(ตอนที่ 2)Computers, writing, and language learning 145
In addition to the implications they have for what we teach, new tech¬nologies also have influenced the ways we teach, providing alternative ap¬proaches to traditional materials and methodologies. Word processors, for instance, provide composing environments which facilitate writing by mak¬ing drafting, revising, and editing much easier and quicker. This obviously offers opportunities for learners to engage with the creative process of con¬struction and for teachers to help make their writing processes more trans¬parent and effective (e.g., Pennington, 1993).
Similarly, the enormous possibilities for remote communications which technology has opened up enable teachers to link students to a far greater range of information, advice, and people than was ever possible before. The Internet now makes it feasible for learners to collect and publish texts online and to extend their communicative experiences beyond the classroom (e.g., Dudeny, 2000), while classroom networks increase interaction between stu¬dents for brainstorming and peer feedback more locally (e.g., Knobel et al, 1998). Some key teaching possibilities in these areas are the ability of students to utilize online information as resources for writing (Taylor and Ward, 1998), to post their writing on the Internet for peer feedback, to com¬municate electronically with "keypals" or via chat sites, to draw on corpus or research data, or to participate in online writing workshops.
It is important to recognize, however, that computers are no more likely to bring about learning improvements by themselves than other teaching tools such as blackboards, overhead projectors, or video players. Technology is not a method but a resource which can support a variety of approaches (Warschauer, 2002). Like all tools and methodologies, it is the ways they are used that can change student writing behaviors. Nor do our uses of technologies simply reflect changes in technology. As I noted in Chapter 1, methods and approaches always reflect beliefs about teaching and learning which are influenced by current broad perspectives of language teaching.
Warschauer and Kern (2000) have recently argued that the use of comput-ers in language teaching reflects a move from structural through cognitive to sociocognitive orientations to teaching. The earliest CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) programs were consistent with a structuralist model which emphasized grammar and vocabulary drill and practice activ¬ities with the computer acting as a tutor. In line with cognitivist conceptions of learning, the second generation of CALL shifted agency to learners by requiring them to use computers to solve problems and navigate through simulated environments. Current uses reflect sociocognitive approaches, shifting "the dynamic from learners' interaction with computers to inter¬action with other humans via the computer" (ibid., 11). Warshauer and Kern observe that these shifts in perspectives and methods have paralleled
146 New technologies in writing instruction
developments in technology from the mainframe, to the personal, to the networked computer.
This characterization of the ways that theory and technology interact in language teaching reflects definite trends in computer-mediated learning toward the view that learning depends on exposure to authentic language and using language for communication. But despite this, computers are still being used in a variety of different ways in L2 writing classes: as instructors, as communication tools, and as informants about language. The following sections explore these different uses in more detail.
Reflection 6.1
Based on your own experience and the brief overview given above, what do you think might be the main advantages and drawbacks of computers in the L2 writing class? Which of the uses mentioned above would you feel most comfortable in using with a writing class and why?
Word processing and writing teaching
Perhaps the most immediately obvious feature of computer-based writing is the way that electronic text facilitates composing, dramatically changing our writing habits and laying bare the processes that we use to create texts. Commonplace word processing features allow us to cut and paste, delete and copy, check spelling and grammar, import images, change formatting, and print to publishable quality, all of which mean that our texts are now generally longer, prettier, and more heavily revised. The ability of these programs to create and manipulate text easily was immediately taken up by writing teachers so that word processing is the most widely accepted and researched use of computers in education today. The impact of word processing on writing has been so great, in fact, that other uses of computers in L2 writing instruction are sometimes neglected entirely (e.g., Ferris and Hedgecock, 1998).
Features of word processors
The interest in the word processor stems from the fact that it is an en¬vironment which encourages users to experiment with different means of expression and organization. Liberated from linear constraints, writers can play around with the text until they are satisfied with the result, and this
Word processing and writing teaching 147
Table 6.1: Potential pros and cons of word processor writing
Advantages
Disadvantages
Greater motivation - more writing time
More revisions
Greater development of content
improvements in quality
Removal of handwriting barriers
Awareness of writing as a process
Greater fluency and accuracy
Longer compositions
Increased experimentation with language
Increased focus on surface features Increased anxiety Local revisions rather than global Premature completion of work Decreased writer collaboration Increased plagiarism and cheating Quantity at the expense of quality Preoccupation with physical appearance Isolation of student writers
flexibility initially suggested that this might encourage students to write more, and with more care, than with traditional methods. Unfortunately, this optimism was quickly dispelled as improvements in student writing turned out to be slow and limited. Research has produced mixed results. Some studies have confirmed that the medium improved students' atti¬tudes to writing and led to increased revisions and improved products (e.g., Snyder, 1993). Others have discovered little difference between hand-writers and computer-writers, or even that the medium inhibits writers and restricts their composing and revising (e.g., Gerrard, 1989). Table 6.1 summarizes some of the major findings of L2 word processed writing (Hawisher and Selfe,-1989; Pennington, 1996; Pennington and Brock, 1989).
These inconsistent findings on the role and impact of word processors are influenced by both variations in participants and contexts, but it is doubtful whether such studies can ever tell us much of interest. While word pro¬cessors may make writing easier, they are only machines and no inherent advantages can be directly attributed to them. As I noted above, writing cannot be developed by new tools but only by proper instruction, and this involves providing learners with appropriate tasks and support. In fact, ar¬guments about the effectiveness of word processors in improving writing have become largely irrelevant as writing is now increasingly produced on computers by necessity, particularly in business and university settings. As with most arguments about technology, the important issue is not whether we should use it, but rather how it can best be used.
Reflection 6.2
What changes do you think word processing has made to the ways you write? How might you use your understanding of writing with a word processor to develop students' writing with computers?
148 New technologies in writing instruction
Word processors in the writing class
Computers do not replace teachers. As with conventional composing, stu¬dents need help to improve their writing. Instruction should therefore both support student writing and be related to their goals, with teaching oriented to the following general principles (Hyland, 1993):
1. A training in keyboard skills and word processing software
2. The provision of explicit instruction in computer composition
3. The integration of computer writing activities into the writing course
4. The provision of opportunities for collaboration and peer support
Obviously students can only write freely on computers if they feel com¬fortable with the software, can exploit its potential, and are not deterred by typing. A central aspect of writing effectively on computers therefore involves learning basic computer literacy and understanding what the soft¬ware can offer, but writing teachers do not generally devote much time to these skills. Although L2 students now tend to be "computer savvy" and fa¬miliar enough with word processors to be free of any anxiety in using them, even the most experienced users often fail to take advantage of many of their capabilities for revision and editing (Susser, 1998). Successful adaptation to the word processor is more likely if composition classes incorporate a familiarization course in keyboarding and basic skills. The most useful of these direct students' attention away from a fixation on local editing, such as cursor moves and block text moves, delete and restore text, scrolling and split screen functions, which encourage more global editing. Help in using the thesaurus, and spelling and grammar checkers is also essential to avoid an overreliance on these very fallible features and then ad hoc, de-contextualized advice.
Reflection 6.3
What are the potential dangers of L2 writers developing an over-reliance on thesaurus, spelling and grammar checking tools? Can you think of any tasks that might help students recognize these dangers and use these features cautiously?
In addition, to write on word processors, students must be provided with ways to generate, revise, and organize material on them. Word processors facilitate rapid, nonlinear drafting by removing the apprehension created by the need to produce clear, accurate prose at the first attempt, but students tend to get bogged down in detailed tinkering. Techniques such as oral dictation,
Word processing and writing teaching 149
SLAWG.RTF
▼ A
Slang in My Language
A person in my language who do not use slang
Questa # 9 of 10 - Checking for Grammar
Check aii the articles you use in your paper. Articles are a, an, and the. Find an example of a count noun and a non-count noun in your paper.
A count noun is person in my first sentence. A person in my language who do not use slang would be funny. Person use the article a. Person is a count noun.
Slang is not a count noun. I cannot count slangs. Slang does not have an article a or an because it is not a count
Previous
Next
Explain
Close
Source: Daedalus, 1997.
Figure 6.1: The revision heuristic program Respond.
brainstorming, and focused freewriting, which force learners to type quickly, can help them get ideas out and build the confidence to put errors right later. Editing can be assisted by the fact that word processors facilitate the jumbling and rearrangement of texts, so that the kinds of transformation, substitution, insertion, reordering, and text completion tasks discussed in Chapter 5 are easily converted to the computer (Hyland, 1990).
Teachers can also use revision heuristics, an example of which is pro¬vided by the Respond module of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Suite (Daedalus, 1997). This steers students through an evaluative process using a series of teacher modifiable prompts as they revise their drafts. As shown in Figure 6.1, the questions appear in the upper half of a window and students respond in the lower half while consulting their texts in another window. Switching back and forth between windows, students can work indepen¬dently through the prompts and refer to the original text to make comments.
The third pillar of support involves effectively integrating word process¬ing with other activities and within the writing course itself. Word proces¬sors are valuable teaching tools, but if writing classes only involve writing
150 New technologies in writing instruction
and writing only occurs in the computer lab, then lack of variety is likely to stultify learning. Intelligent scheduling of computer use is essential to provide adequate access to computers for students, both within and out¬side class time, while ensuring that computers do not come to dominate activities. Research suggests that computer sessions tend to be more pro¬ductive when conducted as writing workshops, allowing students to receive individual attention from a roving teacher and plenty of time to focus on their writing (e.g., Bernhardt et al., 1989). Dividing class sessions between classrooms and regular use of the computer lab enables in-class instruction and discussions to take place as pre-writing and post-writing work, while providing frequent and productive opportunities for writing in a structured and supportive context.
Reflection 6.4
What are some of the potential advantages in holding a writing class exclusively in a computer lab using word processors? What are the advantages of using a mixture of both a lab and regular classroom?
Finally, students often prefer to work on their texts alone when using word processors and teachers may need to encourage cooperation through joint assignments, collaborative writing tasks, and opportunities for peer feedback. While writing involves individual effort, there are clear benefits to students sharing both their texts and experiences with others as they grow as writers, and word processors can facilitate this. The computer screen, for example, is a more public space than a page of paper, providing access to a text by a small group working together. Collaboration is also fostered by the ease and speed of distributing electronic files and hard copies of texts for comments and reworking. Most word processors allow revisions by multiple authors to be tracked in different colors. Microsoft Word, for instance, displays the name and comment of each reviewer in a separate window when the cursor is moved to the text. Collaboration is most fully achieved, however, only with computers through online writing.
Online writing
Word processors are important writing and teaching instruments but they do not fully exploit available technologies for writing and communication. This is partly because word processors are, in a sense, only transitional tools which prepare texts that will eventually be translated back into ink
Online writing 151
on paper, whereas much written communication is now entirely electronic, employing hypertext environments with their own conventions and genres. Second, and more importantly for writing teachers, word processors fail to make use of the advantages of connectivity that technology now offers. A powerful extension of the computer's role in writing instruction is achieved through networked computers. This comprises:
• Synchronous writing, where students communicate in real time via dis¬cussion software on Local Area Networks or Internet chat sites with all participants at their computers at the same time.
• Asynchronous writing, where students communicate in a delayed way, such as via email.
Reflection 6.5
To what different kinds of writing and communication tasks might these two forms of interaction best be suited? Are students more likely to prefer one type over the other? Why?
Synchronous writing environments
Teachers sometimes observe that when using word processors students tend to work in relative isolation with minimal interaction with other students. Absorbed by the machine and concentrating on the development of their own texts, they rarely discuss their unfolding prose or exchange ideas to gain a deeper understanding of texts, audiences, and their fellow students. Linking computers together attempts to build on the advantages of individ¬ual machines through learner collaboration. This reflects both educational theory (Vygotsky, 1962) and research (e.g., Gere, 1987) which suggest that learning is improved through collaboration. Students appear to value peer support while actually composing, rather than simply receiving comments on written products (F. Hyland, 2000), and this also seems to benefit the revi¬sion practices of reviewers themselves by helping them to gain an increased awareness of their own writing processes (Stoddard and MacArthur, 1993).
Reflection 6.6
How might networked synchronous interaction improve students' writing? What kinds of activities, discussion tasks, and topics might make best use of this approach?
152 New technologies in writing instruction
LAN conferencing software
A Local Area Network (LAN) is a number of computers linked through a server for the purpose of sharing information. It offers real-time con¬ferencing between students or between students and teacher in a "virtual environment" which encourages greater peer involvement and interaction than in non-networked contexts. Networks are used in writing classes to pro¬vide for synchronous writing discussions, online teacher feedback, and peer conferencing on texts. These communication contexts require specialized writing software such as CommonSpace, Interchange (Daedalus, 1997) or ytalk, which allow students to simultaneously co-construct a discourse.
Such programs typically display two windows. The bottom portion is the student's writing space where he or she can compose a contribution before clicking the "send" button to post it to the network. The top window is a shared read-only space where posted messages appear sequentially in a continuous flow preceded by the poster's log-in name. While they cannot alter anything in the conference window, students can usually paste text from it into their own window which allows them to respond easily to a specific part of a message. In some programs, a third window allows smaller groups to break off and hold discussions separately from the main conference, a useful facility for peer review sessions. Figure 6.2 shows an L2 chat session on Bridge, a chat program run by Washington State University.
LANs have been slow to attract research interest, although many teachers claim that they increase both the quantity of student writing and the amount of student interaction. Clearly networks potentially have advantages for teaching writing that go well beyond those of word processing (Swaffer et al., 1998). The fact that students have relative autonomy and are interact¬ing for a genuine purpose encourages writing. However, if discussions get lively, then messages fly past at a rapid rate and weaker students are forced to catch up, making the sequence of contributions difficult to follow (e.g„ Braine and Yorozu, 1998). Table 6.2 summarizes the pros and cons of LANs.
Electronic conferencing is probably most effective when used as a sus¬tained learning activity with clear goals and teacher support. The following comments by teachers on their experiences of using LAN conferencing soft¬ware in writing classes, taken from discussions on the online bulletin boards Neteach-L and Teach, suggest some of the problems and possibilities:
I find conferencing on computers fast-paced and conversational. It takes a little time to get used to, and I've generally had a few lurkers early in the semester. I've also had a class or two that could not stay on task at all and moved into somewhat juvenile flaming. Students learn quickly that the teacher cannot control the conversation -which can be great in some circumstances.
Online writing 153
Generally, I've used Interchange as a substitute for face-to-face class discussion, on the premise that students writing their comments are students learning the reality of audience and gaining practice in expressing their opinions through text. I am not too directive and the free-wheeling conversations have functioned well as heuristic and planning sessions, moving from a discussion of an assigned reading into trying out some of their ideas for essays.
In my session tonight I asked the students to reflect on the essay they just completed (three drafts). I asked them what they thought of the writing task, what was difficult, what was easy, what do they think they did well and not so well, what they would do if they had more time to work on the essay. We did this for about 45 minutes. Most responses were on task. A traditional discussion on those questions would not have lasted as long, nor elicited comments from as many students.
I use CMC for focused discussion; I remind students that they are working in a writing medium and encourage a degree of formality. After the conference I sort the transcripts by student, and show each of them how much work they've done toward an essay. In this way their transcripts can function as drafts, because I've fed them questions to answer in Interchange in a sequence that produces essays.
