Writing about One's Own Experiences as a Way of “Expanding and Supporting” Empathetic “Points of View”:

An Attempt to Scaffold the Transition from “Detailed Texts” to “Well-structured Texts”

Abstract

This paper reports on the author’s practice in an advanced Japanese writing class. The students of the class were able to produce “detailed texts on a variety of subjects,” but not “well-structured texts of complex subjects,” and thus remained at the B2 as defined in the CEFR – Companion volume (Council of Europe 2020: 66) (CEFR-CV). Based on the descriptions in CEFR-CV, the author reasoned that C-level writing requires “points of view,” and by presenting these to the students, the author intended to provide a scaffold toward achieving C-level writing. Specifically, after reading an essay whose ideas they could empathize with, each student was tasked with producing a text that “expanded and supported” said essay's “point of view”, while adding their own experiences to provide “reasons and relevant examples”.