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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

Research and theory in composition is divided regarding the role of audience awareness more generally, social cognition in writing. One position holds that social cognition is central to all composing processes, though the nature of social cognitive activity differs depending on such factors as the function of discourse (e.g., expository or persuasive) and the determinateness of the audience (e.g., a known individual or a generalized other). Another position, in contrast, regards social cognition as coming into play only in manifestly persuasive writing; for most school and literary uses of writing, writers are guided more by genre conventions than by anticipating audience responses. Thirtyfive college freshmen of heterogenous writing abilities wrote a typical academic essay and also a persuasive appeal directed toward a specific readership. They also completed a battery of four social cognitive assessments. Results indicated that the social cognitive assessments predicted 26 percent of the variance in judged quality of the persuasive writings. The most powerful single predictor was the degree to which participants were able to recognize and reconcile divergent traits in others. Quality ratings of the expository essays were more adequately predicted by composition length, though multiple regression indicated an additional contribution attributable to social cognitive ability. Results tend to confirm the position that social cognition is most important in persuasive writing, but do not support a strong disclaimer of the role of audience awareness in nonsuasive discourse. The notion of audience awareness commands a central position in composition theory, research, and instruction. (See recent reviews by Ede, 1984; Kroll, 1984; Rubin, 1984b). Proficient writers attend to the broad rhetorical dimensions including audience of their writing task, while nonproficient writers show a compulsive attention to matters of surface correctness (Flower & Hayes, 1980; Perl, 1979. While current research shows some of the ways in which good writers attend to matters of audience through specific discourse features (Rafoth, 1985; Rubin & Pliche, 1979), there is conThis research was supported by a grant from the University of Cieorgia Research Foundation to the first author. The authors express appreciation to John O'Looney for assistance in data analysis. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1986

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This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of are manifested in writing. I use the term here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between awareness, which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and adaptation, which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled audience and reader and response to the larger rhetorical problem were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion attention to the specific needs of the audience. This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

This study investigated the relationships among features of textual cohesion, as identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976), and primarytrait assessments of writing quality and coherence, with manuscript length held statistically constant. A random sample of 493 persuasive papers written by 17-year-olds during the 1978-79 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing evaluation were analyzed. The results of the analyses indicate that general coherence is an important element of writing quality and that the lexical cohesive features of synonym, hyponym, and collocation are important elements of writing quality and general coherence in manuscripts of the same length. When Alexander Bain (1867) first categorized prose discourse into four discourse modes, he stipulated that quality in each mode consisted of the elements of unity, mass (later known as emphasis), and coherence. Conners (1981) notes that Bain's ideas greatly influenced composition instruction in this country until 1950 but have waned since then, giving way to conceptualizations of written discourse that place increased emphasis on the contexts for writing (e.g., Kinneavy, 1971) and the processes that writers use to produce writing within varying contexts (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1980). Clearly, these emphases now permeate all levels of practice and theory. Yet Bain's notion of coherence still holds sway, as Bamberg (1983) points out: Coherence is generally accepted as a 'sine qua non' in written discourse. Oddly, little research has been conducted to determine the relationship between writing quality and coherence, an important relationship because coherence is often used to identify the strengths and weaknesses in student writing. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 1980a) hypothesized that the apparent drop in the writing abilities of 13and 17-year-olds between the first national writing assessment (196970) and the second (1974-75) was due in part to a drop in the number of coherent paragraphs. However, at that time NAEP had no way of empirically determining whether this assertion was accurate. In an effort to determine if coherence in student writing was indeed declining, NAEP (1980a) constructed a primary-trait coherence measure (referred to as a cohesion measure by NAEP) for use in the third national writing assessment (1978-79). Scores on this measure were shown to have the same degree of reliability as scores on primary-trait measures of writing quality. What differed was the focus of the assessment. The primary-trait Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

This essay explores parallels between new paradigms in the sciences, particularly quantum physics, chemistry, and biology, and new paradigms in reading and literary theory, particularly a socio-psycholinguistic, semiotic, transactional view of reading and a transactional view of the literary experience. Among the major parallels emphasized are the following concepts: reality is fundamentally an organic process; there is no sharp separation between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context; the whole (universe, sentence, text) is not merely the sum of parts which can be separately identified; meaning is determined through transactions between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context, and among textual elements on and across various levels. When a friend first introduced me to Fritjov Capra's The Turning Point (1982), I was intrigued by what Capra describes as the paradigm emerging in fields as diverse as physics and economics, psychology and medicine. Clearly, I thought, there are direct parallels between the paradigm Capra describes and that emerging in my own field, reading theory. Seeking to better understand such parallels, I delved into other recent books that describe for the non-scientist the paradigm emerging in the sciences. First among these was Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), a fascinating introduction to quantum physics. More recent books include Wolfs Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), Jones's Physics as Metaphor (1982), Campbell's Grammatical Man (1982), Prigogine and Stengers' Order Out of Chaos (1984), Comfort's Reality and Empathy (1984), and Briggs and Peat's Looking Glass Universe (1984). Each of these in some way contributes to an understanding of the paradigm emerging in the sciences. In the following essay, I draw from books such as these some key concepts that seem to be emerging, or rather re-emerging, from various scientific disciplines, and trace parallels between these and similar concepts that have been re-emerging in reading theory and in literary theory. This work was supported by a Fellowship from the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund, Western Michigan University. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