Internet conferencing resources
An obvious problem with specialist software is that access is restricted to sites with the program installed, and this can make it difficult to find a lab for
CTLT Chat
rdueben
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corinna] ni-hao
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154 New technologies in writing instruction
Table 6.2: Potential advantages and disadvantages of networked writing instruction
Potential advantages
Potential disadvantages
• Allows ail users equal rights and opportunities
• Encourages weaker and shy students to participate
• Decentralizes teacher role
• Facilitates more student talk
• Encourages interaction and sense of audience
• Minimizes social cues such as color, age, gender, and accent and so encourages participation
• Teachers can discreetly moderate small-group work
• Provides conference printouts for students to develop ideas or consider feedback later
• Hard copy of transcripts gives teachers a record of individual participation
Unclear whether it improves writing
quality
Rapid addition of messages means flow
is disjointed and incoherent to learners
Weaker students unable to keep up with
fast scrolling messages
Relinquishing of teacher authority may
lead to reduction in constructive
discussion
Lack of physical co-presence among
students may mitigate against careful
feedback
Feedback is not sustained or developed,
1 or 2 lines only
Technophobic students may fail to
participate
Requires access to labs with network
software and so restricts out-of-class
work.
classes and for students to work outside of the classroom. A solution to this is to go online and communicate through a chat site, a MOO (Multi-user, Object Oriented text-based virtual reality site), or a group site. These do not usually have the features of specialized writing software, but they are free, open up the possibility of long-distance exchanges, and facilitate writing for unknown audiences.
Perhaps the most widely used synchronous chat resource is ICQ (ICQ.com), an onomatopoetic acronym for I Seek You. This is a free program that allows conferencing at any time with groups of two or more participants. Users can initiate chats, page other registered users, be notified when other users are online, and save their interactions. Figure 6.3 shows an example from an L2 ICQ session.
A MOO is different in that users navigate around and interact with other online participants in a virtual space. Lingua MOO at http://lingua. utdallas.edu/ offers a good introduction to this writing format. A good teaching MOO environment is Tapped In (http://www.tappedin.org). This is a virtual building where teachers can have free offices and conduct classes there with their students with transcripts of interactions emailed to the teacher after logging out (see Figure 6.4). Some group chat sites provide for synchronous text interaction and those such as Yahoo! groups
Online writing 155
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Figure 6,3: Synchronous chat among L2 students on ICQ.
(http://groups.yahoo.com) provide good environments for classwork as they allow teachers to place controls on who can join the group and who can post messages, although transcripts of discussions cannot be kept.
Like any other teaching approach, Computer Mediated Communication needs careful thought before being implemented. While this can be a moti¬vating environment for writing, relinquishing control to learners can result in short, undeveloped contributions and may degenerate into off-task per¬sonal exchanges. In fact, the absence of co-presence can weaken interaction norms and result in aggressive or antisocial "flaming." More importantly, there is, as yet, no conclusive evidence that networked communication ac¬tually leads to an improvement in written products. Although it is great for collaborative writing and exchanging ideas on writing projects, teachers are still experimenting with ways of making the best use of this tool for writing instruction.
Reflection 6.7
How would you use synchronous communication as a tool for writing teach-ing? How would you ensure that discussions were focused and how would you facilitate interaction? Would you monitor interaction and what would be the best way to do this? What kind of writing assignments would you set?
156 New technologies in writing instruction
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Asynchronous writing environments
Asynchronous, or time-delayed, communication using networked comput¬ers includes email, news groups, and conferencing software. Its main ad¬vantage for L2 writing teachers is that the nonsynchronicity of the commu¬nication means that a text can be composed and edited prior to transmission at a more leisurely pace, rather than being co-constructed by participants. This tends to mean more reflective and considered responses with greater participation from less proficient students. Topics change less rapidly and contributions do not rush past in an incoherent sequence so that responses are typically more thoughtful, more carefully edited, and more closely reflect conventions of written communication.
Email is likely to be familiar to many students as text files that can be read, saved, edited, and forwarded to other users. It is a useful tool for writ¬ing instruction as it allows teachers to set up both classroom interaction and long-distance exchanges, encouraging students to focus on fluency and meaning while writing for a real audience and purpose. Within a single class,
Online writing 157
most information gap tasks can be accomplished by email, encouraging written accuracy and clarity of expression. In addition, the fact that writers can respond to parts of an email, delete unnecessary parts, and then send it on to another student allows question-answer sessions or serial stories to be developed. A slightly more ambitious use is to establish discussion groups, putting all group members into a collective "alias" so that stu¬dents can send an email message to their classmates simultaneously, dis¬cussing ideas, exchanging vocabulary lists, passing on useful Websites, and so on.
The creation of such online learning communities can also encourage collaboration and a sense of what it means to write for an unknown audi¬ence beyond the classroom. Email is an effective medium for intercultural exchanges and collaborative writing projects between students in differ¬ent countries, perhaps even assisting L2 learners corresponding with native speakers to notice and incorporate LI discourse patterns into their writing (Davis and Thiede, 2000). As a result, a growing number of teachers now use email for class projects with great success. A list of sources for arrang¬ing keypals is given in Appendix 6.1, and ideas for using email in L2 writing classes can be found in Warschauer (1995).
Reflection 6.8
How might keypals be used as a resource in the writing class? What kinds of assignments would be appropriate and what would be interesting cross-cultural topics for keypal exchanges?
Another form of asynchronous communication us.ed by L2 writing teach¬ers is discussion lists (or mailing lists). Each list has its own purpose and scope and serves to connect people with similar interests. Subscribers send questions, opinions, announcements, responses, and other informa¬tion of interest to members via email to the list and these are distributed to all other members. Lists can be an excellent way of communicating with fellow teachers to exchange information, get advice, or keep up to date with conferences or new ideas. Most lists have archives organized by themes (or threads) which allow subscribers to refer to previous top¬ics of interest. There are also student lists where learners can communi¬cate with others with the same interests, do their own cross-cultural stud¬ies, conduct research projects, and so on. Again, some sources are given
158 New technologies in writing instruction
in Appendix 6.1, while a good introduction for teachers is Kenji Kitao (www. ling, lanes. ac.uk/staff/visitors/kenj i/kitao).
Internet resources for writing
The Internet is a massive online database that gives users access to several hundred million multimedia documents, an overwhelming abundance which may make it seem like we are quenching our thirst for information by drinking from a firehose. This vast source of information has also changed many aspects of writing teaching. Not only does the Internet facilitate the modes of computer-mediated communication discussed in the last section, it also enables both teachers and learners to easily find and read online texts which provide (a) data for projects; (b) information, tasks, and materials for classes; (c) authentic language for analysis; and (d) a place for students to publish their work.
The Internet as a source of content
Perhaps the Internet's most widely used role is as a research source, pro¬viding students with data that they can use in writing assignments. Its vast stock of statistics and information provide a rich source of data on the envi¬ronment, economics, literature, politics, current affairs, entertainment, pop culture, and so on which can be used in essays or writing projects. In addi¬tion to independent cyber searches, teachers can set guided information-gap tasks which require learners to treasure hunt for specific information. Thus, students can surf the Web or trawl specific Websites to collect information, about celebrities, travel destinations, and so on to complete a worksheet. Books by Windeatt, Hardisty, and Eastment (2000) and Dudeney (2000) provide a number of ideas for these kinds of Internet tasks. Figure 6.5, for instance, encourages students to analyze the content and style of different online newspapers.
Teachers need to be aware, however, that this immense retrieval poten¬tial of computers also offers opportunities for writers to construct texts from other texts without acknowledgment and even the chance to simply download complete essay-length responses to familiar assignment topics. Sites such as Evil house of cheat (www.cheathouse.com), 12,000 term pa¬pers (www.12000papers.com), and cheater.com all distribute plagiarized papers. The battle has been engaged on the other side by sites such as pla-giarism.org and turnitin.com which offer "document source analyses" of submitted papers, comparing them against millions of texts on the net and documenting similarities.
Internet resources for writing 159
Electronic newspaper 1 Electronic newspaper 2
Are the headlines the same?
Are there any photos to accompany the article? Are they the same?
Are the captions to the photos different?
Are the stories the same length?
Is the beginning of the story the same in each newspaper?
Is the conclusion the same?
Does one story have more direct speech than the other?
Are the same facts reported in both articles?
Do the articles emphasize different aspects of the story?
Is one article more "personal" than the other? Is one more "factual"?
Is one article easier to understand than the other? Is the language easier?
Source: Windeatt, Hardisty, and Eastment, 2000:1.7.
Figure 6.5: Web-task writing awareness worksheet.
Reflection 6.9
What Websites are you familiar with which might serve as useful resources for a writing class? What genres or writing tasks could they assist students to complete?
The Internet as a source of language data
An alternative way of exploiting this wealth of textual material is to collect and analyze the patterns of language it contains, drawing on journalistic, business, scientific, or academic texts as language corpora which can pro¬vide insights into written genres. There are excellent reasons for study¬ing real data, and online editions of newspapers, magazines, and academic
160 New technologies in writing instruction
papers make it fairly easy to collect large amounts of specific and rele¬vant machine-readable English language texts, although copyright laws may complicate their long-term storage. A database of authentic writing of this kind can help us to understand features of written language and make these salient to our students. With the help of concordancing software (discussed below) it can also give the computer an informant role, allowing learners to see the ways in which language is typically used in their target genres.
The Internet as a source of language learning materials
In addition to the resources it contains for researching content and compiling corpora, the Internet is also a rich source of language learning materials and advice on writing. There are now hundreds of sites with quizzes, puzzles, grammar activities, and writing tips for L2 students. These sites generally offer an attractive interface and varied tasks and options for learning and interacting, although their use of multimedia is generally poor and many sites tend toward repetitive and mechanical exercises.
Among the most useful Websites for L2 writing teachers are the On-Line Writing Labs (OWLs) hosted by many university language centers or rhetoric departments. These sites often focus on academic writing, but typ¬ically have links to other sites. In addition to online information and tasks, OWLs may allow teachers to register and download handouts and tutor man¬uals. Some of the best of these sites are given in Appendix 6.1, and a list of over 200 U.S. writing centers can be found at the National Writing Cen¬tres Association (http://departments.colgate.edu/diw/NWCAOWLS.html). As with all sources of materials, however, teachers need to be sure of its accuracy and that they agree with its approach before recommending it to students. Figure 6.6 shows a screenshot from the Purdue University OWL, providing information on writing a research report.
The Internet as a publishing outlet
Finally, the Internet provides an alternative outlet for students to publish their work. This gives them the satisfaction and pride of displaying their writing for a potentially enormous audience and encourages greater care in presenting their texts. Student magazines such as Write Now! are possible outlets for student writing, or Web-sawy teachers can set up class Web pages or encourage students to create their own sites to post their work. There are now numerous Websites that provide advice and examples to help new users create Websites, and several Internet Service Providers (ISPs - the
Internet resources for writing 161
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Audience analysis
Who Is my audience and what will they expect?
It is important to consider your audience before you begin and while you write your research report so that your report will adequately communicate your research and its significance to your readers. For instance, if you don't consider your readers' needs, you might use language that they don't understand or you might explain the background of your work in too much or too little detail. It is best to think of the audience for your research report as peers in your immediate discipline or in a discipline closely related to your subject. This Is true even when you write a report for a class that will be graded by an Instructor rather than read by other researchers.
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If you are writing a research report for a teacher, the greatest challenge you face in writing your report is to write as though ,
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Figure 6.7: A Mindgame activity encouraging awareness of succinct expressions.
and learner psychology. Consequently, there has been a wide gap between much CALL software and current communicative teaching methods.
Programs that exclusively address writing are relatively rare as software developers have tended to focus on what computer programs do best: re-lieving teachers of grammar and vocabulary drill and practice tasks. These can take many imaginative forms, such as Mindgame1 (Figure 6.7) which requires players to answer a language question each time they capture a piece from their opponent, with questions frequently repeated for reinforcement. Such programs offer interesting variations on scaffolding tasks. Although they need to be carefully integrated to ensure their relevance to particular genres and purposes, these tasks frequently offer more entertaining ways of building language competence than those found in textbooks. They also allow students to learn and practice at their own pace and receive instant feedback on their understanding of words or grammar rules.
Writing programs themselves tend to be very procedural, guiding student users through exercises to help them identify the features they need to create
1 I am grateful to Andrew Stokes and Clarity Language Consultants of Hong Kong for permission to reproduce the screenshots in this section.
164 New technologies in writing instruction
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Figure 6.8: Constructing a recount essay from notes and grammar help in Click into English.
particular kinds of texts. A good example is Click into English developed for the Australian Adult Migrant Education Service (Figure 6.8).
This program is unusual in that it follows a genre approach, with a series of instructional sequences built around model texts from different genres. Each sequence highlights structural, stylistic, or grammatical features of the genre and leads the learner through a series of screens with different practice and self-test multiple choice, gap-fill, and drag and drop activities. The program is self-paced and interactive, allowing students to recall the text at any time, get instant feedback on their answers, consult pop-up screens for genre information and usage advice, and access a dictionary through hyperlinks in the text itself. Like many programs, Click into English provides an environment for students to work either alone or with teacher support. Most software, however, is best used when students work collaboratively to maximize human interaction and when the software is integrated into a coherent writing program employing writing assignments and noncomputer activities.
A specialized writing program is Report Writer, designed to help more advanced students with the organization, style, and grammar of special¬ized professional genres. There are different versions of the program for
CALL resources for writing 165
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Identify the efrors in this checklist, then read the letters they come from in the Letter Bank to see if you were right. Finally, check that you have not made any of these errors in your letter!
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technical or business reports and for letters, faxes, and emails. In this pro¬gram students are led through each step as they write a particular type of report or letter, following online prompts supported by pop-up advice on the purpose of each stage and explanatory notes on key language, style, and content. Students also have access to a resource bank of models which they can paste into their own report. The technical report program, for in¬stance, begins with typical forms of report titles with definitions of key words such as describe, analyze, and investigate, together with an expla¬nation of the purpose of each kind of title and authentic examples. Af¬ter completing their own title, the student then proceeds to acknowledg¬ments, abstract, introduction, and so on, through the structure of a report. Figure 6.9 shows a language guide screen for an inquiry letter, with a pop-up example.
An advantage of this software is that teachers can add their own sample texts and advice on style and grammar to the database through a proce¬dure known as teacher authoring. Authoring is a dimension of many CALL programs allowing teachers to customize off-the-peg software to the needs of their own learners without the use of specialized programming skills. Teachers can add new texts and exercises for the particular proficiency
166 New technologies in writing instruction
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levels and target needs of their students. This might involve adding content from a local newspaper story or class project, highlighting features of a specific professional or academic genre, or providing back-up material for a course textbook. Some programs have multimedia capabilities enabling teachers to add sound, video, and pictures to their texts in addition to cre¬ating gap-fill, multiple choice, matching, proofreading, and drag and drop exercises. Figure 6.10 shows an authoring screen from the program Tense Buster.
