Graphic organisers as scaffolding for students' revision in the prewriting stage

Writing is a complex process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) categorise poor and expert writers according to the type of writing they do. Poor writers are likely to use the knowledge telling strategy where students think and write whatever comes to their mind. Their writing reflects their train of thought rather than an understanding of the train of thought of the reader. Expert writers however, use the knowledge transforming strategy. They show an awareness of an overall plan or goal which they develop within the problem constraints given to meet their readers' needs. Graphic organisers have often been used to help students plan their writing but not to revise their writing in the pre-writing stage. Based on the premise that students can revise better if they can see better what they are revising, this paper provides the theoretical underpinnings to show that graphic organisers could be useful revising tools in the pre-writing stage and guidelines on the effective use of graphic organisers as revision tools in multi-draft pre-writing.