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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.

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In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition at Colorado State University wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, STYLE, and SPELL, programs developed by Bell Laboratories. Studies at Bell Laboratories have shown that technical writers using these programs not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. This study tests for similar improvement in college writing and editing skills and also measures effects of computer assistance on attitudes toward writing. Our tests suggest that textual analysis with computers intrigues college writers and speeds learning of editing skills by offering immediate, reliable, and consistent attention to surface features of their prose. Most freshmen writers have had little practice editing their own written work so little that wordy expressions, faulty diction, and spelling errors increasingly mar even their most careful composition. Bedeviled by these and other problems of young writers, we began exploring ways of using word-processing technology and computers to help students analyze and edit their own writing before handing it in for marking. While we were preparing a computerized diction list, reports reached us about Bell Laboratories' extraordinary editing software Writer's Workbench (Macdonald, 1980; Cherry, 1981, 1982; Cherry & Vesterman, 1981; Frase, et al., 1981; Macdonald, et al., 1982). Discovering our parallel interests, Colorado State University and Bell Laboratories began discussions leading to a research exchange permitting CSU to test and adapt Writer's Workbench for teaching composition. During these negotiations, CSU leased the three Workbench programs then available. In Fall Semester, 1981, randomly selected students taking freshman composition wrote essays using word-processing equipment and a computer programmed with DICTION, SUGGEST, and STYLE. Also included in the test was SPELL, Bell Laboratories' spelling checker distributed with the computer we used for the experiment. Studies at Bell Laboratories (Gingrich, et al., 1981) have shown that technical writers using Writer's Workbench not only edit more thoroughly but also learn to edit on their own. What might the effect be on college writers? Few would doubt the value of students correcting their own spellResearch in the Teaching of English, Vol. 17, No. 3, October 1983

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Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. C. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963. Cooley, W. W., & Lohnes, P. R. Evaluation research in education. New York: Irvington, 1976. Hilgers, T. L. Training college composition students in the use of freewnting and problem-solving heuristics for rhetorical invention. Research in the Teaching of English, 1980, 14, 293-307. Hilgers, T. L. Self -monitoring and the expository writing process. Unpublished thesis, The University of Hawaii, 1977. Keppel, G. Design and analysis: A researcher's handbook. Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Kerlinger, F. N. Foundations of behavioral research (2nd ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.

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Teachers who are trained in a fiveweek intensive writing project can improve students' composition skills better than teachers who are not trained to teach writing. That is the finding of an evaluation of the Gateway Writing Project, an inservice program involving eight suburban school districts in St. Louis County, Missouri, and funded by ESEA IV-G The program focuses on training secondary English, language arts, and elementary teachers, identified by their districts, in a five-week summer institute to improve students' composition skills. These trained teachers return to their school districts to teach other teachers the following school year. An evaluation of the project's impact on junior high and middle school students measured students' growth in writing and changes in teacher attitudes. The evaluation revealed the program had a significant impact on changing teachers' attitudes toward writing and on the writing performance of junior high and middle school students. By the completion of the five-week institute, participants demonstrated increased knowledge about research in the teaching of writing, about various approaches to the teaching of writing, and about the evaluation of writing. Each participant read selections by Moffett, Macrorie, Elbow, Britton, Cooper, O'Hare, Diederich, and Shaughnessy from a bibliography prepared for the institute. All participants kept a reading journal of their reactions to these authors and their ideas. Each participant also wrote several papers, then selected one paper for publication. All participants belonged to an editing group which met at least twice a week to read rough drafts of writing assignments. Two methods of evaluation of writing were taught: an holistic scoring approach and an error analysis technique. Approximately one-third of the summer institute was used for the participants to take a turn in presenting an effective teaching of writing approach which was supported either by research or review of the literature and developed through an appropriate writing assignment with printed materials suitable for the junior high/middle school students.