CALL programs offer students a very different learning experience than either computer-mediated communication or the Internet. Language learning and writing software represent motivating, multimedia environ¬ments for studying finite language areas at the student's pace and with control over the directions they take, the material they focus on, and the time they devote to it. In essence, however, these are tutors in an¬other guise, digital textbooks with many of the same advantages and disadvantages. Also like traditional paper materials, their effectiveness in writing classes ultimately depends on the teacher's ability to use them in ways that respond to students' proficiencies, interests, and target needs.
Corpora and concordancing 167
Reflection 6.11
Which of the CALL programs discussed above do you think offer most to the teacher of L2 writing? How might you effectively integrate your choice of program into a writing course for L2 students?
Corpora and concordancing
The use of language corpora and concordancing offers one of the most exciting applications of new technologies to the writing class, providing teachers with evidence of language use not available from other sources and moving away from preprogrammed CALL to redefine the computer as a tool. Electronic corpora are becoming increasingly important in second language writing instruction as teaching becomes less a practice of im¬parting knowledge and more one of providing opportunities for learning. Essentially a corpus is a collection of computer-readable texts, sometimes comprising many millions of words, considered more or less representative of a particular domain of language use. Concordancing software2 is used to search a corpus for a particular word or phrase and display the results as a KWIC (Key Word in Context), a list of unconnected lines of texts with the item studied at the center of each line surrounded by the immediate words in that sentence. Figure 6.11 shows the results of an "approximate pattern match" of benefit using WordPilot 2000?
Concordancing software is used to reveal particular language features of a corpus and determine the relative importance of recurring patterns. The prin¬ciple is that if a particular pattern is found to occur frequently across a range of texts from the same genre, then it can reasonably be assumed that it will oc¬cur frequently in future texts, allowing us to treat it as a significant feature of that genre. Thus, regularity provides a basis for predictability and helps us to understand how particular genres are typically written. Lines in a KWIC dis¬play can be sorted in different ways to show the most frequent collocates, or words which typically occur in its environment. So to identify the adjectives that most frequently modify a target noun, it is helpful to sort on the word left of the keyword, while the collocates of a specific adverb would require a right-sort. Wordpilot then gives a summary of these words (Figure 6.12).
2 The two leading commercial concordances for learners are WordPilot 2000 (www.
compulang.com) and MonoConc (www.athel.com).
3 I am grateful to John Milton for permission to reproduce screenshots of his program
WordPilot 2000.
168 New technologies In writing instruction
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Tribble and Jones (1997) discuss activities for using language corpora in L2 classes, but essentially corpora have been used in two ways in the classroom. In the first, the teacher examines a corpus and writes materials based on the results. For instance, we can consult a corpus to determine the most common words or patterns to teach when introducing a target genre and, drawing on the examples we find there, illustrate authentic uses of those forms in worksheets and exercises. The second, and perhaps more interesting approach, is to teach students how to use a concordancer to study corpora themselves. This raises students' awareness of conventional 170 New technologies in writing instruction patterns in writing and encourages a more inductive understanding of the texts they need to write. Wu (1992: 32) summarizes the advantages of this method: "Only when words are in their habitual environments, presented in their most frequent forms and their relational patterns and structures, can they be learnt effectively, interpreted properly and used appropriately." This kind of direct learner access suggests two further lines of approach (Aston, 1997). Corpora can be treated as research tools to be systematically investigated as a means of gaining greater awareness of language use, or as reference tools to be consulted for examples when problems arise while writing. Even though some students may be stimulated by the research approach to corpora, there is a danger that others will be bored by an overexposure to concordance lines. Research approaches presuppose considerable motiva¬tion and a curiosity about language that is often lacking, and teachers have generally confined student searches to key features through tasks which guide them to what is typical in target genres. Such concordance activities can both suggest the appropriacy of using one word rather than another in specific circumstances and indicate the rarity of true synonymy among semantically related items. For many learners, however, language only be¬comes important when they need it to communicate, and here concordancers are more usefully employed as reference tools. Novice writers are often faced with the problem of a relatively limited lexicon and set of formulaic expressions when composing, and this is not greatly improved by a discovery approach to lexical acquisition. As a result, "learning is more effective when students have direct access to information and timely advice on its use" (Milton, 1997:239). By linking concordancers to word processing software, writers are able to call up a concordance for a word by double clicking that word while they are typing. This gives them information about the frequency and contexts of the expressions they need when they need it. Thus, if a writer is unsure whether to use possible for or possible that in a given context, retrieving concordance lines should pro¬vide sufficient examples to make the choice clear. Information searches can be extended into the Internet to provide instant access to online En¬glish and multilingual dictionaries, writing tutorials, and additional corpora. Figure 6.13 shows definitions from an online dictionary called up from within a word processor by WordPilot. Finally, concordancers also offer teachers interesting possibilities for innovative uses of feedback. If students submit their writing electronically, then teachers can hyperlink errors in an essay directly to a concordance file where students can examine the contexts and collocations of the words they have misused. This kind of reflective, active response to a teacher's feedback can contribute a great deal to a student's writing development. Corpora and concordanclng 171 m WordPilol 2000 - [Infoimation Pleaxe (dtctionaiy t encyclopedia) 1 'ZJFfe Ed* View lads tfmfcw He!p :-laJx| Sack Fowad Yfcsrd Onlni 5peah Search WordUsts Ifcrarfes jemtfBi A qsft|[!|0 ^*T - O Frj';h[),C'CiJ,cs A dynamic web of card idabo A v,-cb of on&ie dictionaries ALL Wads (muti-Inguai Engji" Anoihet diciionarji Cambridge International Dicbo Cobiid Student Dbtionaiy ~~< Comprehensive Reference Computing Dictionary Encyberpsdia Reference Famous Quotations (8erfett's >
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These kinds of immediate online assistance can be extremely useful for raising students' awareness of genre-specific conventions, developing inde¬pendent learning skills, and improving writing products, but this is perhaps an approach to be used cautiously. No method can be effective if partic¬ipants are uncomfortable with it, and concordancing challenges common perceptions about how writing should be taught. It is useful, however, for writing teachers to be aware of this approach and able to employ it. Shifting the pedagogic role of computers from communication channel or virtual instructor to that of informant presents considerable opportunities as well as challenges and it would be foolish to ignore what corpora can tell us and our students about texts.
Reflection 6.13
Which of the three ways of using corpora discussed above appeals to you most? What do you see as the potential advantages of using corpora in the writing class? Can you envisage any problems?
172 New technologies in writing instruction Summary and conclusion
Although writing teachers may be hesitant to make use of computers in their classrooms, this chapter has sought to show that we should not be immune to the possibilities technology offers. In many circumstances, computer-based instruction presents stimulating alternatives to traditional paper materials and tasks, and much commercial software, Internet sites, and chat facilities are easy to learn, straightforward to use, and technically robust. However, teachers should consider carefully why they want to use computers, how students might benefit from them, and how best to integrate them into a coherent writing course. The main points of this chapter are listed below.
• Evidence suggests that the use of computers provides a stimulating learn¬ing and communication environment and can improve L2 students' mo¬tivation, attitudes, and confidence about writing.
• Computer-mediated communication and instruction has implications both for the kinds of writing that students do and the ways that teachers teach, suggesting alternative or parallel materials and methodologies to those used in traditional writing classrooms.
• Computers do not represent a method but can be used to support a variety of methods.
• Computers offer a range of different opportunities for writing instruction including word processing, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication, Internet writing and resources, CALL pro¬grams and concordancing.
• Like any other learning activity, the use of computers in a writing course is only effective when they are integrated into a sustained, coherent program that offers learners some control over their learning and guidance from teachers.
• The choice of programs, sites, and tasks should be carefully based on students' target needs and current abilities as well as the teacher's views of learning.
• Computers do not replace teachers but crucially depend on them, both so that technology is used effectively in the time available and so that students receive adequate support.
Discussion questions and activities
1 A word processor enables the rearrangement of a text by removing words, inserting superfluous words, and by mixing up words, sentences, or para-graphs. How might this feature be useful in teaching word processing and computer composing skills?
Discussion questions and activities 173
2 What are the main differences between synchronous and asynchronous channels of communication in terms of the types of writing and activities they allow? Devise two activities for each channel, setting out clear goals for the tasks and describing what the students are expected to do before, during, and after that activity.
3 One difference between online and traditional classes is that students are only present when they are participating, when they are actually writing, and so a major challenge for teachers using Computer-Mediated Commu¬nication is how to encourage their students to contribute to discussions and form an online community. What kinds of topics, activities, assessments, and principles of engagement might best foster such a community among students you are familiar with?
4 What makes a good language learning program? How important is the use of multimedia or the way it provides feedback? Devise a set of criteria for evaluating the value of an ELT Website or CALL software for a particular group of learners. You may want to draw on the lists of criteria discussed in Chapter 4, but in addition to pedagogic criteria, you will probably want to include features that relate to technical design, multimedia features, and ease of use.
5 Visit the ESL Websites listed in Appendix 6.1 or follow the links you find there to others. Evaluate six sites using the criteria you devised in the previous task and select the best two. What features of these sites are most useful and how would you incorporate them into a writing class for a particular group of students? Write a lesson plan to do this.
6 One advantage of the Internet over individual CALL programs is that stu¬dents do not need to learn how to use a large number of programs. However, the internet does require a set of specialized competencies which students may have to learn. What competencies would you require of your writing students? Add another five items to this checklist and be prepared to justify your choices.
a. Use a search engine to locate a list of sites.
b. Start a browser and type in a URL.
c. Copy and paste text or graphic from a Web page into a word processor.
d. Bookmark and organize Web pages.
7 Look back to the tasks discussed in Chapter 5. Which of these could be adapted for use on the computer? Select three tasks and rewrite them as computer activities, either for word processing, local networked communi¬cation, synchronous or asynchronous C-M-C, or CALL. Write lesson plans to show how you would incorporate these tasks into a lesson.
8 Design a writing project that requires a particular group of students to contact students in another country via email or the Internet. How would you present the project to students? How would you make contact with
174 New technologies in writing instruction
students from the other school? What kinds of tasks would you set for the project? Describe how you would integrate the project into a writing syllabus and how it might influence the assignments you give.
9 It was noted that one danger of the Internet was the great temptation it offers students to cut and paste portions of articles that they find into their own essays or to download ready-made essays. Teachers obviously need to spend some time with students discussing acceptable practices when using Web-based material, but what steps could you take to practically prevent this? Suggest some assignments that might prevent electronic copying.
10 Explore one of these computer resources as a participant, then write up your experience and reflections on how you would use it to improve your teaching. You can either set up your own Website, join a synchronous chat program or discussion list, or correspond with a keypal.
Appendix 6.1: Some useful Websites for writing teachers
Web Search Engines
Search Engine Colossus (directory of search engines)
http://www.searchenginecoiossus.com/
Altavista http://www.altavista.digital.com/
AskJeeves http://www.askjeeves.com
(allows users to make full sentence queries)
Google http://www.google.com
Hotbot http://www.hotbot.com/
Infoseek http://www.infoseek.com/
Lycos http://www.lycos.com/
WebCrawler http://www.webcrawier.com/
Free space for student Web pages
http://www.geocities.com
http://www.tripod.com
http://www.angelfire.com
Free email: Free Web-based email for student exchanges
http://www.mail.yahoo.com
http://www.hotmail.com
http://www.newtaddress.com
Synchronous writing sites
ICQ http://www.icq.com/downioad/ New users information at
http://www.mirabilis.com/icqtour/
Appendix 6.1 175
mlRC
Dave's internet Cafe Discussion Centre
The Speakeasy Studio and Cafe
Remarq Discussion Site
ESL and Language Teachers'
Chatboard CRIBE (Chat Room In Broken English)
http://www.mirc.co.uk/get.html
http://www.eslcafe.com/discussion/dv/
http://morrison.wsu.edu/studio/About.asp
http://www.remarq.com/home.asp
http://www.teachers.net/mentors/esLlanguage
http://www.cup.com/bm7/cribe.htm
Keypal lists
1. Sites where students can find keypals
Dave's E-Mail for ESL Students
ePals Classroom exchange
(Over 850,000 users in 90 countries) The E-Mail Key Pal Connection Keypals Club The Meeting Place Keypals
http://www.pacificnet.net/~sperling/
student.html http://www.epals.com/
http://www.comenius.com/keypal/index.html http://www.mightymedia.com/keypals/ http://www.encomix.es/~its/newdoor.htm http://www.reedbooks.com.au/heinemann/ global/ global1.html
2. Sites for teachers to arrange keypai exchanges
Dave's ESL E-mail for Teachers E-mail Pen-Pals for Students Intercuitural E-mail Classroom International E-mail Project Key Pals
Keypals Club Keypals International International EFIVESL discussion lists
Discussion lists
1. For teachers
Linguist List Information: Writing discussion group:
TESL-L (TESL list)
Linguist
NETEACH-L (net ESL teaching)
2. For students
LaTrobe University Tile.Net (info on lists) Liszt directory (info) Inter-Links (info)
http://www.pacificnet.net/~sperling/guestbook.html
http://math.unr.edu/iinguistics/teslpnpl.html
http://www.stolaf.edu/network/iecc
http://www.enst.fr/~benenson/lgv/
http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/education/WeNET/key/
khome.html http://www.mightymedia.com/keypais/ http://www.collegebound.com/keypaIs http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/education/sl/sl.html
http://www.baal.org.uk/baalf.htm http://kaiama.doe.Hawaii.edu/hern95/pt035/writing/
wholalist.htm! List: listserv@cunyum.cuny.edu Mail: eslcc@cunyum.bitnet Listserv@tamvm1 .tamu.edu listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu
announce-sl@iatrobe.edu.au
http://tile.net/
http://www.liszt.com/
http://aiabanza.com/kabacoff/lnter-Links/listserv.html
176 New technologies in wnting instruction
ESL Teaching and learning sites
Dave's internet Cafe
Its-online
Virtual Language Centre
EF Englishtown
HKUST Language Centre
Writing Machine
Online Writing Labs
National Writing Centres
Association: Purdue OWL
The Online Writery (Missouri) The Writing Machine (HKU) HK PolyU Writing Centre Garbl's Active Writing Links Bemidji State Writing Center Colorado State Writing Center
Michigan State Writing Center
http://www.eslcafe.com
http:its-online.com
http://vic.poiyu.edu.hk/
http://www.englishtown.com/
http://lc.ust.hk/
http://ec.hku.hk/writingmachine/
http://departments.coigate.edu/diw/NWCAOWLS.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
http://web.missouri.edu/%7Ewritery/
http://ec.hku.hk/writingmachine/
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/CILL/writing.htm
http://members.home.net/garbi/writing/action.htm
http://cal.Bemidji.msus.edu/WRC/WRChome.htmi
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/English/wcenter/
ecenter.com http://piiot.msu.edu/user/writing/
Style guides and information on writing
APA Styie resources Columbus guide to
citation style Resources for writers Writing resources Way to Write Steps in the Writing
Process Research & Writing Step
by Step Tools for Your Writing Research Paper Writing How to write an essay Online Technical Writing PIZZAZ (Creative writing)
http://www.psychwww.com/resource/apacrib.htm http://www.coIumbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.htmi
http://webster.commnet.edu/writing/writing.htm http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/resources.htm! http://www.ucaigary.ca/UofC/eduweb/writing/ http://karn.ohiolink.edu/~sg-ysu/process.html
http://www.ipi.org/teen/aplus/stepfirst.htm
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wnting/toois/process.html
http://www.researchpaper.com/
http://www2.actden.com/writ_den/tips/essay/index.htm
http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/acctoc.html
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~leslieob/pizzaz.html
7 Responding to student writing
Aims: This chapter examines central features of teacher oral and written feed¬back and peer response to student writing, exploring the potential effectiveness of different methods and the main issues for teachers.
