Showing papers in "Research in The Teaching of English in 1989"

Grand Conversations: An Exploration of Meaning Construction in Literature Study Groups

Abstract: This naturalistic study investigated what happened in liter- ature study groups composed of 5th and 6th grade students and led by teachers in training. Children chose the novel they would like to read and met with group leaders to discuss their reading (2 days per week, 30 minutes per day) over a 4-5 week period. Teachers were en- couraged to be fellow participants in the discussion groups rather than monitors of reading comprehension. Data were field notes, transcrip- tions of audiotapes of individual sessions, and teacher journals. An analysis of the data revealed that young children of varying abilities participated in rich discussions of works of literature in which they ap- peared to be capable of 1) articulating their construction of simple meaning, but also changing it as they heard alternate views; 2) sharing personal stories inspired by the reading or discussion, often in poign- ant and revealing ways which triggered identification by other group members; 3) participating as active readers - predicting and hypoth- esizing and confirming or disconfirming their predictions as they read; and 4) valuing and evaluating the text as literature. The title of this piece comes from a remark Jim Higgins made to a group of teachers when he was at Arizona State University as a visiting scholar in the spring of 1985. He was describing how literature is used in American classrooms and he said something like "what you most often get are gentle inquisitions, when what you really want are grand conversations." Bryant Fillion (1981) echoed this theme with his remark that when he listened to tapes of literature classes - his own as well as others - he was struck by how often they sounded like inquisitions rather than real discussions. Almost all of children's experiences with literature in elementary schools today are in this inquisition mode. All popular basal series provide students with readers containing stories (many excerpted from fine liter- ature), and teachers with questions (and accompanying answers) to ask about those stories. Children gather together in groups to discuss the story, but the discussion usually consists of the teacher asking the ques-

Student Argumentative Writing Knowledge and Ability at Three Grade Levels.

Abstract: This study examines the ability of students at grades 6, 9, and 12 to write argumentative prose. The study also examines the students' knowledge used to judge the quality of seven constructed prose passages as arguments. The students' judgments were compared to the judgments of a group of adults. The results of the study indicate that the ninth and twelfth grade students scored significantly higher than the sixth grade students in overall argumentative writing quality, using scoring criteria based on the Toulmin (1958) model of argument. When individual argumentative traits are compared, the sixthgraders were less effective than the ninthand twelfth-graders in stating claims and using warrants. There was no significant difference among grades in the use of supporting data. The ninth-graders scored higher in their use of qualifications and rebuttals than the sixthor twelfth-graders. There were no significant differences among the three grades and the adults in their ratings of six of the seven constructed passages. All age groups identified the same passages as arguments. The study concludes that elementary and high school students possess knowledge about argument. Several sources suggest that young students have a great deal of difficulty writing argumentative discourse. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (1980), in its ten-year study of student achievement in writing, reveals that students have much more difficulty with persuasive writing tasks, which involve argument, than with narrative, descriptive, or expository tasks. (The NAEP "persuasive" topic directs students to organize their arguments. Elsewhere in this report the writer refers to studies in which students were asked to write arguments in response to "persuasive" topics; therefore, the terms persuasive and argumentative are used interchangeably.) This assessment indicates that only a small percentage were rated "competent or better" on a persuasive topic (15.6 percent of 9-yearolds; 20.3 percent of 13-year-olds; and 15.2 percent of 17-year-olds). Further, for the 13and 17-year-olds there was a significant (p < .05) drop between 1974 and 1979 in the percentage of compositions rated "competent or better" on the persuasive topics (NAEP, 1980). This research was conducted with the support of a grant to George Hillocks, Jr., from the Spencer Foundation Seed Grants, Department of Education, The University of Chicago. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 1, February 1989

How the writing medium shapes the writing process: Effects of word processing on planning

