ABSTRACT
Writing as a means of communication is one of the basic skills students must master at university level since into the language curriculum the 4 skills are addressed. This project aimed at fostering the writing process through a blended environment in fourth semester students from the Engineering Faculty at Universidad Santo Tomás, Tunja Colombia following writing stages proposed by Hamp-Lyons & Heasley (1987); the participants had the chance to produce any kind of writing as a way of expression. Two writing activities were developed and to gather data field notes, students’ documents and a semi-structured interview were implemented; firstly, to keep a permanent registration of any important aspect, detail or information related to the focus of this study, secondly to provide information about students´ progress in writing, considering the process from the beginning to the end; and thirdly, to collect more data such as strengths, weaknesses and needs of the project to improve my practice focused on fostering the writing production.
Data analysis showed that writing is fostered if students follow stages and receive feedback from the teacher. Three main findings were as follows:
- Students´ writing production can be fostered when following stages to scaffold writing process.
- Language rules are important for students when building up any kind of text.
- Timely and meaningfully feedback is crucial to show students mistakes for accepting and self reflecting on them.
Finally, students fostered their written production when being in contact with different stages; those stages provided them not only a sense of start writing something but a sense of showing them how to do it. However, most of the students were not as steady as it was expected, and it might regard to a motivation matter. Therefore, knowing that learning is mostly based on motivation, it is essential to consider some strategies to increase students’ involvement in writing activities.
Reflection: Writing an abstract might be seen as a not complex task , but it is something that also takes time because people usually want to include every single detail of his/her research. But when having clear what an abstract addresses it is clear for the write produce the text.