Providing feedback is often seen as one of the ESL writing teacher's most important tasks, offering the kind of individualized attention that is other¬wise rarely possible under normal classroom conditions. Writers typically intend their texts to be read, and in the classroom feedback from readers provides opportunities for them to see how others respond to their work and to learn from these responses. This kind of formative feedback aims at encouraging the development of students' writing and is regarded as criti¬cal in improving and consolidating learning. Vygotsky (1978), for example, discusses a stage in cognitive growth he calls "the zone of proximal develop-ment" where skills are extended through the guidance and response of expert others. Feedback therefore emphasizes a process of writing and rewriting where the text is not seen as self-contained but points forward to other texts the student will write. It helps the writer work out the text's potential and to comprehend the writing context, providing a sense of audience and an understanding of the expectations of the communities they are writing for. The nature of this response can vary widely and feedback practices differ according to the teachers' preferences as well as the kind of writing task they have set and the effect they wish to create. But while a response to written work is probably essential for the development of writing skills, there is less certainty about who should give this response, the form it should take, and whether it should focus more on ideas or forms. This chapter explores the practical issues of responding to student texts, addressing:
• Teacher written feedback
• Teacher-student conferencing
• Peer feedback
177
178 Responding to student writing
Orientation
What kinds of factors are likely to influence the type of feedback you give? What do you need to know - about language, writing, or the writer - to give your students usable and effective feedback?
Teacher written feedback
Despite increasing emphasis on the importance of oral response and the use of peers as sources of feedback, teacher written response continues to play a central role in most L2 writing classes. Many teachers do not feel that they have done justice to students' efforts until they have written substantial comments on their papers, justifying the grade they have given and providing a reader reaction. Similarly, many students see their teacher's feedback as crucial to their improvement as writers.
A great deal of research, however, has questioned the effectiveness of teacher feedback as a way of improving students' writing. Research on first language writing suggests that much written feedback is of poor quality and frequently misunderstood by students, being too vague and inconsis¬tent (e.g., Sommers, 1982), and often "authoritarian," "formalist," and "in¬sensitive" (Connors and Lunsford, 1993). Comments tend to be directed to form rather than content and responses can appropriate, or take over, student texts by being too directive (Sommers, 1982). Zamel (1985: 86) suggests a similar picture in ESL contexts:
ESL writing teachers misread student texts, are inconsistent in their reactions, make arbitrary corrections, write contradictory comments, provide vague prescriptions, impose abstract rules and standards, respond to texts as fixed and final products, and rarely make content-specific comments or offer specific strategies for revising
the texts The teachers overwhelmingly view themselves as language teachers
rather than writing teachers.
Reflection 7.1
Look at this comment from Knoblauch and Brannon (1981:165) which sum-marizes their survey of the LI research on teacher feedback:
Commenting on student essays might just be an exercise in futility. Either students do not read the comments or they read them and do not attempt to implement suggestions and correct errors.
Teacher written feedback 179
Do you agree that this is also true of ESL contexts? What could you do as a teacher to make your written feedback effective in improving students' writing?
Despite these negative findings, feedback on early drafts of a paper does seem to lead to improvements in subsequent drafts (e.g., Knoblauch and Brannon, 1981) and this also appears to be true in L2 writing (F. Hyland, 1998). The following sections highlight key aspects of the research relevant for teacher feedback.
Student preferences and uses of feedback
Clearly teachers need to consider what students want from feedback and what they attend to in their revisions. Research suggests that teacher written feedback is highly valued by second language writers (F. Hyland, 1998) and that many learners particularly favor feedback on their grammar (Leki, 1990). Error-free work is often a major concern for L2 writers, possibly because of prior learning experiences and the fact that many will go on to be evaluated in academic and workplace settings where accuracy may be essential. In contexts where they are asked to write multiple drafts, how¬ever, students claim to prefer comments on ideas and organization in earlier drafts and on grammar in later drafts, perhaps influenced by process-oriented feedback practices. Both proficiency and academic level can muddy these waters, however, as students may come to see the writing instructor's ex¬pertise as increasingly restricted to grammar correction as they progress through university (Radecki and Swales, 1988).
The effect of written feedback on student revisions in subsequent drafts has not been extensively studied, although it seems that students try to use most of the usable feedback they are given (F. Hyland, 1998). Students' claims that they value feedback are largely supported through their actions in response to it and, equally importantly, most feedback-linked revisions seem to result in text improvements (Ferris, 1997). In Hyland's study stu¬dents either followed a comment closely in their revision (usually a gram¬mar correction), used the feedback as an initial stimulus which triggered a number of revisions (such as a comment on tone or style), or avoided the issues raised by the feedback by deleting the problematic text. While these changes largely improved the text, Hyland found that students often revised their texts with no real understanding as to why it was necessary and that in many cases deletions were not rephrased, so that the original idea was
180 Responding to student writing
lost rather than amplified. In other words, although revisions may make an improvement to the current text, it is possible that they are contributing little to students' future writing development.
It is also important to note that what individual students want from feed¬back - and the use they make of it - varies considerably. Some students want praise, others see it as condescending; some want a response to their ideas, others demand to have all their errors marked; some use teacher commen¬tary effectively, others ignore it altogether. It can be difficult for teachers to cater to all these different perceptions and expectations, but a full dialogue with individual students is often beneficial. This can take the form of a "re¬vise and resubmit letter" (Ferris, 1997) in which students detail the changes they have made in the subsequent draft, journal reflections on the feed¬back they have received, or a precourse questionnaire in which students set out the areas on which they want feedback to focus.
Reflection 7.2
What factors might influence individual students' preferences and use of feed-back? How could you discover your students' past experiences and expectations concerning feedback? How could you encourage them to try new responses to feedback and abandon ones that have not been effective?
Forms of teacher written feedback
A variety of techniques have been proposed to provide teacher feedback to students, the most common being commentary, cover sheets, minimal marking, taped comments, and electronic feedback.
Commentary. Probably the most common type of teacher written feedback consists of handwritten commentary on the student paper itself. This kind of feedback is best seen as responding to students' work rather than evaluating what they have done, stating how the text appears to us as readers, how successful we think it has been, and how it could be improved. If time allows, responses may take the form of both marginal and end comments. A comprehensive end note allows more space and opportunities for the teacher to summarize and prioritize key points and to make general observations on the paper. Comments in the essay margins, on the other hand, are both immediate and proximate, appearing at the exact point in the text where the
Teacher written feedback 181
Symbol Meaning Symbol Meaning
5 Incorrect spelling A Something has been left out
W Wrong word order [] Something is not necessary
r Wrong tense m Meaning is not clear
c Concord (subject and verb NA The usage is not appropriate
do not agree) 9 Punctuation is wrong
Wf Wrong form
s/f Singular or plural form wrong
Figure 7.1: Correction codes.
issue occurs. This not only ensures relevance and creates a strong sense that the reader is responding to the text "on the fly," but is also more effective than an end comment in making sure that the student understands precisely what is referred to.
Rubrics. A variation on commentary, and often accompanying it on final drafts, is the use of cover sheets which set out the criteria that have been used to assess the assignment and how the student has performed in relation to these criteria. Different rubrics can be used for different genres and, while they restrict the range of issues that can be addressed, they are useful in making grading decisions explicit and showing what the teacher values in a particular piece of writing. An example of a rubric for an expository essay in a university writing class is shown in Appendix 7.1.
Minimal marking. This refers to a type of in-text, form-based feedback. It follows research which suggests that indicating the location and perhaps type of error, rather than direct correction, is more effective in stimulating a student response (e.g., Bates et al., 1993; Ferris, 1997) and also perhaps in developing self-editing strategies. One way of accomplishing this is to use a set of simple "correction codes" such as that suggested by Byrne (1988) and reproduced in Figure 7.1. This technique makes correction neater and less threatening than masses of red ink and helps students to find and identify their mistakes. A disadvantage, however, is that it is not always possible to unambiguously categorize a problem, particularly when it extends beyond a sentence boundary. Extending the code merely makes the procedure un¬wieldy and confusing, so some teachers adopt a more minimalist approach by broadening the categories to focus on a limited number of general areas (Hyland, 1990).
182 Responding to student writing
In the example below, codes identify three such areas: surface form (GR), expression (E), and logical development (L).
Qli The mining industry are able to bring two things to the country. First a E large amount of revenue to the country and also jeopardy to the natural
environment. BCL and other mines all over the world are a good L example of this. Therefore we must only have local companies to
mine.
A true minimal marking method, however, makes a virtue of providing even less information to students as nothing is underlined and no sym¬bols are used. Surface errors are indicated only by a cross in the margin alongside the lines in which they occur, encouraging students to identify the problems and correct them before returning the paper. While various rhetorical and communicative aspects remain outside its reach, the simplic¬ity of the approach allows more time for making more substantive comments and generates peer discussion as students collaborate in correction:
XX We/apolxygi&esfbrthe/inco^ Itwa&aXhbe&MA&e/certain
X rea^fOvw that things turned/ out that way. We/ did/ i&nt a/ X driver to-the/airportbatit broke/on/the/way, Secondly ahotit the/ hotel'. The/ group had/ to- take/ another. We/ booked/ the/ che&pe^and/a/re&4onahlygood/one/. Qoing^to-the/Hitton/wa^ X VvnpoiMMe/be<^MA^e/bookiAxg^ Taped commentary. An alternative to marginal comments is recording remarks on a tape recorder and writing a number on the student paper to indicate what the comment refers to (Hyland, 1990). This not only saves time and adds novelty, it provides listening practice for learners and assists those with an auditory learning style preference. It also shows the writer how someone responds to their writing as it develops, where ideas get across, where confusion arises, where logic or structure breaks down. This example gives some idea of how this works: Student paper 6. Although/ity 4£y"iM&on/a4^ ztandy changing', with/the influence*ofthe/we^erntechnMogy, the/ ba^Co engineering' application/ Us &tiZVthe/foundation/ of Cty operat-ingsprinclple/. Teacher commentary Are you clear about what you're trying to say at six? It's a good general rule to keep your language simple and your sentences short so that your message Teacher written feedback 183 gets across. Try reading this sentence again after checking the grammar and removing the commas. The last two lines are not clear and you need to rewrite them as a separate sentence. Electronic feedback. Finally, as discussed in Chapter 6, computers have opened up new opportunities for responding to writing. Teachers can provide comments on electronic submissions by email or by using the comment function, which allows feedback to be displayed in a separate window while reading a word processed text. Feedback on errors can also be linked to online explanations of grammar or to concordance lines from authentic texts to show students examples of features they may have problems using correctly. These new channels of written feedback offer teachers greater flexibility in their responding practices, but ultimately convenience is likely to be the deciding factor in which are used, Reflection 7.3 What do you see as the main advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches? Are there any you would not use to give feedback to students? Why? Types of teacher feedback Both the communicative approach to language teaching and the process approach to writing emphasize the need for language production uninhib¬ited by language correction, but since errors of grammar are an obvious problem for L2 writers it is not surprising that teachers may feel the need to respond to form. Cumming (1985), for example, found that teachers try to make "comprehensible order" of their students' scripts by focusing on surface features, and Zamel (1985) argues that teachers respond as language teachers rather than writing teachers. The effectiveness of such correction, however, has been questioned, and in a much quoted review of the research, Truscott (1996) concluded that error correction is ineffective in improving student writing. As a result, teachers are often encouraged to focus on global issues of meaning and organization and on the process of writing. While Truscott's assertion may be correct as far as it goes, it is also true that writing teachers have not been well served by the literature he sum¬marizes. Much of this research reflects experimental or analytical research techniques that ignore classroom realities and the preferences of students. 184 Responding to student writing Written feedback is more than marks on a page, yet research procedures often remove it from the real classrooms and teacher-student relationships within which it occurs. Master (1995), for instance, found that corrective grammar feedback was valued by students and effective when combined with classroom discussions. Moreover, while marking mechanical errors can be frustrating, the view that there is no direct connection between cor¬rection and learning is greatly overstated. Fathman and Whalley (1990) discovered that texts improved most when students received feedback on both content and form, while Ferris (1997) found that teachers' attention to form led to a reduction in errors in later assignments, particularly when it contained comments rather than corrections. It is also the experience of many teachers that students vary greatly in their response to grammar feedback and in their ability to benefit from learning how to construct and edit their prose. ESL students themselves, particularly those from cultures where teachers are highly directive, generally welcome and expect teachers to notice and comment on their errors and may feel resentful if their teachers do not provide this. It should also be borne in mind that teachers respond to students in their comments as much as texts, considering students' backgrounds, needs, and preferences as well as the relationship they have with them and the ongoing dialogue between them (F.Hyland, 1998; 2001). A further important consideration is audience. Students may be learning to write for a particular discourse community for whom accuracy can well be important, such as in business or academic environments. Numerous studies of university subject teachers, for instance, suggests that there is little tolerance of typical ESL errors and that linguistic errors tend to interfere with subject teachers' comprehension and influence their overall grading of papers (e.g., Janopoulos, 1992). While we might also seek to encourage these readers to modify their demands, we cannot ignore the immediate needs of our students to both produce texts that are regarded as competent and successful by their intended audiences and to become self-sufficient in constructing acceptably accurate prose. Admonishments to teachers to avoid attention to form and focus on meaning therefore seem misplaced, the result of a view of writing which sees ideas and language as distinct. Although teachers should not be exces¬sively focused on eradicating errors, they should also be careful to avoid emphasizing ideas to the neglect of form. Teachers may feel that they can only help learners to engage in the writing process by responding to their ideas, but, in fact, the separation of form and content is largely an artifi¬cial one, of dubious theoretical value and impossible to maintain in prac¬tice. As I have noted in earlier chapters, we only successfully articulate our Teacher written feedback 185 meanings through the selection of appropriate forms. Language is a resource for making meanings, not something we turn to when we have worked out what we are going to say, and the two cannot be realistically separated when responding to writing. Reflection 7.4 How important do you think linguistic form is in writing? What strategies do you think might be effective in developing ESL students' abilities to notice and correct the accuracy of their writing? Responding to errors Teacher written feedback should respond to all aspects of student texts: structure, organization, style, content, and presentation, but it is not nec¬essary to cover every aspect on every draft at every stage of the teaching-writing cycle. In a personal experience essay, such as a response to a reading for instance, it is important to help students generate, focus, and organize their ideas by providing feedback that addresses the development and clear expression of content material. Attention to sentence-level errors generally can be delayed to a later draft as major parts of the paper may be changed or revised. But teachers cannot ignore cases where students have confused text stages, used an inappropriate text structure, or made tense and vocabulary choices that grossly interfere with the successful expression of their ideas. The key to effective written feedback is to reinforce the patterns which were taught when modeling the genre so that it becomes part of the pro¬cess of learning to write a genre rather than an extemporized response to error. As discussed in Chapter 5, the teaching-writing cycle offers an explicit model of how teachers can move through successive phases of classroom ac¬tivities to develop writing abilities, with each stage associated with different purposes. Feedback on appropriate language and organizational features of the genre is likely to be most effective during the joint construction stage af¬ter students have received considerable input on the structure and language of the target genre and before scaffolding is removed to allow students to create their own texts independently. Feedback can then build on what is cur-rently salient to students because attention is given primarily to the features that have just been taught. This approach allows indirect techniques such as minimal marking, which are more successful in encouraging a response and in developing longer term editing and proofreading skills. 