite the indisputable importance of writing in education, most students appear to struggle with it and not receive adequate support for developing their writing skills. We argue that one of the possible reasons for why writing is problematic for students is the way it is presented and conducted in the classes: writing tasks have too strict requirements and the only reader is the teacher. This distances the act of writing from its original communicative purpose, because no productive dialogue can be developed. We argue that since the fundamental motivation for writing is communication, students can not be expected to write meaningfully if there is no actual communicative context. As one possible solution to this situation, we emphasize the importance of including students into the development writing tasks and their grading, as well as implementing process writing and peer review in writing tasks at school.

Keywords:

Teaching writing, learning writing, process writing, peer review, writing as a communication.