The process writing has dominated the filed in second language writing (SLW) for decades. Students would do pre-writing, writing, peer responding, and rewriting as a process of writing. This process claims to give students a sense of learner autonomy in which students can employ such process to write in different writing pieces. Reflecting from my experiences, I have been taught to do the process writing with multiple drafts, giving and responding to friends’ drafts. It is difficult, as Atkinson suggests, to teach writing without this approach.
Then the “post-process” paradigm comes into the field. As the readings suggest, there is no concrete definitions for the term. Some scholars (Matsuda (2003) and Casanave (2003)) are cautious about the definition and the use of the label in the SLW field. Other readings focus on the social, political, and cultural aspects of both the writing and the writers. Personally, I will be careful when using this term as I am still not so sure about the definitions as well. Though Kent (1999) defines the term that “writing is public,…interpretive, [and]…situated” (p. 1), every piece of writing can be classified into those categories. I agree with Casanave’s and Matsuda’s remarks that the label is socially constructed and can be interpreted in different meanings. This could add both complexities and “multiplicity” (Matsuda, 2003, p. 79) to the field.
Another interesting point to be made here is Casanave’s discussion of her Japanese students. This is nothing new to my personal experience as well. Due to time constrain and overloaded with contents, teachers and students do not have a chance to even respond to their friends’ writing, let alone to receive the paper back from teachers. Some teachers employ this teaching practice; however, students do not see the importance of peer response. This also leads to the failure in appropriating western pedagogies to different contexts. The issue of (self) perception in doing peer response should be discussed and reconstructed to students.
Is the process writing really outdated? How well students and teachers prepared for this so-called post-process? How do you define the term? What are teaching implications to be included in this post-process approach? These are questions in which I think are important to be considered.
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I don't think that process and post-process is a matter of choice. It's clear to me that both approaches have their own merits and each of them is not a monolitic concept, but can be realized in a form of a wide range of different classroom practices. I, as a writing teacher, would want to implement practices from both based on specific situations and students' chracteristics. I might want to encourage studetns to write multiple drafts and revise them, but might not want to stick to peer review in a Korean writing classroom full of 100 students. Casanave's discussion of Japanese students also remind me of Korean EFL settings.
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