186 Responding to student writing It makes sense for teachers to address text features associated with the genre in question and that have been the subject of earlier scaffolding ac¬tivities, yet some errors seem to be blind spots for particular students and persist in their work. It is obviously counterproductive to attend to all errors and teachers need to prioritize problems for feedback and review. Numer¬ous factors can influence the errors students make and, once again, teachers will need to consider individual differences and students' particular prefer¬ences for feedback. Ferris (2002) offers a practical resource on this topic for teachers, but more generally in deciding which errors to target in feedback, the following criteria are useful: • Genre-specific errors - those particular to the current target text-type. • Stigmatizing errors - those that most disturb the particular target com¬munity of readers. • Comprehensibility errors - those that most interfere with the clarity of the writing. • Frequent errors - those consistently made by the individual student across his or her writing. • Student-identified errors - those the student would like the teacher to focus on. Reflection 7.5 Which of these types of error should receive most urgent attention? Which are likely to be the easiest and most difficult to address through teacher-written feedback? Writing feedback: purposes and forms This discussion has suggested that teachers do not simply respond to gram¬mar or content, but have a number of different purposes in mind. Reid (1993: 205), for example, distinguishes responses that are descriptive (the main idea in this essay is X), personal (the part I like best was Y), and eval¬uative (comments that justify a judgment). Ferris et al. (1997), on the other hand, identified eight broad functions of response in over 1,500 teacher comments, ranging from "Asking for unknown information" ("what is your focus here?") to "Giving information on ideas" ("This is a bit off track"). Different stages of writing are also characterized by different pur¬poses. Teachers can only judge and evaluate a finished product and hope the writer will improve in the next assignment, fo£ instance, while the Teacher written feedback 187 goal of feedback on a text in progress is to respond and influence the writing. Bates et al. (1993) suggest the following ways to achieve these purposes: • Write personalized comments - maintaining a dialogue between reader and writer • Provide guidance where necessary - avoiding advice that is too directive or prescriptive • Make text-specific comments - relating comments to the text rather than general rules • Balance positive and negative comments - avoiding discouraging stu¬dents with criticism In practice, it may be quite difficult, and unhelpful, to follow specific rules too strictly as different assignments and different students require different types of responses. The most flexible approach may be for teachers to select from the overarching functions of praise, criticism, and suggestions in their comments (Hyland and Hyland, 2001). Some teachers believe that providing too much praise, especially at early stages of the writing cycle, can make students complacent and discourage revision. Praise, however, is widely used to encourage students, particularly in responding to ideas in a text, but is often reserved for final drafts where it can act to reward students for their efforts: You/ have/ dealt wCth thd/ topCo well. There/ Us a/ good/ flow of idea* and/a/ very clear plaru An/ejteelle^eteay, ihe/Cdea^are^cle^irarid'e^Myto- and/there' are/ few voccdndary problem^. AyvCritere^tvng^and/comprehensive ei&ay. Well-organised/and/weH-writterv. There is no doubt that positive remarks can be motivating and that many L2 learners attach considerable importance to them (all quotes from Hyland, 1998; Hyland and Hyland, 2001): If teacher give me positive comments it means I succeed. (Japanese student) I always look for what she says is good in the essay first, this gives me the support. Then I can look at the corrections I must do. (Spanish student) However, while students appreciate and remember positive comments, they also expect to receive constructive criticism (e.g., Connors and Lunsford, 188 Responding to student writing 1993). Nor do all students welcome empty praise, regarding it as insincere, looking instead for comments they can act on: Sometimes maybe the teacher doesn't mean it, but they just try to encourage you. [... ] Because there is always "but" after the positive. Sometimes the teacher just tries to find something good in my essay and then may be that strength is not the main point. (Chinese student) Reflection 7.6 What are your own feelings about the value of praise? Is it best reserved for final drafts only? Can it be used for margin comments as well as end comments? Should it be used for all aspects of texts or only ideas? At what location, stage, and focus is praise likely to be most effective in improving writing? Teachers therefore need to use positive comments with care, but a lack of positive comments can affect both students' attitudes to writing and their reception of feedback. I am very interested in teacher's comments every time. I like to read it and when I read it and if it says "it's good but your problem is grammatical problem," then I will turn back to see how many mistakes I have. But if the comment is very bad and maybe not good enough, maybe I'll stop for a while and keep it and take it out and look at again later. (Thai student) ... If feedback is not so good, I mean that teacher criticize many mistake I have, then I feel - "Oh I don't like writing." (Taiwanese student) Because of this, some teachers seek to stress the most important or most generalizable problems in their feedback in order not to overwhelm the students by criticizing all their problems. This experienced teacher described why she is reluctant to be directly critical (F. Hyland, unpublished Ph.D. thesis): I had a Korean student who was kind of a fossilisation problem I guess. And her writing was just full of errors and like you didn't even have paragraphs and it was very short. On the very first test I think I made some criticisms ... and she wrote in her journal that she found this very devastating and "please try and encourage me" and so after that I modified my feedback to try and be more positive. I mean I had been positive but I felt it was my duty to point out that there were major problems here. I mean it's hard sometimes to get a balance between being a realist and being positive. But once she told me that, I made a conscious effort. Teacher written feedback 189 Reflection 7.7 How do you think a teacher might achieve this balance between being realistic in pointing out errors and problems to learners and being encouraging? Suggestion and criticism can be seen as opposite ends of a continuum ranging from a focus on what is done poorly to measures for its improvement, so while criticism is negative comment on a text, suggestions contain a retrievable plan of action for improvement, a do-able revision of some kind. Thus, in (i) the teacher provides a fairly clear suggestion for revision, while in (ii) she has chosen to express her comment more forcefully as a criticism: (i) Try to- express your ideas- as- svmply os-possihle/ and gOve/ extra/ information/. (ii) There/ Cs no- statement of intention/ in the/ essay - what is the/purpose/of your essay and/how are/you/govng^to-deal/With/ it? Vow are/ not giving' me/ any direction/. It is important to note here that it may be difficult for students to extract the implications of a criticism as it contains no explicit advice on what they should do to rectify the problem. If students fail to understand what is being said, they may simply ignore it or delete the passage from their revised draft. To guard against this, teachers can pair a criticism with a suggestion: This conclusion/ is alL a/ hit vague/. I think/ it would/ he/ hetter to- clearly state/your conclusions with the hrief reasons for them/. This is a/ very sudden/ start. You/ need/ a/ more/ general/ statement to- introduce/the/topUy. Suggestions can focus on a student's text and propose revisions to it, or can refer to general principles which extend to future writing behavior: Maho, afrl hold on* your first draft, a/lotofthis essay Csahoutyour learning' history and/ therefore/ not directly relevant to- the/ topic. Atleastyou/huvenltihownhow it is relevant. Atuniversityyowmust answer the question*you/ choose/and/keep on/thctopic/. Interesting^content, hutdifficultto- understand/. I think/yaw need to- ash for help from/ flatmates', classmates', friends, to- read/ your writing' and/ bee/ifthey can/ understand/ it. 190 Responding to student writing Although this moves away from strictly text-specific issues, summary com¬ments of this kind help communicate concepts and principles that students can make use of in subsequent assignments. Reflection 7,8 Do you think that either praise or criticism can be an effective choice in en-couraging revision and proofreading strategies? How can criticism be made constructive in facilitating student revisions? Interpersonal aspects of written feedback: mitigation strategies The form that feedback takes also shows that teachers consider the potential interpersonal impact of positive and negative feedback. While it is an im¬portant pedagogic resource, teacher feedback also involves delicate social interactions that can affect the relationship between a teacher and student and influence instruction itself. ESL writers are often insecure about their writing and can be heartened by positive comments or devastated by crit¬icism. Because of this, teachers often soften the force of their comments using the various mitigation strategies shown in Figure 7.2 (Hyland and Hyland, 2001). The use of such mitigation strategies can also help moderate the teacher's dominant role and tone down what might be seen as overdirective interven¬tions in students' writing. Many teachers are anxious about the issue of appropriation and concerned about how students might respond to com¬ments that are too directive and prescriptive. Knoblauch and Brannon (1984: 118) have argued that writing can be "stolen" from a writer by the teacher's comments and that if students follow directive feedback too closely they may develop neither their cognitive skills nor their writing abilities, but merely rewrite texts to reflect their teachers' concerns. In ESL writing classrooms, however, nondirective approaches may not only violate the cultural expecta¬tions of students from backgrounds where explicit advice and correction is expected, but fail to give L2 students the direct and concrete help they need (Reid, 1994), leaving them ill-prepared for the demands of their target con¬texts (Johns, 1997). Once again, it can be seen that feedback does not occur in a vacuum and teachers always need to respond to their particular contexts. However, despite these laudable interpersonal and pedagogic reasons for mitigating feedback, indirect comments have the very real potential to cloud issues and create confusion. Mitigation allows teachers to minimize the risk of demotivating students or of taking over their texts, but it is possible to forget that students are reading feedback in a foreign language and that Teacher written feedback 191 Paired comments Combining criticism with either praise or a suggestion Vocabulary Usgood/butgrammar i& not accurate* and/of-ten/ makesyour ideas difficult to- urtd^ritand/. Good/ movement from/$e*xerab to-ype&ific/, but yow need/ to-makes a; clearer promUe/to-the/ reader. Hedged comments Modal verbs, imprecise quantifiers, usuality devices Some/ of the/ material/ heemed/ a/ little/ long^-wCnded/ and/1 wonder (fiWcoulxlyha^e'beer\/aymprei^ed/w There/Cypo^My too- much/Cnfbrmatton/here/. Personal attribution teacher responds as ordinary reader rather than as expert Twv borry, but when readl4\g-thCye
One way to accomplish many of these goals simultaneously is to fully integrate teaching and assessment with the use of portfolio projects as dis¬cussed in the next section.
Reflection 8.12
In addition to creating anxiety among learners, the acts of setting, negotiating, and scoring writing assessment tasks and monitoring learner progress also often cause stress among teachers and raters. Can you list some strategies for reducing teacher anxiety?
Portfolio assessments 233
Inform learners from the outset of the course that they will be assessed.
Openly discuss the purposes for an assessment and the criteria used in
terms they will understand.
Assess against explicit criteria.
Provide ways for students to appraise their own writing and those of
others (see Chapter 7).
Involve learners in regular dialogic assessments by modeling
techniques for simple text analysis - for example by discussing
strengths and weaknesses of a text on an OHT.
Provide model texts, with key language features highlighted, which
students can use to analyze their own writing.
Encourage each student to collate a portfolio of their writing for
comparison and analysis.
Ensure, as far as possible, achievement tests are conducted when
learners are likely to succeed.
Consider reliability and validity issues in assessment construction.
Make assessments as relevant, purposeful, and specific to the
coursework and the students as possible by ensuring an integration of
teaching and assessment.
Give students feedback on results, highlighting their progress and what
needs to be done next.
Figure 8.3: Strategies for reducing learner anxiety in assessment.
Portfolio assessments
Portfolios are multiple writing samples, written over time, and purposefully selected from various genres to best represent a student's abilities, progress, and most successful texts in a particular context. Portfolios in ESL writmg contexts are a response to testing situations which ask students to produce a single piece of timed writing with no choice of topic and no opportunities for revision, seriously disadvantaging L2 writers who often require much longer to perform such tasks. In contrast, portfolio evaluation reflects the practice of most writing courses where students use readings and other sources of information as a basis for writing and revise and resubmit their assignments after receiving feedback from teachers or peers.
Features of portfolios
A good example of a portfolio structure for an L2 writing class is given by Johns (1997), who describes a portfolio devised by secondary school teachers in Singapore for final-year students preparing for a public exam (Figure 8.4). The model illustrates how a portfolio can be used even in a
234 Assessing student writing
A timed essay (argumentative or expository).
Reflection questions include: Why did you organize the essay in this way? What
phrases or parts of the essay do you particularly like? Are you satisfied with
this? Why or why not? A research-based library project (ail notes, drafts, and materials leading to the
final paper).
What difficulties did you encounter writing this? What did you learn from
writing it? A summary (one summary of a reading).
Why did you select this particular summary? How is it organized? Why is it
organized like this? What are the basic elements of all the summaries you have
written? A writer's choice (any text in the L1 or L2 that has been important to the student).
What is this? When did you write it? Why did you choose it? What does it say
about you? An overall reflection of the portfoiio (a letter to the teacher integrating the
entries).
What were the goals of this class? Describe each entry and why it was
important for achieving these goals.
Source: Johns) 1997:140-41. Figure 8.4: A portfolio structure for advanced secondary school students.
highly constrained curriculum by drawing on the genres required by the school and encouraging students to reflect on these genres, on their task experiences, and on their writing practices and attitudes. Such reflections are often seen as a major strength of portfolios as they make visible what students see in their work, in their development, and what they value about writing.
Essentially, the purpose of portfolios is to obtain a more prolonged and accurate picture of students writing in more natural and less stressful con¬texts. They can include drafts, reflections, readings, diaries, observations of genre use, teacher or peer responses, as well as finished texts, thus rep¬resenting multiple measures of a student's writing ability. The texts are typically selected by students, often in consultation with a teacher, and comprise four to six core items in categories which reflect the goals of the writing course. They can serve to either showcase a student's best work or display a collection of both drafts and final products to demonstrate process and highlight improvement. By assembling their texts over time, students are able to observe changes in their work, compare different gen¬res and writing experiences, and discover something about the entries and their learning. Portfolios thus encourage students to reflect on their writing and the criteria employed for judging it; it is an assessment that promotes
Portfolio assessments 235
greater responsibility for writing (Belanoffand Dickson, 1991; Purves et al, 1995).
Reflection 8.13
Would you consider the use of portfolios as an assessment option in your teach¬ing context? What items would you ask students to include and how would you link the collection to the course?
Advantages and disadvantages of portfolios
Portfolio assessments appeal to teachers of L2 writing because of the increased validity provided by multiple samples and the fact that evaluation can be matched with teaching objectives. Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000) point out that portfolios strongly support pedagogies which involve multidrafting, revision, peer review, collaborative learning, and reflective writing. This not only helps students to more clearly see a direct connection between what they are taught and how they are assessed, but can also provide more data on individual writing progress, enabling teachers to offer more support in their weaker areas (Brown and Hudson, 1998). Multi-genre portfolios, perhaps including both narrative and expository genres, can also highlight how texts are organized differently to express particular purposes. Similarly, a portfolio can illustrate how one genre often relates to or interacts with others, as in cases where students assemble all the genres for a formal job application.
