Collaborative Work in the Prewriting Stage

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of collaborative work in the prewriting stage. Several collaborative prewriting activities are presented to encourage students to optimize their peers' help in obtaining ideas to write. Those activities will ultimately help students get interesting ideas to write and develop them into dynamic writing. Keywords: collaborative work, prewriting, dynamic writing, brainstorming, chained information, clustering, trategic questioning, information gathering, buddy journals Helping students get and develop ideas is an integral aspect of teaching writing. Many researchers have examined both teacher's written and oral responses (such as in one-to-one teacher-student writing conferences) to student writing and also students' responses toward their peers' writing. Thus, students' working together (collaborative work) in giving feedback either in the development of ideas and editing process is very common. In this paper, however, I would like to explore how students can help each other get ideas in the prewriting stage. When I was teaching Writing 1 (the very beginning level of writing classes) at Petra Christian University, Surabaya, my students often told me that they could not write because they did not have interesting ideas to write. When students are short of ideas, they tend to be less confident in writing. That is why; getting idea is a very crucial process in the prewriting stage that I would like to address.In this paper, I would discuss the use of collaborative work in the prewriting stage to help students get interesting ideas to write, then develop those ideas into what Ikeguchi (1997) calls dynamic writing. Dynamic writing is whenever students' writing is not just a copy of model writing. It really expresses students' ideas that are richly developed and elaborated and finally meets audiences' expectation. Writing: A Process and Collaborative WorkBefore we (writing teachers) guide our students to the prewriting stage, we have to motivate them. One way to motivate our students is to point out to them that writing is a process. In the process, a writer goes through the intertwining stages of prewriting, writing and revision. In fact, as writers, students can discover and rediscover their ideas as they attempt to put meaning into prose. Students have chances to develop workable strategies for getting started such as finding topics, generating writing ideas, focusing, planning content and organization. They have chances for drafting, i.e. working through multiple drafts, for revising such as deleting, adding, reorganizing and modifying. They also have chances for editing such as working out problems with word choice, grammar and mechanics, and sentence structure (Reid, 1993).

Research Studies in Second Language Writing and in Contrastive Rhetoric

“…Sharing her classroom experience in dynamic writing, Wijaya (2000) argues that that collaborative activities are useful to help learners generate ideas in prewriting process. Dheram (1995) found that learners made revisions following feedback both in form and in content.…”

Optimum condition of biodiesel production from waste cooking oil using continuous stirred tank reactor

“…But palm oil has some disadvantages between being easily oxidized and being damaged because palm oil contains lots of fatty acids. The use of palm oil will disrupt the availability of palm oil as cooking oil so as to interfere with food security [7]. In addition, biodiesel production from vegetable oil is higher than fossil oil due to high raw material cost.…”