A Product-Process Analysis of Saudi Student Writers’
Essays
Ikram Rouissi
University of El Manar, Tunisia
Abstract
Writing as an interactive process of thoughts and words has been the
focus of two different yet complementary approaches, namely the product
approach and the process approach. While
the product approach focuses on the formal properties of texts, their
macrostructure and grammar, the process approach attends primarily to students’
meaning-making processes. These two approaches can present a clearer picture of
writing skills and lead to direct and immediate pedagogical implications. This
paper is an attempt at reconciling process and product approaches to ESL/EFL
writing. The paper investigates Saudi learners’ product deficiencies and
attempts to infer Saudi learners’ writing processes through a retrospective
composing process questionnaire and a product multi-levelled analysis. The
analysis shows that the students fail to conceive writing as a lengthy,
multistep, recursive, and creative process. Their product contains deficiencies
at the levels of cohesion and coherence in addition to interlanguage errors at
the morpho-syntactic level and at the vocabulary level. The deficiencies at the
cohesion and coherence levels reflect the students’ lack of familiarity with
the appropriate formal and content schemata. The paper recommends instating
writing as a process that gives priority to cohesion and coherence and relating
these to formal and content schemata.
Key words: Product approach, process approach, interlanguage,
cohesion, coherence, contrastive rhetoric, error analysis
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