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Manipulating Mind-Mapping Software to Develop Essay Writing

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Introduction Human race has always had an instinct to express their needs, feelings, and emotions in written forms as well as oral ones. Calkins (1989, p. 3) illustrates that human beings have a deep need to represent their experiences through writing. He mentions that ancient people were fond of writing stories, events, habits, or situations related to them on the walls of caves and temples. It could be said that it is a natural human desire and tendency toward drawing shapes and lines on some material's surfaces. One can observe that young children are driven to leave written marks with pens, pencils, markers, pieces of coal, or even lipsticks on walls, furniture, or bathrooms. Academically speaking, writing is one of the four …show more content…

Whereas the product-based approach deals with writing correct kinds of paragraphs and texts, the process-based approach concentrates on the communicativeness of the written texts. Moreover, the process-based approach is a learner-centered, rather than a language-centered mode. The process of second/foreign language writing, as well as writing in the native language, involves three distinct stages followed by foreign language writers: (a) pre-writing, rehearsing, or the write-based phase, in which the ideas are gathered and generated; (b) drafting, or product-based phase in which the writer composes structures, and reconstructs ideas and (c) revision, or the reader-phase of revision (Leeds, 1996; Richards,1992; Scholes and Comley, 1989). Efforts done for the sake of developing the writing skill/sub-skills serve these three phases. Mind-mapping is located in the first pre-writing phase, where the students are given an opportunity to generate, gather, and arrange ideas related to a given essay (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992). A mind map is a graphic organizer in which major categories radiate from a central idea, and sub-categories are represented as branches of larger branches. According to Buzan (2000) and Howitt (2009) a mind map is a visual tool that can be used to generate ideas, take notes, organize thinking and develop concepts. The British Council

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