But, as. White (1994: 127) observes, "a portfolio is not a test; it is only a collection of materials," and teachers still have to evaluate what is collected. Scoring a portfolio may, in fact, actually be harder than dealing with a single piece of writing because of the heterogeneous nature of what is assessed and the greater complexity in ensuring reliability across raters and rating occa¬sions. Standardizing a single score to fairly express a student's ability from a variety of genres, tasks, drafts, and perhaps different subject discipline ma¬terial can be extremely difficult. There is the problem of controlling the vari¬ability which can arise from different tasks assigned by different teachers, particularly if some are intrinsically more interesting, or easy, to write about (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996: 417). Teachers also need to consider the difficul¬ties of establishing grade equivalence across raters and their own decisions in rating different portfolios. In fact, portfolios place huge cognitive and time loads on raters, which means they may take shortcuts in making decisions (Hamp-Lyons and Condon, 1993). Table 8.5 summarizes these issues.
236 Assessing student writing
Table 8.5: Some potential advantages and disadvantages of portfolio assessments
Advantages
Disadvantages
Represents program goals Reflects progress over time, genres,
and conditions More broad, comprehensive, and fair
than exams Closely related to teaching and students'
abilities Students see portfolio as a record of
progress Focuses on multidrafting, feedback,
revision, etc. Assignments build on each other and
show genre sets Allows different selection and
assessment criteria Students reflect on their improvement
and weaknesses
Produces heavy workload for
teachers May encourage "teaching the
portfolio" Difficult to compare tasks set by
different teachers Difficult to assign a single grade
to varied collection Problems with plagiarism or
outside assistance Problems with reliability across
raters !
Reflection 8.14
To what extent would the disadvantages of portfolio assessment dissuade you from using this approach in your writing classes? How might you seek to overcome these problems?
Designing, managing, and assessing portfolios
Portfolios differ widely as they reflect the goals of different courses and the needs of different learners, but all require careful thought from the outset. When designing a portfolio assessment, a number of questions can be addressed as a concrete starting point:
1. What do we want to know about the writer - progress? genre aware¬ness? self-reflection?
2. What texts will best achieve this purpose - what genres? drafts or final only? peer reviews?
3. Who will choose the entries? teachers only? students only? teacher and student together?
4. What should the performance criteria be and how will these be linked to course objectives?
Portfolio assessments 237
Table 8.6: A checklist for managing a writing portfolio
1. Determine what the portfolio is to include based on course objectives and student needs analysis.
2. Ask students to buy a ring binder for the portfolio. They should paste a sheet in the front with the submission texts and due dates and divide the binder with labeled tabs.
3. Discuss the purposes and procedures of the portfolio with students throughout the course.
4. Agree on assessment decisions and scoring criteria with other teachers and communicate these, both formally and informally, through feedback comments to students throughout the course.
5. Set aside days to conduct checks to monitor progress and help learners reorganize their portfolios.
6. Provide opportunities for students to display their work through portfolio presentations, design competitions, readings, and so on.
7. Encourage reflection on entries by asking students to write an introduction to their portfolios and diary entries or letters to readers on its contents.
5. Should the entries receive a preliminary initial grade or the portfolio only be graded as a whole?
6. What part will students' reflections and self-assessments play in the assessment?
7. How will consistent scoring and feedback be achieved - what rater training is needed?
8. How many people will grade the portfolio and how will scoring dis¬agreements be resolved?
9. How will the outcomes of the evaluation process washback into stu¬dents' learning?
10. What mechanisms should be set up for evaluating the program and making changes to it?
Once a portfolio system is agreed upon, it needs to be implemented and managed, with an initial emphasis on teacher and learner training. Students will need explicit guidance in selecting items and learning to write reflec¬tive comments on their choices, while raters must have clear criteria to ensure consistency and reliability in compiling and assessing these choices. It is important that students understand their responsibilities in choosing texts and that they are aware of the rating process. It is also important that teachers participate in benchmarking sessions to familiarize them with the scoring rubric to be used. This is to improve reliability and to ensure that students receive formative commentary based on course performance criteria. A checklist for managing a portfolio might include the points in Table 8.6.
238 Assessing student writing
Consistently Consistently
present or high absent or low
«■=—====== Characteristics of the Writer ==—=====■»
Fit between reflection and portfolio evidence Awareness beyond immediate task
Perspective on self as a writer Quality of reflection about writing
«■" Characteristics of the Portfolio as a Whole ==■»
Variety of tasks Awareness of reader/writer context
Sense of purpose and task Choice and management of genres
<-====== Characteristics of Individual Texts ==-===■» Engagement with subject matter Significance of subject matter Resources used Amount of writing Quality of development and analysis Critical perspective on subject matter ^============== in-Text Features ==============■» Control of grammar and mechanics Management of tone and style Coherence/flow/momentum Control and variety of syntax Source: Based on Hamp-Lyons and Condon, 2000:144. Figure 8.5: Dimensions for assessing portfolios. As noted above, the heterogeneity of portfolios makes them difficult to score, but there are two main approaches to grading them: 1. Holistic: Previously scored portfolio samples are used as models rep¬resenting certain score levels and student work is measured against these to provide a single grade. 2. Multiple-trait: Can include text features of specific genres, but may also include criteria for draft stages, awareness of processes, self-reflection, cooperative interaction, content knowledge. Whereas the holistic method may be effective with smallepsamples, it is unlikely to be reliable with longer and more open portfolios which display considerable variation. The multiple-trait option more faithfully reflects the complexities of both the products and the processes involved, but may become unwieldy if too many different criteria are scored. Hamp-Lyons and Summary and conclusion 239 Condon (2000) suggest a useful heuristic for devising criteria based on the main elements to be assessed (Figure 8.5). When assessing portfolios, or any kind of writing task, it is important that there are some accountability processes involved so that the basis for a particular score can be given. Multiple-trait systems seem to offer the most effective means of accomplishing this, while simultaneously developing raters' appreciation of the features of good writing. It should be pointed out that portfolios do not necessarily bring greater accuracy to assessment, but they do promote a greater awareness of what good writing might be and how it might be best achieved. The advantages lay principally in that the validity, and value, of assessment is increased if it is situated in teaching and based on a clearer understanding of writing. Summary and conclusion Performance assessment is a crucial aspect of the writing teacher's job, pro¬viding information on students' progress and weaknesses and feeding back into new tasks, materials, and syllabus revisions. This chapter has provided a practical overview of the principles and practices of writing assessment relevant to classroom teachers, stressing its essentially pedagogical role. While institutional constraints may not always allow teachers to administer the assessment tasks they would prefer, the use of clear rubrics and prompts anchored in needs and course objectives, attention to issues of validity and reliability, and the application of explicit and systematic scoring criteria can help ensure fair and effective assessment. The main points made in this chapter have been: • Although a stigma attaches to "teaching to the test," every assessment task should reflect the objectives of a course and relate to the writing skills and understandings that have been taught. • Assessment is not a disembodied aspect of education but is an integral element of the curriculum, feeding back into and influenced by needs analysis, course design, and selection of tasks and materials. • Teachers should be clear about the reason for any writing assessment and ensure that results are not used for inappropriate purposes. • It is important to implement the principles of reliability and validity to ensure that the assessment is as fair and meaningful as possible. • Teachers should consider rubrics and prompts carefully to create tasks that are clear, engaging, and relevant to students' needs and what they have been taught. • Different scoring methods have their own advantages and problems and correspond to different views of writing and assessment. The choice of 240 Assessing student writing method should be made bearing in mind issues of reliability, validity, practicality, and the information it can provide on students' writing abilities. • Devising and implementing scoring criteria is a demanding task best done as a collaborative exercise with all raters and involving the benchmarking of texts to achieve consistency. • Portfolio assessments have advantages over single essays by providing students with an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities in different genres and their understanding of different writing processes. Discussion questions and activities 1 What is the essential difference between formative and summative as-sessment? How do these two categories relate to the broad purposes for assessing student writing discussed in the opening section of this chapter? 2 What do reliability and validity refer to and why are they important in the design and interpretation of L2 writing assessment tasks? Validity is said to be more important than reliability in assessing writing. Why? 3 What can writing assessment tasks tell us about learners that could feed back into curriculum decisions concerning needs, lacks, course design, task specification, materials production, and subsequent assessments? Can you anticipate any problems in this washback process? How might they be overcome? 4 Many teachers worry that their assessment practices are essentially sub-jective and can vary from one essay to the next or may be different from those of other teachers. How can teachers ensure greater consistency and reliability in judging performance? 5 In what ways can teachers make their writing assessments an integral feature of their courses? What advantages does integration offer course participants? 6 Evaluate the following task from what you know about prompt and rubric construction and assessment validity. Devise an appropriate scoring prompt for the assessment. Write an essay which examines your progress as a writer in light of the as¬signments you have completed during this course. In your essay you should consider how at least two of the following have contributed to your develop¬ment: genre, reader awareness, pre-writing, revising, or using feedback. Be sure to plan your essay carefully and allow time for this. Bear in mind the need for logical structure, introduction and conclusion, focusing statement, topic-led paragraphs, links, and appropriate tone. You have 60 minutes to write approximately 500 words. Appendix 8.1 241 7 Construct a writing assessment task for either an imaginary group of stu-dents or a class you are familiar with. Explain why this is an appropriate task for the learners in terms of their needs and class objectives and show how it meets the criteria given for task rubrics and prompts. 8 Devise an holistic and an analytic scoring rubric for the assignment you designed in 6 above. 9 A number of studies have shown that the judgments made by raters using both holistic and analytic scales are unreliable and that even experienced raters may differ in the importance they give to different criteria. Conduct a small-scale research project to test this finding. Allocate a number of student essays and a scoring rubric to three or four colleagues or fellow-students and examine the similarities and differences in their ratings. Write up your results in a short essay. 10 Devise a portfolio that would be an appropriate course assessment for a particular group of students you are familiar with. List the items you require students to include and the reflection questions they should respond to. Provide a written justification for your choices. 11 A significant difficulty for many new teachers is managing the distribution of assessment tasks through a course and keeping on top of the marking load. What do you think the main issues might involve here and what strategies would you use to deal with them? Appendix 8.1: Holistic marking scheme Rubric for a report written in response to listening and reading sources: Score 86-100 71-85 Descriptors Outstanding work: excellence clearly in evidence through correct selection of content and its ordering under the appropriate headings of the report; ability to summarize and rephrase wordings of input content; overall coherence of the report structure, internal cohesion of each of the three sections; linguistic accuracy and the use of a variety of structures and vocabulary; and the sustained employment of an appropriate tone and style Very good work: all relevant points from the inputs identified and incorporated under appropriate headings; a mostly successful attempt is made to rephrase the wordings of the main points from the inputs; overall coherence is good and ideas are logically and clearly connected; syntactic variety may be limited but there is no more than a sprinkling of (nonserious) grammatical errors; only occasional lapses in tone and style, mainly through inappropriate selection of vocabulary 242 Assessing student writing Appendix 8.1 (continued) Score Descriptors 56-70 Satisfactory work: incorporation of relevant points from the reading and listening inputs mostly satisfactory but some minor points may be missing and some phrases may be taken verbatim from the inputs; overall coherence is quite good but cohesion within and between sentences may be faulty in places; variety of structures/choice of vocabulary is limited and more than a sprinkling of grammatical errors is in evidence but these do not seriously impede reader comprehension 41-55 Marginally satisfactory work: some relevant points not incorporated, and some points copied verbatim and/or not subsumed under the appropriate headings of the report; connections between sections of the report and the linkage of ideas within sections of the report are relatively poor but can be read without causing the reader serious strain; grammatical mistakes are frequent but do not cause excessive strain for the reader; frequent lapses in tone and style 26-40 Unsatisfactory work: inadequate incorporation of relevant material from the inputs and/or direct copying of wordings; poor overall coherence and local cohesion leading to strain in reader comprehension; numerous grammatical errors, some serious and impeding comprehension; no consistent attempt to establish appropriate tone and style; some attempt to fulfill task requirements but at an unacceptably low level 1-25 Very unsatisfactory work: relevant points missing and/or irrelevant material included; may be strong evidence of extensive copying from the inputs; coherence and cohesion are consistently poor and cause serious strain for the reader; text is littered with grammatical errors of all kinds and there is little or no attempt to produce the appropriate tone or style; the work clearly fails to fulfill task requirements Appendix 8.2 243 Appendix 8.2: An analytic scoring rubric Mark Format and content 40 marks 31-40 Fuifills task fully; correct convention for the assignment task; features excellent to of chosen genre mostly adhered to; good ideas/good use of very good relevant information; substantial concept use; properly developed ideas; good sense of audience 21-30 Fulfills task quite weil although details may be underdeveloped or good to partly irrelevant; correct genre selected; most features of chosen average genre adhered to; satisfactory ideas with some development; quite good use of relevant information; some concept use; quite good sense of audience 11-20 Generally adequate but some inappropriate, inaccurate, or irrelevant fair to poor data; an acceptable convention for the assignment task; some features of chosen genre adhered to; limited ideas/moderate use of relevant information; little concept use; barely adequate development of ideas; poor sense of audience 1-10 Clearly inadequate fulfilment of task; possibly incorrect genre for the Inadequate assignment; chosen genre not adhered to; omission of key information; serious irrelevance or inaccuracy; very limited ideas/ignores relevant information; no concept use; inadequate development of ideas; poor or no sense of audience Mark Organization and coherence 20 marks 16-20 Message followed with ease; well organized and thorough excellent to development through introduction, body, and conclusion; relevant very good and convincing supporting details; logical progression of content contributes to fluency; unified paragraphs; effective use of transitions and reference 11-15 Message mostly followed with ease; satisfactorily organized and good to developed through introduction, body and conclusion; relevant average- supporting details; mostly logical progression of content; moderate to good fluency; unified paragraphs; possible slight over- or under-use of transitions but correctly used; mostly correct references 6-10 Message followed but with some difficulty; some pattern of fair to organization - an introduction, body, and conclusion evident but poor poorly done; some supporting details; progression of content inconsistent or repetitious; lack of focus in some paragraphs; over- or under-use of transitions with some incorrect use; incorrect use of reference 1-5 Message difficult to follow; little evidence of organization - inadequate introduction and conclusion may be missing; few or no supporting details; no obvious progression of content; improper paragraphing; no or incorrect use of transitions; lack of reference contributes to comprehension difficulty 244 Assessing student writing Appendix 8.2 (continued) Mark Sentence construction and vocabulary 40 marks 31-40 excellent to very good 21-30 good to average 11-20 fair to poor 1-10 inadequate Effective use of a wide variety of correct sentences; variety of sentence length; effective use of transitions; no significant errors in agreement, tense, number, person, articles, pronouns and prepositions; effective use of a wide variety of lexical items; word form mastery; effective choice of idiom; correct register Effective use of a variety of correct sentences; some variety of length; use of transitions with only slight errors; no serious recurring errors in agreement, tense, number, person, articles, pronouns and prepositions; almost no sentence fragments or run-ons; variety of iexicai items with some problems but not causing comprehension difficulties; good control of word form; mostly effective idioms; correct register A limited variety of mostly correct sentences; little variety of sentence length; improper use of or missing transitions; recurring grammar errors are intrusive; sentence fragments or run-ons evident; a limited variety of lexical items occasionally causing comprehension problems; moderate word form control; occasional inappropriate choice of idiom; perhaps incorrect register A limited variety of sentences requiring considerable effort to understand; correctness only on simple short sentences; improper use of or missing transitions; many grammar errors and comprehension problems; frequent incomplete or run-on sentences; a limited variety of iexicai items; poor word forms; inappropriate idioms; incorrect register 9 Researching writing and writers Aims: This final chapter departs from exclusively pedagogic issues to focus on links between teaching and research. It offers a practical guide to ways of researching L2 writing processes, texts, and classrooms and suggests areas of