Transforming Early- Stage Writing into Composing: How to Motivate Young ESL Learners to Write, the Activity Way

Abstract

Writing is an activity in which mind and body are simultaneously engaged; content and language correlate; a person and ‘an other’, as a representative of a community, coexist. If any one element in the pairs mentioned above turns dysfunctional, writing collapses. While in a second or foreign language, possibilities of such failures and mismatches are more. This paper explores the potentials of the activity theory as discussed at length in the Soviet psychology of the first half of the last century. The paper begins with an inquiry into how writing instruction in English as a second language (ESL) can be made more productive, and ends with a proposal of transforming the act of writing into an activity of composing, using the framework of activity theory.