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Research suggests that children in sixth grade are at an important threshold in developing basic skills for interpreting metaphoric language in poetry. However, there is also evidence to suggest that children, because of their dependence on concrete operations, need special forms of cuing in learning how to approach the interpretations of poems.This study investigates the effectiveness of three instructional support systems for cuing sixth grade children in interpreting metaphoric language of poetry. The first support system (Treatment A) involved regular classroom teachers who applied their own verbal cuing. The second system (Treatment B) included external instructional support through given media and the teachers' verbal cuing. The third system (Treatment C) provided internal support through the use of poets. The underlying assumption here is that the teacher who is a practicing poet brings to the classroom a unique set of writing experiences that assist in cuing. A special control group (Treatment D) who received no instruction in responding to metaphoric language in poetry was also used..Subjects in this study were taken from sixth grade classes in three different school corporations in Tippe- canoe County, Indiana. Through a method of randomization and matching within school systems, the investigator limited the number of subjects from 720 to 272 in 12 intactclasses. Each treatment had 68 children and three classes. The independent variable in this study was the method of instructional support. The dependent variables were the raw scores of children's responses to Form B of "A Look at Literature," particularly 11 critical items that dealt specifically with the interpretation of metaphor in poetry.All three poetry-instruction groups were given the same instructional approach model and the same set of 24 poems from which the teachers selected 16 poems for instruction over an eight day period.An analysis of the pre-test scores for Form A of "A Look at Literature" indicated no significant differences among treatments. An analysis of post-test scores showed no significance among treatments in the children's responses to a wide range of reading skills but that there were significant differences among treatments in the children's responses that dealt specifically with the interpretation of metaphoric language in poetry. As a result of the scores for the "11 Critical Items Measurement," the following rank order of mean scores was observed: Treatment C, Poets (highest); Treatment B, Media and Teachers; Treatment D, control; Treatment A, Teachers (lowest). The Newman- Keuls test indicated that differences between Treatments A and B and between A and C were significant at the .05 level. All other differences among treatments were not significant.The findings suggest that children learned more in classes with internal or external support than in classes with no unique system of support. From data supplied by poets and teachers, it became apparent that Treatments B and C provided more experiential types of activities, whereas Treatment A provided more referential activities in approaching poetry. Teachers in Treatment B were given two films, twenty slides, and sixteen transparencies to prime children to interpret images as symbols and to experience tension in the poems through contrasting images. The poets in Treatment C were caught up with the dynamics of interchange in discussing levels of meaning, frequently shifting between the literal, and the symbolic, constantly weaving webs of meaning based on experience. Approaches used by the teachers were often based on referential guidance, with the teachers frequently limiting and sometimes telling the responses.

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Since teacher expectations for good writing, as communicated in responses on student compositions, may influence the nature of student writing and since little is known about how teachers respond to student writing, this study was designed to investigate the responses made by intermediate level teachers to their students' writing. Responses were classified as focusing on content or form of student writing. Classification on another dimension dealt with types of response (evaluation, assessment, instruction, audience response, or moving outside the writing). Findings show that teachers responded overwhelmingly to form. Specific types of responses tended to be of two kinds: (1) evaluation, which was usually of a general nature (e.g., Well written or a mark) and (2) instruction, which usually focused on specific language structures by correcting all mechanical errors.

The developmental nature of the reflective concept of in young children (ages 4.0 to 1.8) was investigated, and the degree to which these developmental aspects of metalinguistic awareness correspond to levels of cognitive development as described by Piaget (preoperational, transitional, and cognitive operational) was studied. Results showed that conscious awareness of the structural and significatory aspects of words follow what Papandropoulou and Sinclair have termed a long and slow elaboration characterized by an initial inexact notion equating a with the totality of an utterance to the conceptualization of word in terms of component letters. It is suggested that the printed word, by virtue of being stable, ilobjectified referent, plays significant role in turning the child's conscious attention to language as an opaque object of study. Implications for instruction are offered. In order to deal with the requirements of most programs of beginning instruction, children must be able to step back and treat language as an object that can be studied in its own right; they must be metalinguistically aware (e.g., Mattingly, 1972; Gleitman & Rozin, 1973). Challenged by the need to identify necessary prerequisites for undertaking formal instruction, researchers have sought to determine young children's ability to deal analytically with language. If cracking the is an integral part of the acquisition of reading, then necessary prerequisite for the neophyte reader is to grasp the understanding that there in fact exists code that needs to be cracked. This conceptual understanding of the nature and purpose of is not given for many young children (Downing, 1976; Vernon, 1971); they may not share their teachers' understanding of what reading is (Reid, 1966) much less what terms such as word, sentence, and sound refer to (Francis, 1973). For example, first grade teacher's request to Tell me which word doesn't The authors wish to express their appreciation to Pamela Lemer for her assistance in the collection of the data, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the original draft of this article.