research suitable for teachers and students, Teaching and research are often seen in opposition, one practical and the other theoretical, leading many teachers to regard research as an activity con¬ducted by scholars and unrelated to their everyday lives. Research, however, is central to what we know and do as teachers. I have argued that the most effective teachers are those able to make informed classroom choices from an awareness of current perspectives on second language writing. Keeping abreast of ideas and developments in the field is a key professional activity and many teachers make a point of reading the research published in the Journal of Second Language Writing and other journals that carry relevant articles such as Language Teaching Research, TESOL Quarterly, Assessing Writings and Research in the Teaching of Writing. But teachers are not simply consumers of others' research. They tend to be curious about their students and their subject; they actively experiment with different tasks and materials; and they reflect on their approaches and decisions. They know a great deal about teaching in the sense of formulating attitudes to the issues and events they encounter and have assumptions and beliefs about what they do. As professionals, they accept that their expertise should develop as they gain experience and look for ways to better understand what they teach and the ways they teach it. In other words, as Stake (1995: 97) points out, "research is not just the domain of scientists, it is the domain of craftspersons and artists as well, all who would study and interpret." Because it stimulates curiosity, validates classroom observations, and helps develop a critical perspective on practice, research is at the heart of professional development since it 245 246 Researching writing and writers helps to transform a personal understanding into an informed awareness. This chapter outlines how teachers can use research as a systematic and ongoing approach to solving problems and expanding their knowledge of writing, focusing on: • Generating and designing research projects • Collecting and analyzing data • Reporting research Orientation What does "research" mean to you? What do you think makes good research? Can research into writing and learning to write be useful and if so, in what ways and to whom? Some preliminaries and key steps It is possible to study writing without detailed knowledge of the various procedures available, but equipped with an understanding of basic steps and methods, the process becomes more fruitful. "Good research" can be defined in many ways which reach beyond narrow conceptions of objectiv¬ity and validity. All research should interest the researcher, target a specific issue, have intellectual or practical value, be ethically and rigorously con¬ducted, draw on appropriate data and methods of analysis, and produce credible results. The actual practices which can realize these broad criteria are extremely diverse, however, and an awareness of the options available can assist the researcher enormously. Many "teacher as researcher" studies originate in the type of inquiry known as action research, the process of collecting and analyzing data to improve the quality of some action, typically a classroom practice (Wallace, 1998:4). The emphasis is on concrete and practical issues of immediate con¬cern and conducted in classroom settings by teachers working individually or collaborating in teams (Burns, 1999). But although this is a very ac¬cessible type of research, not all teacher studies are problem-driven and change-oriented. Research arises from a need to understand what people do in certain situations, and this may arise as much from a simple interest as to achieve a practical payoff. It will become clear that there is no "one-size-fits-all" formula to car¬rying out research. Different topics, contexts, access to data, researcher Generating research 247 preferences, and available time and resources will all influence the approach. Nor is research the tidy, linear, and efficient procedure often presented in completed studies. Topics often tend to evolve in an organic rather than a mechanical way, with accompanying dead ends, false starts, and new av¬enues subverting a simple stepwise approach. We can, however, identify the following ideal stages which help systematize the process while allow¬ing for the possibility of change, recursion and redirection, and in the next sections I will enlarge on these basic steps: Formulating"* Focusing^Designing-* Collecting-* Analyzing^ Reporting Generating research: Formulating and focusing a question Formulating a topic Almost anything can form a question for research, but basic prerequisites are that it should be viable, discrete, intrinsically interesting, and potentially involve collaboration with others (Hopkins, 1993: 64). Teachers should, initially anyway, only consider taking on small-scale and relatively limited topics that are interesting to them or relevant to their students and which have a chance of succeeding within a restricted time-scale. It is easy to underestimate the time that research demands, and formulating a specific issue at the outset can be time well spent. This doesn't mean that research always begins with a clear idea or hypoth¬esis. It often starts as an open-ended aspect of writing that seems interesting and slowly gains shape through jotting down observations or reflections. Teachers may be motivated by the desire to understand the texts they present, the effects of changing their teaching, the writing processes of their students, the ways students discuss writing, their preferences for particular expres¬sions, or the genres of target communities. Some researchable topics are listed in Appendix 9.1, but an issue may evolve from one of these sources: • A personal observation - why do two groups respond differently to the same assignment? How does the structure of a narrative differ from a report? Why don't students stay on task in peer review sessions? • Something we find in a journal or a conversation - a surprising result or interesting suggestion. • The behavior of students - why do they have trouble with transition paragraphs? What composing processes do they use? What do they say about their essays in peer groups? What kinds of writing do they engage in out of class? 248 Researching writing and writers • A claim about writing in a study guide or a textbook that seems ques¬tionable or interesting. • An aspect of student needs analysis - How is this genre structured? How does it relate to other genres in this situation? What sources do students need to draw on in this context? Reflection 9.1 While you may not have conducted any formal "research," what kinds of pro-fessional or classroom issues do you find interesting and would like to know more about? Why do these interest you? Focusing The original observation or practice which triggered an idea for research then needs to be more clearly focused in order to help define the kind of data that will be needed, the way it will be collected, and how it will be analyzed. The issue is reformulated more precisely as a result of a fact-finding and reflective process. This stage involves closer scrutiny of the topic through discussions with experienced colleagues, unstructured ob¬servation of the context, open-ended interviews with participants, or In¬ternet and library searches to learn what others have said about the issue. Thus, if a teacher is interested in, say, the impact of teacher feedback, then he or she needs to be clear about the kind of behavior to include as feedback and what will count as a relationship between feedback and re¬sponse. Is it worth looking only at written feedback? Should both margin and end comments be included? What counts as a revision? How are revi-sions to be related to feedback? Is the scope of a revision important or only its frequency? What should be done with revisions that originate outside feedback? Focusing also involves thinking about how to frame the question. Some researchers prefer to formulate a specific question early in the process and then set out to answer it. This kind of tight framing reflects natural science procedures and involves stating an explicit hypothesis that the research can test to either confirm or disprove. Thus, the teacher concerned about students' use of feedback may hypothesize that offering more corrective advice in end comments will produce more form-focused revisions. He or she might then collect first and second drafts of-student essays, identify all form-focused feedback, and match this against changes to students drafts. Designing research 249 An alternative is to work with general questions and take a more exploratory approach. This involves collecting and drawing on data to see where the is¬sue leads, examining factors in the revising context, such as the help learn¬ers get from friends or the preferences they have for particular kinds of feedback. As we shall see below, the choice between these ways of fram¬ing the question has important implications for the design of the research itself. Reflection 9.2 How would you focus the following general issue to make itpossible to research: "Some of my students are reluctant to participate in peer-review sessions"? What specific questions might you need to frame to address your question? What sources could you turn to in order to learn more about the issue? What kinds of data would you want to collect? Designing research The next stage is to design a research plan by matching the topic to a feasible method of investigation. It involves three broad aspects: 1. Viability: Setting up a realistic way of carrying out the research. 2. Ethicality: Establishing principles and procedures to protect the par¬ticipants in the research. 3. Validity: Ensuring that the research results are likely to fit with reality. First of all, the research obviously needs to be feasible given siruational constraints. While the choice of a particular method will depend on the indi¬vidual's understanding of the issue and preference for a particular research approach, it is also a very practical matter involving mundane issues of access and management. The main issues here concern both the resources needed to collect data and get a project under way and those required to monitor and control it: • acquiring access to texts, institutions, information, and participants • gaining the cooperation and patience of students • encouraging the cooperation of colleagues • securing time to engage intellectually with the data and to reflect peri¬odically on the changing shape of the project • managing record-keeping and tracking progress 250 Researching writing and writers Table 9,1: Some ethical considerations for research • Gain approval from participants - for documents, quotations, observations, transcripts - anything! • Explain clearly - ensure those involved understand the aims, methods, and intended dissemination. • Clarify consequences - guarantee that subjects are not penalized for in vo I vement/n on involvement. • Maintain confidentiality - ensure participant's anonymity. • Involve participants - encourage others with a stake in the work or contributing to it. • Get feedback - allow contributors to see and discuss your accounts of their behavior. • Report progress - keep the work visible and remain open to suggestions from colleagues. • Negotiate release of information - different agreements may be needed at different levels. • Retain rights - if participants are satisfied with fairness and accuracy, then accounts should not be vetoed later. Ethical considerations are also a crucial dimension of design. Conduct¬ing a research project changes a teacher's relationships with his or her students and colleagues, and care needs to be taken to guard against ex¬ploiting those relationships through lack of negotiation or confidentiality. Of central importance are the potential issues of coercion, compromise, and misunderstanding which can arise because of the inherent power im¬balance in the teacher-student relationship. The teacher's responsibility for assigning grades and other crucial decisions poses serious implicit chal¬lenges for conducting research in one's own class which need to be rec¬ognized and openly discussed. Students must understand that their partic-ipation or nonparticipation in the research will have no consequences for them. In addition, participants should have the right to know the aims of the project, what information is sought, how it will be used, and who will have access to it. Even where the English proficiency of L2 students may not be high, every attempt should be made to ensure that they understand the purpose of the research and that they are aware that they have the right to anonymity, to withdraw, or to veto the release of data. Often students are keen to be involved in a study, but they should have a choice. Potential dilemmas arise, of course, when informing students may influence the data, but it might be possible here to ask students after the event and exclude data about those who are unwilling from the final results. Table 9.1 raises some key guidelines for ethical research (see also Cohen et al., 2000; Hitchcock and Hughes, 1995). Designing research 251 Table 9.2: General features of quantitative and qualitative research Quantitative Qualitative Values objectivity and eliminates Sees behavior as subjective and context-bound researcher bias Data seen as measurabie quantities Interpretations through participant perspectives Establishes and tests hypotheses Theorizes issues via reflection on contextual data May involve intervention to control Explores natural contexts without controlling the context variables Values reliability and replication Ensures validity through multiple data sources of methods Seeks to generalize beyond Does not generalize but focuses on instances immediate context Reflection 9.3 Imagine you want to conduct an experiment with two groups of writers to study the effects of feedback. One group will receive feedback on their drafts and the other only a grade, then each group will be tested on its improvement. What ethical issues does this raise? How could you modify the research to address these issues? The third main aspect of design is to ensure that the research will answer the questions it has set itself, providing a credible explanation or char¬acterization of the issue. In particular, this involves decisions concerning the researcher's understanding of the role of "objectivity" and the degree to which he or she will intervene to collect and analyze data. Data can be distin¬guished in various ways, and one familiar contrast is between qualitative and quantitative types. Until recently, educational research has favored quantita¬tive scientific methods aimed at securing objectivity by testing hypotheses through structured and controlled procedures. Essentially the researcher approaches an issue from the outside, working to discover facts about a situation that can be measured and compared. Qualitative researchers, in contrast, argue that it is important to explore any situation from the partici¬pants' perspective and is more inductive, reflective, and exploratory. Denzin and Lincoln (1998) and Miles and Huberman (1994) provide authoritative discussions of the differences and these are summarized in Table 9.2. This neat opposition, however, overlooks the fact that many studies em¬ploy both numeric and other kinds of data, and it is worth emphasizing that 252 Researching writing and writers much writing research combines both quantitative and qualitative types of data, analysis, and interpretation to gain a more complete picture of a complex reality. There are, in fact, good reasons for incorporating several techniques in data gathering, and the concept of triangulation, the use of multiple sources, provides for greater plausibility in interpreting results. It obviously makes sense to view research pragmatically, adopting what¬ever tools seem most effective, and a researcher may, for example, gather student opinions about their writing practices through a questionnaire and supplement this with interview or diary data, mixing methods to increase the validity of the eventual findings. Despite this, the qualitative-quantitative distinction does raise the inter¬esting contrast between elicited and naturalistic data. The researcher has to consider whether data are to be gathered in controlled conditions, such as through questionnaires, structured interviews and experiments, or in cir¬cumstances not specifically set up for the research, such as via classroom observations or analyses of naturally occurring texts. No data can ever strictly be free of the effects of the researcher's intervention, and as we shall see below, all methods of collection and analysis allow varying degrees of open-endedness and control. In more interventionist research designs, how¬ever, the researcher has to take care that the data collected are authentic and not simply the product of an artificially contrived situation. Reflection 9.4 Selecting either an interventionist or naturalistic approach, consider the tasks you might need to perform to investigate the impact of teacher written feed¬back on student revisions. Match these tasks with the resources required. What resource requirements are likely to be most problematic? Collecting data The previous two sections addressed the important steps of selecting a researchable issue and determining the mode of approach in terms of the degree of intervention and quantification to be used. With a focused research issue and a general plan, the next stage involves going deeper into the research process by collecting data. Space allows only a brief survey of the various data collection techniques used in writing research, and readers are referred to user-friendly introductions to classroom research by Bell (1999), Burns (1999), Hopkins (1993), McDonough and McDonough (1997), and Collecting data 253 Table 9.3: Main data collection methods for researching writing Questionnaires Highly focused elicitations of respondent self-reports about actions and attitudes Interviews Adaptable and interactive elicitations of respondent self-reports Verbal reports Retrospective accounts and think aloud reports of thoughts while composing Written reports Diary or log accounts of personal writing or learning experiences Observation Direct or recorded data of "live" interactions or writing behavior Text analyses Study of authentic examples of writing used for communication in a natural context Experiments Controlled context to discover the effect of one variable on another Case studies A collection of techniques capturing the experiences of participants in a situation Nunan (1992) for greater coverage. A profile of methods for researching writing would include those listed in Table 9.3. Reflection 9.5 Which of the data collection methods listed above appeal to you most? Why do these seem most attractive and can you imagine circumstances where you might wish to use other methods? Elicitation: Questionnaires and interviews These are the two main methods for eliciting information and attitudes from informants. Questionnaires are widely used for collecting large amounts of structured, often numerical, easily analyzable self-report data, while inter¬views offer more flexibility and greater potential for elaboration and detail. Both allow researchers to tap people's views and experiences of writing, but interviews tend to be more quantitative and heuristic and questionnaires more quantitative and conclusive. Questionnaire items vary in the kind of responses they elicit: • Closed options from a set of fixed alternatives (yes/no/don't know) • Structured items with opportunities to select or rank alternatives or scale agreement with statements • Open-ended questions which prescribe no responses at all The more predetermined questionnaire formats make them easy to admin¬ister and facilitate considerable precision in framing issues for large groups 254 Researching writing and writers and assisting the analysis and quantification of data. The lack of oppor¬tunities for immediate followup and clarification, however, means that the researcher has to be confident that items can be interpreted independently and unambiguously, and that instructions for completing them are clear. These factors become particularly important when respondents are second language learners who may be intimidated by a long and daunting docu¬ment. There is also the possibility that L2 students may restrict themselves to the options available and not consider perspectives that have not been proposed. As a result, teachers generally pilot their questions beforehand to ensure they are short, clear, and direct, and that learners have sufficient knowledge to respond. Questionnaires are particularly useful for exploratory studies into writing attitudes and behaviors and for identifying issues that can be followed up later by more in-depth methods. One major use of questionnaires