Abstract
This chapter describes the schema of composing formulated in order to model composing processes for learner writers. The process had been largely intuitive in response to a pressing educational need, but had also been informed by intensive reading on the process approach to writing. At a formal level, it could be related to what Widdowson termed a “user’s model”, that is a description of language use from the point of view of the naïve user rather than one based on linguistic theory (Explorations in applied linguistics 2, 1984:9). Unravelling the modelling process from Franck’s perspective, almost at the other end of the investigation, revealed the user’s model to be an applied (or empirical) model of composing. It was, however, an applied model containing, implicitly, a system of communicative functions, which, in Franck’s terms, constitutes a theoretical model of composing. The user’s model is a key aspect of the modelling process documented here, the fulcrum, as it were, on which the rest of the process balances. The communicative functions could not have been identified clearly had it not been for the way in which they were separated in writing, much in the way that litmus paper reveals separate bands of elements in chemical compounds.
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Pratt, D. (2010). The User’s Model of Composing. In: Modelling Written Communication. Methodos Series, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9843-6_4
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