Abstract:

What every writing teacher should know is that students frequently need certain amount of awareness raising activities in which they can fill in the gaps about the subject they previously learned and review the important points underlined. Also, the teaching of writing skills in a communicative and systematic way is inevitable considering the fact that students should be aware of the subject matters they learn and operate on while studying a foreign language. In this study, two classroom applications in which a consciousness raising task was implemented are presented with teacher and student reflections. For the application of the task, first, the students were asked to form groups of 5, and each group was named as Group A, B, C, and D. Then, each student in the groups was given a number and they were assigned to be responsible for the paragraphs that their numbers were equal with. The work for the students to complete was to identify the type of the essay using the paragraphs they had with them by discussing in their groups. After certain amount of time, by making sure that everybody was ready, the students were asked to form new groups considering their numbers given. At that time the students’ task was to form the whole essay, and to find the missing parts in the essays. The students were all sure that conclusion paragraphs were missing. So, they were asked to write conclusion paragraphs for their essays in their groups considering the components of a good conclusion paragraph. Only one day after the first application, the task was implemented in a classroom of 23 second-year Turkish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. In order to reflect on the classroom task, the course was videotaped and transcribed by the teacher. After the group design, this time, the students—again—were asked to identify the type of the student essays given in their groups. When students completed their tasks, their predictions on the types of essays were elicited since they had different ideas. Then, without giving the correct answers, the students were asked to form their new groups and see the whole essays and check their answers once more. When students saw the whole essays in their new groups, the answers related to identifying the type of the essays were elicited again, and each group was able to find them out. Then, as it was for the first application, the students were asked to find suitable titles for the essays they had. After checking the answers and comparing them with the original ones, the students were asked to evaluate the task conducted along with the principles of a ‘task evaluation sheet’. The results of the classroom applications were satisfying enough to discuss the importance of noticing and collaborative work in writing. Certain implications for teaching writing are also discussed.

Keywords:

teaching writing, collaborative writing, consciousness raising, language learning, language teaching.