Abstract: This article presents a study examining the effects on planning processes of using pen and paper and word processing for composing. The study employed a 2-by-3 factorial design and a thinkaloud methodology. Experienced writers and student writers composed texts with pen and paper, with word processing, and with both media. Amount and kinds of planning were analyzed. Results showed significant differences between the pen and paper and the word processing alone conditions: when writers were using word processing alone, there was significantly less planning, significantly less planning before beginning to write, significantly less conceptual or high-level planning, and significantly more local or sequential planning than when they were using pen and paper. Surprisingly, there were no subject-by-condition interactions, nor were there clear differences between the condition which allowed writers to use both media and the other two conditions. Most theories of writing have acknowledged the importance of planning, and planning continues to be of interest to composition researchers. One reason for this interest may be that better writers seem to plan more. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1978a) found that while young writers are often unable to differentiate writing from planning, the planning of the more mature, adult writers was almost four times as long (in number of words spoken in a think-aloud protocol) as the text they produced from those plans. Flower and Hayes (1980) also found expert writers differed from novice writers in both the amount and the kind of planning they did during writing. Not only is planning the hallmark of the expert writer, but planning may be what allows us to learn as we write: the movement between text and plan may be where "discovery" during writing takes place (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987b; Murray, 1984; Penrose, 1987). Planning in writing, like planning more generally, can be valuable because it is reAuthor's Note: This research was funded by a grant to the author, Christine Neuwirth, and John R. Hayes from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) under grant number G008642161. Technical support was provided by the Information Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon. Close readings by Christine Neuwirth, Nancy Spivey, John R. Hayes, David Kaufer, and Glynda Hull led to substantive improvements and are gratefully acknowledged. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 2, May 1989

The effect of audience specification on undergraduates: attitude, strategies, and writing

Abstract: This study investigated the effects of assigning an audience on undergraduates' attitudes, composing strategies, and persuasive writing. Eighty-seven students in an intermediate composition course took a writing pretest without an assigned audience. Then, they were randomly assigned to three posttest conditions: (a) imaginary assigned reader, (b) real assigned reader, and (c) no assigned reader. For all participants the posttest was a second draft about the pretest topic. When the assigned reader and English teachers rated the essays for persuasiveness, assigning an audience had a limited effect on the assigned reader's scores and no significant effect on the teachers' scores. However, analyses of questionnaire and interview data indicated that assigning an audience increased students' interest, effort, and use of audience-based strategies. In addition, the questionnaires revealed an audience effect across groups. That is, students who said they had thought of someone like the assigned reader were twice as likely to persuade the assigned reader as students who had not. Studies suggest that most secondary and college students are not adapting their writing to audiences beyond the classroom (Applebee, 1981; Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Cooper, 1984; NAEP, 1985, 1986). Some researchers have attributed this problem to a deficiency in students' (a) cognitive development (Lunsford, 1979; Moffett, 1968; Shaughnessy, 1977), (b) knowledge of text conventions (Dillon, 1981; Park, 1982, 1986), or (c) coordination of composing demands (Bereiter, 1980; Kroll, 1984; Scardamalia, 1981). While acknowledging these deficiencies, other researchers have argued that the school context also contributes to the problem (Applebee, 1981; Collins & Williamson, 1984). The studies cited above indicate that most school writing addresses overhearers teachers who are not personally involved with the topic. In contrast, most on-the-job writing addresses rhetorical audiences (see Anderson, 1985). According to Bitzer (1971), a rheThis article is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation (University of Maryland, 1987). The research was supported by a fellowship from the United Negro College Fund and by a grant from the University of Maryland, College Park. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 1, February 1989

Bringing Life to Literature and Literature to Life: Social Constructs and Contexts of Four Adolescent Readers

Abstract: This study examined social influences on the reading process- es of four adolescent readers, as well as the relationship between fac- tors of social-cognition and these readers' responses to short stories. Four case study participants, all seniors in high school, were chosen from a group of 56 students in a suburban school. Data sources in- cluded: transcripts of 24 interviews with the students and their teach- ers, "think-aloud" protocols of their responses to four short stories, measures of interpersonal congitive complexity, and Reading Interest questionnaires. Results underscore the need for more varied and sys- tematic assessments of reading competence, as well as an understand- ing of the interplay of competence, pragmatics, and volition in the likelihood that readers will bring social-cognitive processes to bear on reading. Recent scholarly work in the social and social-cognitive aspects of literary response has demonstrated the importance of a knowledge of social and literary conventions (Beach, 1983; Black, Galambos & Read, 1984; Pur- ves, 1986), as well as a repertoire of interpersonal constructs (Hynds, 1985) for understanding stories and story characters. However, little is known about how social-cognitive processes function in readers' response processes, or what motivates readers to bring such competencies to liter- ary texts. In light of these limitations, this study explored two questions: 1) How do young adult readers appear to use their understandings of people in interpreting and responding to literature? 2) What social influ- ences in the home and school relate to readers' attitudes toward reading, and the likelihood that they will bring a full range of social-cognitive com- petencies to bear on literary texts? In addressing these issues, this study explored social-cognitive aspects of the literary response processes and reading backgrounds of four Acknowledgements: This project was funded by a grant from the Syracuse University Senate Research Committee. My sincere appreciation is also due to Richard Beach, Alan Purves, and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable assistance in drafting the manuscript. Fi- nally, I want to thank Karen Johnson and Claudia Gentile for help in data collection and coding, as well as the marvelous students, teachers, and administrators who made this study possible.

