Research in the Teaching of English
31 articlesAugust 2024
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An Eight-Year Longitudinal Study of an English Language Arts Teacher’s Developmental Path through Multiple Contexts ↗
Abstract
This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.
August 2023
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Abstract
The field of children’s literature has been adversely affected by the current alarming resurgence of book banning across the United States. Book banning has become the grandstanding stage for individuals on different political platforms to institute their desire to silence issues and people; most of these banned books share experiences that differ from mainstream white society. In their zest to muzzle others and create a dogmatic uniformity to a majority white mainstream, some parents and their political allies have targeted books they deem inappropriate, books that celebrate the kaleidoscope of races, cultures, and mores that make up the US. This essay examines the current wave of banning children’s books and the reasoning behind this trend. I argue that this trend of reader suppression seeks to silence minoritized voices and prevent critical conversations. Finally, I make a call to action for educators to share diverse stories so young readers, especially Black and Brown children, can see representations of themselves in books and other media.
May 2022
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“Swirling a Million Feelings into One”: Working-Through Critical and Affective Responses to the Holocaust through Comics ↗
Abstract
Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, affect theory, and critical literacy, this article explores comics made by three eighth-grade students in response to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. Students’ comics were developed through participatory research alongside their classroom teacher, a research team, and teacher candidates from a local university. These three students, Stella, Maisie, and Naomi, reacted strongly to the content of Maus and the comics medium, and raised questions around identity, representation, and the legibility of their often-intense emotional responses. We trace their affective engagements to explore how comic-making allowed students to represent feelings that are often difficult to make visible in school spaces. Our analysis highlights how affective critical literacy orients teaching and research toward working-through rather than resolving complicated emotions, allowing educators to recognize unanswered questions as forms of critical engagement.
May 2021
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Resisting and Negotiating Literacy Tasks: Agentive Practices of Two Adolescent Refugee-Background Multilingual Students ↗
Abstract
Student agency is an important construct for all students, especially those marginalized because of their linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency, we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection, agentive resistance of imposed identities, and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement, the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination, we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.
November 2018
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Abstract
In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.
May 2015
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Abstract
In this set of essays, the authors argue for the importance of affect and emotion in literacy education, teacher education, and classroom life. In the introduction, Boldt describes the authors’ shared belief in learning as happening within a landscape of relationships and emergent life in classrooms and beyond. The introduction makes clear that while the authors are writing from different intellectual traditions, they share a sense of anger about the fetishization of standardization, testing, and methods at the expense of ambiguity, improvisation, and unexpected, disruptive, and enlivening classroom relationships. In the first essay, Lewis demonstrates how emotion is regulated in a secondary English classroom and yet can never be fully regulated, giving rise to discomfort and to unexpected transformations of signs. In the second essay, Leander argues for a more emergent vision of lesson planning that begins with the body and its expression of energies and potentials in the present. In the final essay, Boldt urges that teachers be provided with opportunities to openly examine their negative emotional responses—including anxiety and, at times, aggression—to mismatches between children and what is required in a high-stakes environment. Throughout the essays, the authors enact rather than describe a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, laying their differences and their shared commitments side-by-side in the hope of creating for themselves and their readers new sets of relations and possibilities and, with those, the condition of potential for imagination and desire.
February 2015
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Abstract
Technology is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives in and out of schools, yet it escapes the sustained scrutiny of education researchers who contribute to the wider “orthodoxy of optimism” (Selwyn, 2014) accompanying all things technological. Challenging such orthodoxy begins with greater precision in language, replacing the broadness of technology with the more accurate specificity of software (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). This essay conceptually frames how software space—a term I use to refer to complex computational assemblages—affects the teaching of literature, arguing that software-powered technologies can be conducive to rigorous forms of literary study and research if they are used with an understanding of both the nature of software and the contexts in which software is produced and promoted. I draw on English education and related fields to propose the establishment of what I call new literatures.
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Editors’ Introduction: (Dis)orienting Spaces in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Affects, Ideologies, and Textual Objects ↗
Abstract
The editorial team introduces the February issue, which focuses on the affects, ideologies, and textual objects that influence the teaching and learning of English.
