With a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices, we examined what 120 preservice secondary English language arts teachers (PSETs) considered to be “useful” and “appropriate” feedback to English learner (EL) writers by analyzing posts to an online database of student writing and teacher feedback. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and sought to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they ultimately equated useful feedback with error correction. PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, but they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development and could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the student’s proficiency level. Furthermore, PSETs largely ignored ELA content and attributed appropriate EL feedback to teacher bilingualism rather than recognizing the need to learn about ELs’ interests and backgrounds. We suggest equipping PSETs with skills to learn about ELs and leveraging extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.

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Although multiple studies have found that peer review is an effective instructional practice for the teaching of academic writing in K–12 settings, little research exists that documents students’ views of peer review and the features that make peer review tasks useful or challenging for writing development. In this study, we investigated high school students’ perceptions of peer review through a questionnaire administered to 513 students from four schools who had used SWoRD, an online peer review system. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our findings demonstrate that most students viewed peer review as helpful to their writing development and that students consistently viewed three features of the SWoRD peer review system as most beneficial: anonymity of writers and reviewers, opportunities to review other students’ writing, and feedback from multiple readers. Students reported difficulty with managing conflicting reviews and wording their feedback. Our study contributes to existing research on peer review of writing by suggesting that secondary peer review activities would be more helpful to students if they considered students’ concerns about social positioning and face-saving, allowed writers to receive feedback from multiple reviewers, and taught students how to manage conflicting reviews. Additionally, our study suggests that the benefits of reviewing have been greatly underestimated in existing research and that students would benefit from more opportunities to give, as well as receive, feedback on academic writing.

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.

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 &amp; 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.

In response to growing concerns among faculty regarding the lack of attention to the bilingual student population in our pre-service teacher education program, the authors engaged in a shared self-study of the process of revising and implementing a secondary English methods course with explicit attention to the special needs of bilingual/bicultural learners. The paper describes how the second author, an English educator, with support from the first author, a mentor/colleague in bilingual education, identified and negotiated tensions and dilemmas that arose in a process of curricular transformation toward culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education practice. The study highlights several points of disjuncture, or critical turning points, experienced by the English educator and the ways in which she navigated the contradictions that resulted at these points of disjuncture through conversation with her mentor. Our documentation and articulation of this process may assist content area teacher educators in negotiating new knowledge and creating strategies for managing the dilemmas in practice that arise in the design and implementation of revised course curricula aimed at supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

The concepts of drafting and revision were developed out of process theory and research done in the early 1980s, an era when word processing was not as pervasive or standardized as it is now. This paper reexamines those concepts, drawing on an analysis of two decades of previous college-level studies of writing processes in relation to word processing and an exploratory survey of 112 upper-level undergraduate students who use computers extensively to write and revise. The results support earlier studies that found students’ revision is predominantly focused on local issues. However, the analysis suggests that the common classroom practice of assigning multiple drafts to encourage global revision needs to be rethought, as more drafts are not necessarily associated with global revision. The survey also suggests that printing out to revise may be on the decline. Finally, the analysis suggests the very concept of a draft is becoming more fluid under the influence of word processing. The study calls for further research on students’ drafting and revision practices using more representative surveys and focused qualitative studies.

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

In this archaeological investigation of the work of Louise Rosenblatt, we read and highlighted all text-level differences between the 1st (1938) and 5th (1995) editions of Literature as Exploration. We categorized each type of revision, traced a sample of each to the edition in which the change was made, and then extended our analysis to 70 passages.

In a benchmark meta-analysis of experimental research findings from 1962 to 1982, Hillocks (1986) reported the varying effects of general modes of instruction and specific instructional activities (foci) on the quality of student writing. The main purpose of the present study was to explore the relative effectiveness of those modes and foci using a non-experimental methodology and a new group of 16 teachers and 275 students in grades 1, 3–6, and 8. Teachers who had attended a summer writing institute reported on 17 different instructional variables that were primarily derived from the meta-analysis during each week of a ten-week treatment period that occurred at the beginning of the next school year. A pre- and post- treatment large-scale writing assessment was used with a prompt that allowed latitude in student choice of topic and extra time for prewriting and/or revision. Large gains in quality and quantity were found in the lower grades (1, 3, and 4) and smaller gains were found in the middle grades (5, 6, and 8). The demographic variables of SES, primary language, residence, and gender were found to have small and/or insignificant relationships to gains. Teacher-determined combinations of instructional variables and their relationship to gains in quality were investigated through factor analysis while controlling for pretreatment individual differences. Only one combination of activities was associated with large gains, and it was interpretable as the environmental mode of instruction. This combination included inquiry, prewriting, writing about literature, and the use of evaluative scales.

The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

Current scholarship indicates that most writing students read and make use of teachers’ written comments on their drafts and find some types of comments more helpful than others. But the research is unclear about which comments students find most useful and why. This article presents the results of a survey of 142 first- year college writing students’ perceptions about teacher comments on a writing sample. A 40-item questionnaire was used to investigate students’ reactions to three variables of teacher response: focus, specificity, and mode. The survey found that these college students seemed equally interested in getting responses on global matters of content, purpose, and organization as on local matters of sentence structure, wording, and correctness, but were wary of negative comments about ideas they had already expressed in their text. It also found that these students favored detailed commentary with specific and elaborated comments, but they did not like comments that sought to control their writing or that failed to provide helpful criticism for improving the writing. They most preferred comments that provided employed open questions, or included explanations that guided revision.

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This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

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.

This study investigated the effectiveness of an approach to improving revising skills that integrated strategy instruction, peer response, and word processing. Seventh and eighth grade students with learning disabilities were taught a systematic strategy for working in pairs to help each other revise their writing. The strategy was designed to guide students in both the social and cognitive aspects of response and revision. Cognitive support included a set of evaluation criteria, specific revision strategies, and an overall strategy for regulating the revision process. Social interaction was guided by a predictable structure for listening and responding to each others’ writing. A multiple probe design across pairs was used to assess instruction. On the pretests, students made few substantive revisions and did not improve the quality of their papers by revising them. Following instruction, all students made more substantive revisions, the proportion of revisions rated as improvements increased from 47% to 83%, and second drafts were rated as significantly better than first drafts. Furthermore, the overall quality of final drafts increased substantially from pretests to posttests. The gains were maintained at one and two-month maintenance testing and generalized to handwritten compositions.

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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.

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