Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 35, Issue 3, 2001

Diane Stephens prepared the following talk for the 2000 NCTE Conference in Milwaukee upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous year’s volume judged most likely to have an impact on the practice of others. In her talk Stephens considers the doubts she has had about the design of the award winning study, focusing especially on a researcher’s obligation to help the teachers with whom the researcher is working, even at the risk of jeopardizing a study’s design. Stephens traces the way that her engagement with that question has led to her current professional commitments.

This study describes some of the tensions and challenges that 9 student teachers faced as they attempted to apply theoretical tools or principles for teaching middle and secondary school English to the realities of practice. Several contexts or activity settings both shaped and complicated the appropriation process, including undergraduate experiences with and prior beliefs about English as a school subject, the preservice methods courses, field work prior to student teaching, and the classroom context for student teaching. To describe the socialization the student teachers experienced that mediated their appropriation of the principles of instructional scaffolding, we identified three modes of participation in teaching middle and secondary school English. For some, teaching included both the learning of classroom routines as well as reflective practice, that is, a theory-based consideration of instructional decisions; for some, teaching was a process of procedural display in that they were absorbed primarily in enacting lessons that worked for themselves and for their students, making it difficult for them to consider the principles underlying their instructional decisions; and for some, learning to teach was a matter of mastering routines, that is, adopting, without adaptation, curricular and instructional practices without concern for students’ understandings or for instructional principles espoused by the teacher education program. The data suggest that the alignment of various activity settings supported the appropriation of teaching tools and a reflective stance toward teaching and learning. On the other hand, when activity settings worked at cross-purposes with one another, they created obstacles for the appropriation of theoretical and practical tools emphasized at the university. This study suggests the importance of understanding the kinds of relationships that student teachers develop within each setting and how social settings get negotiated and identities get constructed as a result of personal history.

This semester-long qualitative study explores the effects of a high-stakes, direct writing test on 3 teachers and their students in 1 rural Maryland high school. Out of the 23 students in both classes, 14 students had been identified for special education services for physical or learning problems; all had either failed the test once or had not yet taken it. The researchers conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed their classrooms, and collected samples of student writing and other artifacts to address 3 questions: (a) How did the test influence teacher beliefs about writing instruction? (b) How did these teachers adapt their instruction to respond to the demands of the test? (c) How did students who had not passed the test respond to their writing instruction and how did preparation for the test affect their attitudes/beliefs about writing? Our findings suggest that an emphasis on test preparation diminished the likelihood of the teachers’ engaging in reflective practice that is sensitive to the needs of individual students, that the high-stakes assessment process discounted the validity of locally developed standards for assessing writing, and that the criteria for passing the test failed to take into consideration the rich variety of American culture and the complexity of literacy learning.

The purpose of this study is to describe the intermediate forms of children’s informational and story compositions across the elementary grades. Two hundred twenty-two informational texts and 222 story texts were collected from 2 classes of each grade level, K–5, in a suburban, middle- to upper-middle-class school in a large district. These texts were analyzed for sophistication in macro-level organization including global elements, grammars of story and information genres (e.g., setting, initiating event, etc. for story, and topic orientation, characteristic attributes, etc. for information), and global structures (e.g., visual diagrams of content relationships). Findings indicate that even the youngest children differentiated between the genres with over half of all kindergartners and first graders producing texts classified at some level of organizational complexity above labels and statements. By second grade all but a few children did so. The youngest writers’ readings of their productions of labels, genre-specific statements, and more complex information and story texts provide insights into the beginnings of written genre knowledge development for this suburban group of children. Texts produced across the grades offer additional insights into children’s developing control of story and informational writing. The intermediate forms are considered as a possible framework of story and informational writing development for children in this particular mainstream context.