Self-regulating writing performance in English when recommending texts at a high school language media resource center

Abstract

This work presents a didactic proposal as part of the advisory services provided by a high-school language media center aimed at encouraging students to self-regulate their performance when writing in English as a foreign language. The proposal prompts the students to write, revise and edit a recommendation in English of a narrative text, with support from an advisor. The methodology includes that the students and the advisor agree on the characteristics of the written recommendation and then revising and editing the texts based on feedback provided by the spelling and grammar checker in the Word software, the advisor and, whenever possible, another teacher. The aim is to make the students adopt good writing practices related to textuality standards, the text type appropriate for recommendations and the representation of authors and interlocutors in the text. Based on these textuality experiences, students can ponder on and self-regulate their writing performance to attain an improved final draft.
The article examines the students’ writing performance based on the earliest, intermediate and final drafts of their recommendations; these showed evidence of self-regulated writing linked to the feedback received. The attitudes, decisions and strategies adopted by students to overcome the difficulties faced during writing are also described. A noticeable finding is that the students’ major concerns, over the various revision stages of their texts, were grammar and spelling.