Original scientific paper
Attitudes to Writing and Writing Behavior
Vesna Beli
Abstract
The paper describes a study carried out with university English majors to gain an insight
into students’ attitudes to writing and into their writing behavior, and to provide
a starting point for developing a writing curriculum. A questionnaire was designed
to elicit data from a sample comprising over 200 students. In addition, interviews
were carried out with a subsample (N=30) and their written work was continually
assessed over a period of three months. The findings suggest that students overall
consider their writing skills lacking in many aspects and would find a college course
that would help them develop and perfect academic writing very helpful. Although
the participants were quite proficient in English, most found writing in English a
very daunting task which required dealing with the cognitively complex process of
writing and at the same time focusing on articulating meaning in a linguistically acceptable
form. The data shows that students can, to some degree, identify problems
they have in writing but they are not prepared to deal with them. A well-thought
out curriculum which approached writing as a recursive process and was based on
a student-centered pedagogy would create a more fruitful writing environment and
raise students’ motivation, thus facilitating the development of a very important and
possibly the most complex skill not only in L2 but in L1 as well.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
75715
URI
Publication date:
1.4.2011.
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