May 2014
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Abstract
While grand claims have been made for the power of literature, there is a dearth of experimental research in English education examining the effects of reading literature—and specifically young adult literature—on students’ attitudes and moral development. Little work of any kind has been done on the efficacy of literary interventions in reducing adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. In response, this study examined the capacity of a dialogically organized, reader response–based literary unit focused on the young adult novel Speak to reduce adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. An experimental design was used with eighth-grade English language arts students in seven classes that were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Rape myth acceptance was measured using the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (Burt, 1980) and a researcher-created scale, the Adolescent Rape Myth Scale (ARMS). Results revealed that girls had significantly lower levels of pretest rape myth acceptance than boys, that intervention significantly lowered participants’ rape myth acceptance, and that there was no backlash to treatment. Factor analysis revealed a two-component solution for the ARMS representing common rape myths; further analysis found that treatment was more effective in reducing the component She Wanted It than the component She Lied. The results demonstrate the instructional value of young adult literature, support the use of reader response–based dialogic instruction, and show it is possible to effectively address topics such as rape at the middle school level. I argue that future research should examine whether similar literary units can affect attitudinal constructs such as homophobia, tolerance of bullying, and attitudes toward disabilities. The potential marginalization of this type of literary instruction due to current educational reforms is also discussed.
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Embodied Composition in Real Virtualities: Adolescents’ Literacy Practices and Felt Experiences Moving with Digital, Mobile Devices in School ↗
Abstract
English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.
February 2014
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Abstract
Paradigms of writing instruction and of writing assessment are interconnected, and they are, or should be, affected by the sociocultural context in which they are embedded. In the case of writing assessment, the predominant context is the assessment of the writing proficiency of second- or third-language writers of English. Since the Second World War, English has taken a hold as the language of business and politics, and much of that interaction occurs between and among multiple groups who share only English as a common language. English is also dominantly the language of intellectual exchange, and English language tests are a critical component of decision-making about the movement of people from less-developed countries to countries where they can gain greater educational opportunity. English tests have great value. Everywhere in the world, English proficiency is one of the essential keys to unlock the door of educational opportunity and all that promises for an individual’s future. The assessment of writing is, then, socially and politically significant not only within a country’s internal struggles for opportunity for all through quality education, but also between nations.
November 2013
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Systems of Writing Response: A Brazilian Student’s Experiences Writing for Publication in an Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program ↗
Abstract
Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.
May 2013
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Learning to Write a Research Article: Ph.D. Students’ Transitions toward Disciplinary Writing Regulation ↗
Abstract
This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.
August 2011
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Subjectivity, Intentionality, and Manufactured Moves: Teachers’ Perceptions of Voice in the Evaluation of Secondary Students’ Writing ↗
Abstract
Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.
May 2011
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Abstract
In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.
May 2006
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Abstract
In the current research climate favoring rigorous experimental studies of instructional scripts using randomly chosen treatment and control groups, education and literacy researchers and policy makers will do well to take stock of their current research base and assess critical issues in this new context. This review of research on classroom discourse as it affects reading comprehension begins by examining 150 years of research on classroom discourse, and then findings and insights shaped by intensive empirical studies of both discourse processes and reading comprehension over the last three decades. Recent sociocultural and dialogic research supports claims that classroom discourse, including small-group work and whole-class discussion, works as an epistemic environment (versus script) for literacy development. New studies examine situated classroom talk in relation to educational outcomes and cultural categories that transcend the classroom.
February 2006
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Abstract
This conceptual essay employs psychoanalytic theory in exploring the difficulties the author’s son experienced in learning to read. Emphasizing the profoundly affective and subjective dimensions of one child’s movement toward and against literacy, the author considers the potential of psychoanalytic perspectives in helping teachers and researchers better understand and respond to children’s resistance to reading.
