The process approach to the teaching and learning of writing can better address the problems facing the struggling writers who badly need support in the writing process. Nonetheless, instructional adaptations need to be made to enable learners with writing problems to succeed in the process approach which entails more procedures than the product approach.

As those struggling writers have no intrinsic motivation to write, creating situational interest is the necessary first step to spur their engagement in writing. Interesting and manageable writing topics that are relevant to students’ personal lives and fun and game-like activities can be incorporated into the writing task to increase students’ willingness to write. And this eagerness to write is especially important in the process approach to writing where sustained writing is encouraged. Teachers can also adopt cooperative learning strategies to create a non-threatening classroom environment to extrinsically motivate students to write. Such an extrinsic motivation can stimulate students’ situational interest in writing which in turn, can lead to personal interest in writing.

Apart from adapting the design of the writing tasks, adjusting the nature of instruction is essential to provide scaffolding for the writing of the struggling writers. As the struggling writers need far more support than the average learners before they can start writing, teachers can give guided instruction to guide students through the thinking processes in the generation, planning and organisation of ideas to initiate their actual writing. To enable the students with writing and learning difficulties to generate ideas step by step, teachers can use a variety of pre-writing activities and structured teaching methods to help them discover and select ideas for their writing bit by bit. Providing and discussing mentor texts with students, giving students opportunities to share ideas with their peers, focusing on meaning while delaying attention to language can greatly facilitate this exploration process at the pre-writing stage. As the struggling writers and learners greatly need clear and concrete guidelines, explicit teaching methods can provide them guided support for planning and organising ideas. Using graphic organisers, providing multiple models and giving small teaching steps are all effective ways to enable them to visualise some abstract concepts like text structure and paragraphing. In this project, writing graphic outlines and color-coding are the strategies which the struggling writers and learners found particularly useful.

It is also important that teachers can make realistic expectations of the struggling writers. To create practical conditions for students with writing problems to succeed in the process approach at the initial stage of implementation, teachers can emphasise more on the pre-writing stage to remove students’ inhibitions towards writing while keeping the ‘revising’ and ‘editing’ stage short in order not to scare students away from process writing. Giving focused revision instruction and focused editing instruction are good ways to develop self-regulatory strategies and to enable productive rewriting among the struggling writers.