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The teaching of basic composition courses is oriented toward not only improving skills but also toward favorably affecting the student's orientation about writing; skills alone are insufficient unless one also has a predisposition toward using those skills. The recently emerging concept of writing (Daly & Miller, 1975a) appears to have a major relationship to both skill achievement and attitude toward writing. Writing apprehension is defined as a specific case of general communication apprehension one's anxiety or fear about communicating in real or imagined communication situations (Daly & Miller, 1975a). Such apprehension is said to outweigh individual projections of possible gains from the communication situation (Phillips, 1968). These apprehensions toward communicating appear to lead to a number of deleterious effects in various environments. For example, in oral communication situations, individuals who are highly apprehensive communicate less (Wells & Lashbrook, 1970), disclose less (Hamilton, 1972), and achieve less socially (McCroskey & Sheahan, 1977), academically (McCroskey & Daly, 1976; McCroskey & Andersen, 1976; Smythe & Powers, 1978), and occupationally (Daly & McCroskey, 1975), than do individuals who are low in apprehension. Furthermore, individuals who are highly apprehensive in written communication use fewer words, statements, ly words, commas, and delimiting punctuation (Daly, 1977, in press), and less intense language (Daly & Miller, 1975c), and their is rated lower in quality (Daly, 1978; Book, 1976). Book (1976) suggests further major differences in structure, language use, and amounts of information conveyed between high and low apprehensives. Composition teachers develop significantly less positive expectancies of high apprehensive students than of low apprehensive students. Occupations with low requirements are more desirable to high apprehensives than those with high requirements (Daly & Shamo, 1976). In addition, high apprehensives have lower success expectations of themselves in classes than low apprehensives, perceive themselves to have been less successful in previous oriented classes, and are less likely to take advanced courses demanding writing. (Daly & Miller, 1975b). Given such an abundance of clearly defined negative effects for the high apprehensive students, attention must be drawn toward possible allevia-

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This study was a response to the current movement to introduce more Canadian content into the literature curriculum of Canadian schools. It examined the assumptions behind the movement by asking three main questions: (1) To what extent are Vancouver students able to recognize Canadian poems? (2) Do Vancouver students respond to Canadian poems in a way that is measurably different from their response to other poems? (3) Do any such differences in response depend upon information extrinsic to the poems—such as that provided in the label "A Canadian Poem"—and thus derive from attitudes established prior to the reading of a particular poem rather than, or as well as, from an encounter with the poem itself? These questions were shown to relate to important general questions about student response to literature, especially those bearing upon the relationship between a literary work and the world known to the reader. The design (a fully crossed 2x2 "factorial" with 12 replications) provided that twenty-four Vancouver grade eleven classes listen to taped recordings of a pair of unfamiliar poems and, concurrently, read them privately. The students were then asked to respond to the poems freely, in writing. There were twelve poem pairs, each pair consisting of one Canadian poem and one New Zealand poem. All poems represented landscapes. Each pair was presented to two different classes (in reversed order to counter order effects). The Canadian poem set was refined by sampling half from British Columbia and half from other Canadian regions. Separate analysis was made of responses to each poem sub-group. Each class was divided, randomly, in two. The Canadian poem in the pair that was given to one class sub-group was labelled as Canadian. The New Zealand poem in the same pair was labelled as Non-Canadian. The same Canadian and New Zealand poems given to the other class sub-group were not so labelled. The responses were subjected to content analysis by a scheme designed for the study. Its reliability by percentage overlap was 91.5%. Analysis was descriptive, with the Chi-Square statistic assisting description. A number of supporting instruments were employed to make possible various finer comparisons and to yield data for future research. Of the research questions, the first and second were answered negatively: little discriminatory recognition and little response difference were detected. The third question was answered positively: there was considerable evidence that students, when they knew the origins of the Canadian poems, favoured those poems in a variety of response dimensions (such as Evaluation, Comprehension, Visualisation, and Involvement). Regional differences did exist, the British Columbia poems being less favoured than the other Canadian poems. The attempt to establish a working base for ongoing exploration was successful. Statistically significant and/or important findings emerged in several areas. Some were: the adjectival pairs students used in characterizing their responses to the poems; stated preferences between poems; the effects on response when there is strong "transfer" between the poem and what is familiar to the student; and the students' desire for more Canadian literature in their schools. The study concluded with a statement of implications for curriculum planning and teaching strategy, and some suggestions for future research.

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