November 2004
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Second Language Acquisition for All: Understanding the Interactional Dynamics of Classrooms in Which Spanish and AAE Are Spoken ↗
Abstract
Understandings of the ways home and school languages shape classroom dynamics and influence development, identity, and subsequent school success are important for teachers of both bilingual and African American students. This article builds a link between these complementary bodies of research by analyzing interactions in a second grade mainstream classroom in which the language development of bilingual and African American children were simultaneously relevant. We focus on two qualitatively different kinds of classroom language use: when instruction was solely in English, and when Spanish became a tool for instruction. Our findings suggest that the latter language practice subsequently marginalized the participation of English monolingual students; this especially affected the African American students in the classroom, who were interactionally delegitimized as participants in bilingual interaction despite their desire to participate in both languages. This study suggests the need to ensure that multilingualism is brought into the classroom as a resource for all students. Recognizing this need, however, necessitates interdisciplinary research that crosses the fields of second language acquisition, bilingual education, and sociolinguistics. Such disciplinary boundary crossing can usefully inform teachers and researchers looking for new understandings of language learning in contemporary classrooms.
February 2001
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Abstract
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.
November 1999
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Abstract
Argues that the marginality of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) expatriate teachers exemplifies the postmodern condition affecting society at the end of the millennium. Uses the image of the paladin and its juxtaposition with the conceptual framework of postmodernity to generate new ways of thinking about issues in ESL/EFL teaching.
February 1999
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Abstract
Reflects on the notion of community in public life. Considers the importance of developing and sustaining affective relationships in the larger public sphere, engaging in civic literacy (publicly consequential acts of citizenship) complemented and sustained by civil literacy (characterized by a willingness to listen), supported by critical empathy (establishing affective connections with other human beings).
November 1998
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Abstract
Examines, using grounded theory methods, an interactive, televised writing course taught via Teletechnet, a distance-education program at Old Dominion University. Shows how technology affects a writing classroom and influences the construction of students as writers. Suggests that institutional contexts are reconfigured in televised instruction as virtual and material spaces that allow interesting tensions to emerge.
February 1997
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Abstract
Historically, the Bible has occupied a prominent—though sometimes disruptive—position in American education. The 1963 Bible study benchmark case, Abington v. Schempp (1963), ruled that the Bible is worthy of study, and that such study is constitutional. Both religious and educational organizations support a literary study of the Bible in public schools because it is great literature and because it is foundational for understanding Western culture. The purpose of this study was to determine the current, actual place of Bible literature in high school English classes and the reasons that affect its place. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods: survey, interviews, and observations. It included observations of three models of teaching Biblical literature: a) a full-year elective course, b) a required grade unit, and c) a Bible unit in a humanities course. The study found that Bible literature seems to play an extremely small role in high school literature programs. While 81% of high school English teachers reported it was important to teach some Bible literature, only 10% taught a Bible unit or course. High school textbooks average one fourth of one percent (.260%) from the Bible. Though 55% of college English instructors personally recommended that secondary English majors take a Biblical literature course, only 38% had done so. The wide gap between recommended study and actual study of the Bible is filled with misinformation, contradictory attitudes, and confusion. Two problems of teaching Bible literature are: dealing with religious beliefs and non-beliefs of teachers, parents, and students; and overcoming ignorance. Some college professors, administrators, English department chairs, and librarians did not know what Bible literature was taught in their schools or that teaching Bible literature was legal.
October 1994
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Confidence and Competence in Writing: The Role of Self-Efficacy, Outcome Expectancy, and Apprehension ↗
Abstract
This study investigated the relationships among self-confidence about writing, expected outcomes, writing apprehension, general self-confidence, and writing performance in 30 undergraduate preservice teachers over one semester. Results supported social cognitive theory and prior findings reporting a relationship between confidence in one’s writing abilities and subsequentw riting performance. A regression model consisting of the variables noted above and a pre-performance measure accounted for 68% of the variance in writing performance. Students’ beliefs about their own composition skills and the pre-performance measure were the only significant predictors. Writing apprehension was negatively correlated with writing self-confidence but was not predictive of writing performance. General self-confidence was correlated with writing self-confidence, expected outcomes, apprehension, and performance but was not predictive of writing performance in the regression model. Results and implications are discussed, especially as they relate to the need for context-specific assessments of confidence in one’s own capabilities and to pedagogical obligations.