Audience Analysis and Persuasive Writing at the College Level.

Abstract: The first part of this study examined the relationships between an audience analysis task, the number of arguments and appeals used by college students in a persuasive paper, the level of strategic adaptation of those arguments, and overall persuasiveness of the papers the college students wrote. Results indicated that three of these variables predicted over half of the variance of the scores of essay persuasiveness. For the second part of the study, half of the participants were given information about the audience relative to the topic of their persuasive papers, and the other half were not. Results showed that this treatment had a significant effect on each of the three outcome variables used. These students produced more self-identified arguments, averaged a higher level of audience adaptation, and were judged to be more persuasive. Both traditional and modern theories link audience analysis with persuasive writing. However, previous research has not specifically measured activities which may comprise audience analysis nor specifically examined the relationships between these measures and audience persuasiveness. In addition, teachers need to know if students who have information about their audience can adequately apply audience analysis to their writing using adaptive strategies and if having this representation actually results in recognized qualitative differences in their persuasive writing. Some research has suggested that audience awareness, consciously using ideas about an audience to create or revise text, could be a key factor helping to explain differences in writing ability (Berkenkotter, 1981; Flower, 1979). Also, communication researchers have established links between social cognition (characterizing and making inferences about others) and writing quality (Clark & Delia, 1977; Delia & Clark, 1977; Kroll, 1985; O'Keefe & Delia, 1979; Rubin, 1984; Rubin, Piche, Michlin, & Johnson, 1984). However, in these studies, social cognition is treated as a single entity, as a general measurement of the way an individual makes inferences about and characterizes others. Rubin (1984) argues that social cognition ought rather to be treated as a multivariate construct, including a hierarchy of various subskills, each of which could affect the outcome of persuasive writing. He has labeled these subskills perspective differentiation, Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 3, October 1989

Teaching the Interpretation of Irony in Poetry.

Abstract: This study compares the effects of three treatment conditions on students' interpretation of stable irony in poetry: (1) a direct method, based on research on metacognition in reading, which attempts to give students conscious control of the interpretive strategies experienced readers use to understand irony, (2) a tacit method, which seeks to have students develop their own strategies through extended practice with the genre, and (3) no treatment. Four teachers and twelve classes (three 9th-grade, six lOth-grade, and three llth-grade) participated in the study. A total of 253 students took both the pretest and the posttest. In addition, one student randomly selected from each class was interviewed about two poems both before and after instruction. The results indicate that the direct and tacit methods were statistically superior to no treatment on a variety of measures. There were no statistically significant differences between the direct and tacit methods, though the data suggest that the direct method may be more effective for the least experienced readers and on the most difficult tasks. All of us constantly reconstruct ironic meanings. If I spill soup on my tie and say, "Nice job, Michael," I expect that people will understand that I am criticizing my clumsiness rather than congratulating myself for making a new design. Booth (1974) calls those ironies created by an ironist in order to be understood "stable" ironies. Even young children are able to understand them. Winner (1988) explains a variety of studies that suggest that this ability tends to develop sometime between the ages of six and nine. Although we successfully reconstruct ironic meanings in our daily lives, for many this ability becomes short-circuited in literary situations. Often students become what Muecke (1969) calls "victims" of irony because they fail to understand irony in literature. Two Instructional Models How can teachers help their students avoid becoming victims? My computer search of the literature did not find any studies evaluating methods of teaching irony. However, researchers and theorists have suggested some possible approaches that could be applied. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 3, October 1989

Audience and Information.

Abstract: This study explored the decision patterns of good and belowaverage college freshman writers regarding available information on audience and topic. Decisions and rationales were studied at two different points in the composing process before the first draft and before the final draft. Findings indicate that both groups of writers tended to defer audience considerations until the revision stage. Students' rationales for these decisions show a number of similarities between

The First Twenty Years of "Research in the Teaching of English" and the Growth of a Research Community in Composition Studies.

