Prewriting and Drafting Strategies of Graduate Students In Writing Term Papers in English
Abstract
Researches on writing have found that some writers are successful while others are not. Studies that focus on the texts students produced were unable to reveal the reasons for the phenomenon. Researches on the process of writing attempt to uncover the mental processes that students experience while writing texts. Findings by researchers on mental processes predict that more successful writers employ a battery of effective strategies while writing and they employ a more recursive steps in producing the texts. The present study is an attempt to uncover the mental processes of two graduate students when they were writing papers as a form of academic assignment. The research employed descriptive qualitative design. The data were collected using think-aloud protocol in which the subjects think aloud what came to their mind during the production of the papers and it was tape-recorded. The recorded think-aloud was then transcribed and analysed by categorizing the utterances into cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and by depicting the utterances into a chart that depicted the subjects’ flow of thought during prewriting and drafting stages. The data were collected from 22 and 24 sittings of writing the papers. The result of data analyses shows that: (1) the subjects employ both cognitive and metacognitive strategies when writing, (2) the subjects create mental outline in the prewriting stage and keep on revising it during the drafting stage, and (3) recursiveness is not a mark of successful writers.
Keywords: drafting, papers, prewriting, strategy
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