February 1994
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Determining the Progression from Comfort to Confidence: A Longitudinal Evaluation of a National Writing Project Site Based on Multiple Data Sources ↗
Abstract
This study reports the results of a three-year longitudinal evaluation of a National Writing Project site and illustrates the value of using multiple sources of data to evaluate aspects of National Writing Project sites. We examined the immediate effects of the Summer Institute by looking at teachers’ reactions to writing process Instruction both before and after the Summer Institute. We also examined longrange effects by looking at how teachers implemented the writing process in their classrooms over an extended period following Institute participation. Results indicate that during the Summer Institute teachers moved from self-oriented concerns about the writing process to concerns about how this approach would influence students and fellow teachers. Results also indicate how attendance at the Summer Institute affected classroom practice. We conclude with implications and questions for further study.
December 1993
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Abstract
Most studies dealing with feedback and revision focus on teachers and students in composition courses. However, there is insufficient evidence for assuming that these studies are applicable to writing situations in non-composition courses. To investigate the writing processes of non-composition students, this study describes patterns of feedback and revision in four writing across the curriculum (WAC) courses. The first and final drafts of 20 WAC students were analyzed by a team of readers to determine the following: 1) the apparent aims and criteria underlying the feedback they received on first drafts; 2) the extent to which the students utilized this feedback while revising; 3) the criteria most affected by the revisions; and 4) the extent of the revisions. Several patterns that emerged in this study resemble those found in research involving composition classrooms, although there are some differences as well. The study also highlights several issues for future research, including the source of a writer’s or reader’s criteria for effective writing and the comparative value of global and non-global revisions.
February 1993
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Abstract
Researchers have frequently examined the effects of sentence combining (SC) practice upon writing and found positive results. Researchersh ave also investigatedt he effects of writing practice on reading comprehension. But these results have been mixed because of problems in design, the measures used, instructional variables, and the lack of a theoretical base to explain divergent outcomes. The purpose of the current study was to identify effects of SC practice upon reading comprehension and to determine whether cohesion knowledge would be augmented and, if so, whether enhanced cohesion knowledge would affect comprehension. Sixty- five grade 4 students met with a researcherf or 16 instructional sessions. Students in the experimental group devised narratives from sets of cued and uncued kernel sentences, while the control group read compiled narratives developed by the experimental group and then completed crossword puzzles, a “placebo” treatment. The study found statistically significant results on the Stanford Reading Test, positive results approaching significance on cloze passages with structure /function word deletions, but no positive results on passages with content word deletions. These results indicate that SC practice may have enhanced cohesion knowledge and general comprehension. They also suggest that children may effectively learn to attend to semantic and syntactic repetitions that form “chains of cohesion” following SC practice but not after merely reading the same texts.
October 1991
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Abstract
This article examines the kinds of instruction that foster student engagement with literature and the effects of such instruction on achievement. First, two general kinds of student engagement are distinguished: “procedural,” which concerns classroom rules and regulations, and “substantive,” which involves sustained commitment to the content and issues of academic study. The article then describes the manifestations of these two forms of engagement, explains how they relate differently to student outcomes, and offers some empirical propositions using data on literature instruction from 58 eighth-grade English classes. The results provide support for three hypotheses: (a) Disengagement adversely affects achievement; (b) Procedural engagement has an attenuated relationship to achievement because its observable indicators conflate procedural and substantive engagement; and (c) Substantive engagement has a strong, positive effect on achievement. Features of substantively engaging instruction include authentic questions, or questions which have no prespecified answers; uptake, or the incorporation of previous answers into subsequent questions; and high-level teacher evaluation, or teacher certification and incorporation of student responses into subsequent discussion. Each of these is noteworthy because they all involve reciprocal interaction and negotiation between students and teachers, which is said to be the hallmark of substantive engagement.
February 1991
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Abstract
This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.
May 1990
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A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report ↗
Abstract
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