Abstract: This essay takes the completion in 1986 of the first two decades of Research in the Teaching of English as the occasion for an historical reflection on one portion of the research it includes: studies of writing related to teaching and learning. The pages of RTE reveal a community constituting itself, characterized initially by a single research paradigm: quantitative "scientific" studies. Through the years, the community has broadened the definition of both what will be studied and how it will be studied to include qualitative research and a variety of theoretical standpoints. Change has been slow, however, and the founding paradigm remains dominant. RTE has served both to maintain the dominant paradigm and as a forum for calls for change, specifically calls to pursue other research approaches in addition to the dominant one. The pages of RTE also show the tensions existing between the research community and the larger community of English and composition studies, in general over the role of empirical studies in that larger community and in particular over such issues as the validity of testing and its impact on curricula and educational policy decisions. In 1986 Research in the Teaching of English (RTE) completed its 20th year of publication. This essay takes the completion of these first two decades as the occasion for an historical reflection on one portion of the broad range of language arts research it includes: studies of writing related to teaching and learning. Such a reflection seems particularly timely because this 20 year anniversary coincides with the publication of George Hillocks' Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching (1986), a companion volume to Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's 1963 book Research in Written Composition. Together these books serve as bookends for the first 20 years of RTE and for the period when a research community in composition studies was constituting itself. Reflecting on this period, Hillocks recalls the 1963 observation of Braddock et al., that "today's reThe author wishes to thank Charles Moran of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the editors of RTE, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful reviews of earlier versions of this article. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 2, May 1989

Models of Competence: Responses to a Scenario Writing Assignment.

Abstract: Writers and teachers interpret scenario assignments from dif- fering perspectives on the writing situation. These interpretations im- ply differing models of communicative competence. Mismatches be- tween writers* and teachers' models of competence represent potentially problematic areas in the writer-teacher relationship. In order to discover disparities between writers' and teachers' inter- pretations of an assignment, a scenario assignment which opera- tionalized the theoretical premises of Rogerian rhetoric was admin- istered to three groups of writers: graduate students trained to teach rhetoric, academically successful undergraduate students trained as tutors, and entering freshmen. Analysis revealed the writers' diver- gences from the orthodox Rogerian interpretation of the assignment. The mean degree of adherence to the orthodox interpretation (here termed "interpretive community") was highest for the most experienced writ- ers. The correlation between interpretive community score and holis- tic score increased with the experience of the groups and was signifi- cant for the three groups combined. The analytical technique provided a heuristic for investigating models of competence implicit in essays as well as for estimating the nature and degree of agreement between writer and teacher on the interpretation of an assignment.

Child Knowledge and Primerese Text: Mismatches and Miscues.

Abstract: By the time they begin learning to read in school, children know a great deal about the forms and functions of language. This article describes some of the mismatches that can occur between child knowledge and the language of controlled "primerese" texts used to teach reading. Various reading miscues from a sample of 30 first grade children reading four controlled texts are analyzed to show how they resulted from controls on vocabulary and sentence length, and from overdependence on punctuation in primerese texts. The results elucidate the ways in which children bring their linguistic knowledge to bear on the reading process, and they indicate that the controls and distinctive features of primerese text are counterproductive. Three decades of intensive research on the development of linguistic and communicative competence have shown that children know a great deal about the forms and functions of language by the time they begin reading instruction in school. It has also been known for some time that children are inclined to bring this knowledge to bear on the reading process as demonstrated, for example, by the finding that their oral reading miscues tend to be syntactically or semantically consistent with the discourse contexts in which they occur (Goodman, 1967, 1973; Weber, 1970). The question we address in this study is what happens when linguistically knowledgeable children encounter the kind of unnatural "primerese" language typically used in basal texts for beginning readers. In an effort to make learning to read easier, the authors of primerese texts employ controls on vocabulary and sentence length that often result in violations of the "rules" that represent our tacit knowledge about the ways language is normally used in oral and written discourse. These violations produce primerese texts that are characterized by awkwardness and redundancy due to the frequent repetition of words in places where such repetition is odd or unnatural, by the absence of explicit connectives between sentences, by dependence on punctuation to mark syntactic relations, by the use of exophoric reference that makes interpretation of the text dependent upon illustrations, and by malformed stories in which basic elements are either carried by illustrations or omitted altogether (Beck, McKeown, & Caslin, 1981; Gourley, 1978; Shuy, 1981). Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 4, December 1989