This investigation sought to determine how the active meaning-making process of 10 sixth-grade students with above average reading and writing ability was reflected in their written responses to four books of realistic fiction. Students kept literature response journals to record their ongoing thoughts and reflections during the reading process. The nine-point categorization scheme that emerged from the content of students’ responses was used to analyze the journals of 4 of these students in order to determine individual response styles. Further analysis revealed the sequence of response for these 4 students during each quarter of their reading and writing. The study suggests how complex and unique response to literature is for even upper elementary and middle school students

The purpose of this study was to examine how different writing tasks influence students’ thinking in reading and writing. The tasks used in this study, writing either a report or a problem-based essay, required students to integrate prior knowledge with information from six sources in order to create their own texts. The 15 undergraduates, enrolled in a seminar on European history, were randomly assigned to one of two task conditions, report or problem. Analyses focused on students’ acquisition of topic knowledge and the ways writers structured meaning as they organized and selected information. For insights into how writers approached these two tasks, all students provided think-aloud protocols and kept reading-writing logs. Classroom observations also provided information about contextual factors that can influence the strategies students use in reading to create their own texts. Comparisons made between the two groups revealed that they differed significantly in their interpretations of the two tasks and in their approaches to restructuring information from sources. However, there was no difference between the amount of prior knowledge that students writing reports and problem-based essays included in their essays, nor were there differences in learning. Both groups of students improved their understanding of a given historical event. Possible directions for future research are discussed.

To explore how writers with extensive experience and learning in an academic discipline used both topical and rhetorical knowledge to construct synthesis essays, 40 graduate students equally representing the two disciplines of psychology and business wrote synthesis essays on either supply-side economics or rehearsal in memory. Half of the writers completed think-aloud protocols, and their composing processes were analyzed for different qualities and frequencies of elaborations and rhetorical awareness and for task representation. Their written products (40 essays) were analyzed for the importance and origin of information and for the quality of key rhetorical moves. Analyses of variance revealed that high-knowledge writers evidenced more local and evaluative elaborations as well as an awareness of rhetorical contexts. They also included more new information in their essays in the top levels of essay organizations. Low-knowledge writers elaborated less but did rely on structural and content-based awareness to compose, factors which also were influenced by specific topics and disciplines, and they included comparable amounts of borrowedimplicit information in their essays. Intercorrelations of process and product features revealed that evaluative elaborations and awareness of rhetorical context corresponded with the presence of new information in essays for all 40 writers, suggesting that prior knowledge of an academic topic may take the form of a complex, situational strategy for composing. The findings confirm the interrelatedness of comprehension and composing processes and illustrate how writers, with varying levels of topic familiarity, use both their knowledge of disciplinary topics and their experience as readers and writers to compose synthesis essays.

To develop an insider's perspective as to what teachers employ in their efforts to translate instructional theory into occasions for learning, this study represents teachers' perspectives in a way that ( 1 ) identifies some of the legitimate and unexpected resistance to implementing new curriculum, and (2) suggests an analytic model of theoretical and practical value to those interested in curriculum implementation. Two high school teachers collaborated with the researcher to develop writing tasks that would encourage careful thought and learning on the part of the students. Both teachers were observed before and during the time they developed and implemented these writing tasks. On the basis of the field notes and interview transcripts, an analytic model was developed and used to: 1. characterize a single meaning system here defined as a curricular system of meaning; and 2. identify several natural sources of resistance to innovation. The discussion focuses specifically on two components of this meaning system: (a) locus of attention here defined as a critical point of balance in the system which enables the teacher to negotiate a number of delicately balanced and sometimes conflicting concerns, and (b) of instruction, defined as the underlying conditions that influence instructional practice. These conditions include the teacher's conceptions about the source of knowledge, the development of knowledge, and the goals of instruction. Evidence cited suggests that these two concerns are crucial to the effective and efficient working of a system, and that both are thus natural sources of resistance. A number of factors have contributed to the recent interest in writing across the curriculum. Among them is our developing understanding of the relationship between writing and thinking. Work by Emig (1977, 1983), Martin (1976), Hays, Roth, Ramsey, and Foulke (1983) and others indicates that the process of writing affords the writer a special opportunity for thinking and thus for learning. Building on the work of Vygotsky (1962), Luria (1971), and Bruner (1971), Emig (1983) argues that both the act and the product of writing are marked by a number of features which, in her words, correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies (p. 123). In the The research reported here was supported by grant number NIE-G-82-0027 from the National Institute of Education. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the funding agency. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1986 69 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.162 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 05:40:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 70 Research in the Teaching of English process of using hand, eye, and brain, the writer may, among other things, sort through ideas, integrate old information with new, and reformulate thoughts. Fostering such processes is especially important since they have been identified as critical intellectual components of more complex forms of

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The case study approach was used to describe the revision strategies used by eight twelfth grade writers as they wrote compositions for two audiences: their teachers and their peers. The sample consisted of four writers who had previously been classified as basic and four who had been classified as competent according to scores that they achieved on holistically scored pieces of writing for a teacher audience. The data included responses gathered during interviews with the subjects and with their previous teachers of English, multiple drafts of compositions produced by each writer for each audience, and audio tapes of the subjects' verbal protocols as they composed aloud. The findings indicated that (a) the basic writers made more revisions for the teacher audience, while the competent writers made more revisions for the peer audience; (b) the competent writers made a wider range of revisions according to the points, levels, types and purposes of revision that were established prior to the collection of the data; and (c) the competent writers were able to revise in extended episodes in which one revision was cued by, and related to, an earlier revision, while the basic writers made isolated revisions. Although there were differences in the revision patterns of the different groups of writers, the basic writers demonstrated that they possessed the same revision strategies as the competent writers, though they used those strategies in different ways. The verbal protocols of the basic writers suggested that their limited use of some of the revision strategies that they possessed resulted from the constraints under which they were operating. The most significant of those constraints seemed to be the difficulties that the basic writers had with the actual production of text and the basic writers' view of composing as a two-draft procedure with revision taking place only during the second draft. It was suggested by the investigator that students need opportunities to write for a variety of audiences other than their teachers and that teachers can facilitate successful revision in students' writing by providing students with information about the revision strategies that they possess but use too infrequently.

Conventional empirical approaches often fail to deal with important dimensions of children's response to literature, such as the demand for repetition and successive responses, nonverbal modes of responding, and the nature of spontaneous expressions of response. In this study, using techniques borrowed from ethnography, a participant observer spent four months in one elementary school working with 90 children in three classrooms spanning kindergarten through grade five. Behaviors that revealed some connection between children and literature were identified and categorized as response events, with attention to their juxtaposition and sequence in the classroom. The distribution of these events across grade levels and qualitative differences in relation to age reflected familiar patterns of language and cognitive development. The occurrence and expression of response events, however, and some aspects of their quality, were tied to the social-instructional contexts of the various classrooms and were susceptible to the influence of the teachers who created those settings.

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