Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 29, Issue 2, 1995

This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only, study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recall, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her eleventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observational and case study techniques were employed to describe the teacher’s pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class read, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learning from selected history passages. Analyses of the students’ writings indicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the passages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outperforming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with higher scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall was further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the written responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediatea nd delayedc onditions. Although the general students’ performanceso n this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students’ performances, they benefited more from analytic writing than from answering study questions about the history passages. Because both instructional context and academic ability seem to influence students’ performances on writing-to-learn tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangle these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student ability on learning from writing.

This paper examines the written genres of a group of six children in a first grade classroom. Using the dual lenses of sociocognitive constructivism and emergent literacy, it explores relationships among the children’s genres and between these genres and the social context of the classroom in which the children’s written discourse is situated. Analysis of naturalistic data (using an integrated functionalformal analysis which considered substance, intention, form and context as interrelated dimensions of genre) resulted in a classification scheme which encompassed all genres in the children’s writing.

Analyses of the classroom discourse revealed the children to be active participants in the social dialogue within their classroom. They constructed their written genres in response to the texts with which they engaged during collaborative reading and writing tasks and in response to the ways in which the teacher structured the writing tasks. They acted upon their world by writing about their personal experiences, creating imaginary worlds through drawing and writing and playing with words and ideas.

The genres the children employed came from the morning news, from stories and poems, and from genres that were embedded in their literacy environment or constructed by them in collaboration with their teacher and each other. Both constructiona nd appropriationw ere seen as active processeso n the part of the child rather than as passive imitation or copying from models.

This study uses the performative theory of Erving Goffman to understand the conversational roles taken on by students and teachers during college-level writing conferences. According to Goffman, both teacher and student are engaged in the performance of roles, and they cooperate so that discrepant information (revelations that might undermine these roles) are not revealed. Some of that information can come out, however, in what Goffmanc alls “backstage” areas. This study creates two “backstage” areas where both an instructor and the two students involved can listen to tapes of their conferences and provide commentary about tensions and miscommunications in the conferences. The study particularly examines confusions about terminology concerning unity in writing and the negotiation of roles in the conference. The perspective taken in this study illuminates the specific performative demands of a writing conference, suggesting that because these demands are new to some students, their teachers may need to engage in considerable role-shifting to ease the conversational burden and help the students “save face.”

This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

Editor’s Note: Selected, annotated bibliographies of research in the teaching of English appear in the May and December issues of RTE. In general, the items selected for inclusion in each bibliography are drawn from the dissertation abstracts in DAI and from articles or books published from July to December preceding the May issue and from January to June preceding the December issue. Annotations of items from DAI are based on the abstracts; annotations of other items are based on the full texts of those items.

We ask readers to call our attention to published research we may have overlooked inadvertently and to notify us of newly published books containing research in the areas covered by the bibliography for possible inclusion in the review. Please direct questions or comments to Richard L. Larson, 30 Greenridge Ave., 5-H, White Plains, NY 10605-1237.