in writing research has been to discover the kinds of writing target communities require from students. Jenkins, Jordan, and Weiland (1993), for example, used a questionnaire to fine-tune the relevance of their technical writing course by learning more about the genres their L2 engineering students had to write and the attitudes their professors had about students' writing skills. Their questionnaire asked respondents to indicate the types of writing they asked students to do, judge the relative difficulty that L2 students had in writing them, rank the importance of different errors, and so on. In this case statistical tests were used to establish the significance of the differences between the responses for each question, but teachers often find that simple descriptive measures such as means and percentages are sufficient to identify general features of their results. Reflection 9.6 What do you think might be the relative advantages and disadvantages of open and closed questions in questionnaires designed to research L2 writing? Con¬sider both pros and cons for the researcher in designing and analyzing them, and for the subject in responding to them. Interviews offer more interactive and less predetermined modes of elicit¬ing self-report information. Although sometimes little more than oral ques¬tionnaires, interviews generally represent a very different way of under¬standing human experience, regarding knowledge as generated between people rather than as objectified and external to them. Participants are able Collecting data 255 to discuss their interpretations and perspectives, sharing what writing means to them rather than responding to preconceived categories. This flexibility and responsiveness means that interviews are used widely in L2 writing research and often supplement questionnaires as a means of clarifying and expanding potentially interesting answers. Like questionnaires, however, interviews can be divided according to the extent they constrain responses: • Structured interviews: a relatively tight format and set of assumptions -preplanned questions given in a fixed order almost like a checklist. • Semi-structured interviews: set of guidelines in no fixed order and al¬lowing extensive followup. • Unstructured interviews: loose outline of issues with direction following interviewee responses. Once again, the researcher needs to weigh the relevant issues and the types of respondents involved to decide what kind of interview would be most appropriate for the research purpose. Reflection 9.7 In what ways would the use of naturalistic, unstructured interview techniques be helpful as a research methodology and what difficulties might this also cause for the researcher? Interviews can be undertaken with individuals or with small groups of three or four (often called focus groups) and in writing research typically address the following broad areas: • Writing practices: to discover the genres people write and how they understand and go about writing (What kinds of texts do you write in this context? How is this text different from this one?). • Teaching and learning practices: to discover people's beliefs and prac¬tices about teaching and learning (How many assignments do you set? How do you start planning an essay?). • Discourse-features: to discover how text users see and respond to partic¬ular features of writing (Why did you use this here? Why do you think the writer changes direction here?). Because they offer a flexible tool for gaining privileged access to oth¬ers' writing beliefs and practices, interviews allow researchers to probe beyond preconceived explanations to refine categories and explore new 256 Researching writing and writers perceptions. It is difficult, for instance, to predict the kinds of problems that students might have in understanding teacher feedback, but through interviews Hyland and Hyland (2001) learned that students often experi¬enced considerable confusion in deciphering teachers' indirect feedback. Interviews are also effective means of discovering the kinds of writing that people do in different contexts and the meanings and challenges it holds for L2 writers. Thus, through interviews Chang and Swales (1999) found that their L2 student writers were disturbed by the appearance of informal features such as sentence fragments, sentence-initial but, and first person pronouns in published writmg, while Flowerdew's (1999) Hong Kong L2 academics believed their weak facility of expression and poorer argument skills hindered their writing for publication in English. Reflection 9.8 Suppose you want to conduct research into the writing done in a particular set-ting to ensure you are providing your students with appropriate preparation for the tasks that face them. To what extent would (a) questionnaires and (b) inter¬views be appropriate methods of investigation? What other kinds of data might you also need? introspection: Verbal and written reports While elicited self-report data are central to much writing research, many interesting issues can be addressed through more introspective methods such as verbal and diary reports. The idea of verbal reports as data rests on the belief that the process of writing requires conscious attention and that at least some of the thought process involved can be recovered, either as a retrospective recall or simul¬taneously with writing as a think-aloud protocol. Protocols involve partici¬pants writing in their normal way but instructed to verbalize all thinking at the same time so that information can be collected on their decisions, their strategies, and their perceptions as they work. Think-aloud data have been criticized as offering an artificial and in¬complete picture of the complex cognitive activities involved in writmg. For one thing, many cognitive processes are routine and internalized opera¬tions and therefore not available to verbal description while, more seriously, the act of verbal reporting may itself distort the cognitive process being re¬ported on (Stratman and Hamp-Lyons, 1994). Subjects' verbalizations tend to slow task progress and may interfere with the way they perform the task Collecting data 257 or explanations they give. In particular, the procedure can overload second language students who may only be able to describe their thinking in their LI. In fact, the technique is difficult even in one's first language, and may require considerable training to accomplish. But despite these criticisms, the method has been widely used (e.g., Smagorinsky, 1994), partly because the alternative is to deduce cognitive processes solely from subjects' behavior, and this would obviously be far less reliable. Think-aloud techniques have been extremely productive in revealing the strategies writers use when composing, showing that writing is not simply a series of actions, but a series of decisions which involve setting goals and selecting strategies to achieve them. Much of this work has explored what students do when planning and revising texts, and in one study de Larios et al. (1999) used the method to examine what students did when they were blocked by a language problem or wanted to express a different meaning, tracing the patterns they used in searching for an alternative syntactic plan. The procedure has also been used to discover something about teaching processes. R Hyland (1998), for example, asked teachers to conduct think-aloud protocols as they gave written feedback on student essays to reveal the reasoning processes behind the comments and the meanings they intended to convey by them (see Figure 9.3 for an example transcript). So, while think aloud is a potentially difficult technique, it can offer the researcher a source of considerable insights about writing and writing response practices. Reflection 9,9 Record yourself thinking aloud while performing a language learning or teach-ing task (such as marking a paper, writing an essay, or engaged in a comprehen¬sion exercise). Does the tape tell you anything you weren't previously aware of about your behavior? What could be usefully explored further? Diaries offer an alternative, and more straightforward, way of gaining introspective data. Bailey (1990:215) defines diary studies as "a first-person account of a language learning or teaching experience, documented through regular, candid entries in a personal journal and then analyzed for recurring patterns or salient events." They can be kept by students, teachers, expert text users, or researchers themselves, and are often followed up with interviews. Individuals are encouraged to enter all relevant activities on a regular basis and, when a sufficient amount of material has been produced, the researcher examines it for patterns which are then interpreted and discussed with the 258 Researching writing and writers writer/Diaries therefore provide a rich source of comparatively uncontrolled and reflective data which can reveal social and psychological processes that might be difficult to collect in other ways. While some diarists may resent the time and intrusion of making entries, journal writing is now a familiar feature of many writing classes and the use of this data can be a useful way of gathering information about ongoing writing practices. Again, the procedure can be structured or open. Diarists may be given the opportunity to produce "narrative" entries which freely introspect on their learning or wilting practices and experiences, or be set guidelines to restrict the issues addressed. Such guidelines help L2 learners to keep "on task" and supply a metalanguage to talk about their experiences. These can be in the form of detailed points to address ("write about what you found most/least interesting about this class"; "write about your interactions with group members") or a loose framework for response ("note all the work you did to complete this assignment"). Alternatively, researchers may ask diarists to concentrate only on "critical incidents" of personal significance or to simply maintain logs which record dates and times of reading and writing. Diaries have been widely used as introspective tools by teachers to record their own writing experiences or the effects of their teaching on students' writing. More commonly though, studies have focused on students' reac¬tions to their writing classes or the strategies they employ to accomplish particular tasks. Thus, Nelson (1993) used diaries to discover how her stu¬dents went about writing a research paper. She told them that the entries could include notes on their trail through the library, how they evaluated sources and took notes, the conversations they had with others, insights that occurred to them at any time, decisions about planning the paper, and so on. The students understood that they were expected to explain in as much detail as possible how their research evolved, from the time they were given the assignment to the handing in of their paper. This approach provided a rich account of writers' reflections, suggesting why they acted as they did and how they saw contextual influences. They also highlighted the features of successful strategies that Nelson could use in her teaching. Reflection 9.10 For many people, keeping a diary is not easy and can be time-consuming and burdensome, perhaps even leading to negative attitudes toward what is reported on. What strategies do you think might help to involve diarists in a study and increase their motivation to participate? Collecting data 259 Observations While elicitation and introspective methods provide reports of what people say they think and do, they do not offer any actual evidence of it. Direct observation methods attempt to bridge this gap by systematic documentation and reflection of participants engaged in writing and learning to write. They are based on conscious noticing and precise recording of actions as a way of seeing these actions in a new light. Observation of students is something teachers engage in constantly and, as a result, is a mainstay of classroom research, although the focus of research observation can be much broader and may include: • Ourselves as teachers: the teaching methods and classroom practices employed to teach writing • Students: the behavior of students engaged in writing, conferencing, or other learning tasks • Contexts: the classroom layout, group arrangements, writing stimuli, uses of source materials • Experts: the actions of expert writers in relevant target contexts For research purposes observation needs to be systematized and narrowed to ensure that relevant data are recorded. McDonough and McDonough (1997: 105) distinguish observation as an "intentional activity" from the more usual "reactive noticing" and point out that while the latter can be useful for generating research issues, the former implies planning and prior decisions about what to record. The literature contains a wide variety of different approaches to classroom observation and the researcher needs to consider the extent to which a prior coding scheme will be useful as a way of highlighting significant events from the mass of data that taped or live observation can produce. Once again, the researcher has options about the degree of coding to employ, from simply checking pre-defined boxes at fixed intervals or every time a type of behavior occurs (Figure 9.2), to writing a full narrative of events (Figure 9.5). For novice researchers, a clear structure is easier to apply and yields more manageable data, increasing the likelihood that a new perspective might be gained on a familiar situation. Burns (1999: 81) favors structured observation and provides the following guidelines for teachers: 1. Decide a focus relevant to the research. Don't try to record everything. 2. Identify a specific location for the observation (classroom, common room, library). 3. Identify the group or individual to be observed (class, peer-group, teacher-student conference). 260 Researching writing and writers 4. Record the events (video, audio, or checklist). 5. Be as objective and as precise as possible and avoid evaluative de¬scriptions. 6. Record complete events or incidents for a more inclusive or holistic picture. 7. Develop a recording system that fits in with other events in the context of observation. Obviously coding schemes are easier to use than on-the-spot descrip¬tions, but such pre-selection necessarily reduces the data and may ignore relevant behavior that wasn't predicted. All observation will necessarily privilege some behaviors and neglect others, as we only record what we think is important and so for beginning researchers it may be a good idea to identify appropriate observational categories as explicitly as possible. These categories may originate from a variety of sources: from background reading of the subject, from discussions or brainstorming sessions with col-leagues, from initial unstructured observations of the activity, or from our own teaching experiences. They can also range from relatively low inferen¬tial categories ("uses chalk board," "asks question," "reads draft") to items that are highly interpretive or project attitudes on to participants ("offers compliment," "daydreams," "expresses irritation"). Clearly a balance has to be drawn between ease of recording and richness of analysis, and the teacher may need to first experiment with different schemes. Reflection 9.11 Select a writing activity that you would like to observe and consider how you would observe it. Would you adopt a coding scheme and if so, what categories would you record? What would you hope to discover and how could you use the information you obtain? Text data A major source of data for writing research is writing itself: the use of communicative texts as objects of study. Research on texts can be done in a variety of ways and for many different purposes, but all modern text analyses seek to discover how people use language in specific contexts. Textual data allow us to see how texts work as communication and may comprise the writing that learners produce, the texts they need to produce, or simply texts that seem intrinsically interesting. Analysis of such texts can Collecting data 261 help identify the features of effective writing in different genres or among different groups of users and perhaps also the influences that contribute to these features, extending our understanding beyond the text itself to the multidimensional constraints of its context. Selection of discourse data requires careful thought. Sometimes re-searchers work with a single text, either because it is inherently interesting or because it seems representative of a larger set of texts or particular genre. A major policy speech, a newspaper editorial, or an important scientific article can offer a rich source of insights into forms of persuasion, the distribution of particular syntactic or lexical choices, or the views of text writers. A sample student essay or exam writing may provide awareness about student uses of particular forms or the assumptions underlying different choices. In either circumstance, the data form a "case study" or "an instance in action" (Walker, 1985) and while this is a widely recognized approach, it also raises questions about the extent to which the text is actually representative of a larger set of texts. The view of an expert text user may be helpful here and the teacher may be able to call upon the judgment of another teacher famil¬iar with the genre or student writer in question, an experienced journalist, a faculty member, or so on. Support for the representativeness of textual data is obviously stronger if several texts are compared, and the random selection of texts from a corpus is one important approach here. A number of texts can be collected, from a newspaper or target workplace for example, and examined for recurring patterns of features, or a larger sample representative of a particular genre assembled in electronic form and analyzed using a concordance program (see Chapter 6). While this facilitates the acquisition of information for needs analysis, a major source of data is obviously students' written texts, perhaps essays or assignments submitted to the teacher as attachments or on disk, archives of LAN or Internet discussion sessions or asynchronous email exchanges. Small collections of texts of this sort, gradually built up week by week, can provide interesting frequency information and open up new research questions about students' progress as a group. Reflection 9.12 Imagine you believe your students are overusing first person pronouns in their academic essays. What data would you collect to confirm or disprove this sus-picion? How could you ensure that the texts you select are representative of the genre and writers you wish to study? What would you do with the data? 262 Researching writing and writers Experimental data Experimental methods involve a deliberate intervention to isolate and study a single feature under controlled conditions. Experimental researchers are particularly concerned with external validity and design experiments to enable the results to be generalized to other populations, typically by min¬imizing threats to the reliability and validity of the research. Experimen¬tal techniques explore the strength of a relationship between two variable features of a situation such as test scores, proficiency, instruction, and so on. The idea is that the researcher seeks to discover if one variable influ¬ences another by holding other factors constant and varying the treatment given to two groups. Statistical tests are then carried out on the data to find if differences between the control and the experimental groups are significant. While experiments have been largely rejected in writing research in fa¬vor of more qualitative, natural, and "thicker" data collection techniques, there are contexts in which they may be appropriate. A good example of an experimental approach in writing research is Berg's (1999) study on the influence of peer response training on the quality' and type of text re¬visions made by peers. Berg studied her own students in two intermedi¬ate and two advanced level groups. One group from each level (the ex¬perimental group) received instruction in the language needed for peer response (e.g., asking questions, using specific words, giving opinions, etc.) and in rhetorical aspects of meaning, while the other classes (the control group) received no training. Both the trained and the untrained classes received similar writing instruction, used the same course text, and participated in similar composing and revising activities. Pre-peer first drafts and post-peer second drafts were then examined for meaning changes and graded holistically by two raters. The results showed that the students trained in peer response made significantly more meaning revi¬sions and their writing improved more than untrained students over the two drafts. Although this is a good example of how experimental research can ap¬ply to writing and feed back into teaching, results of experimental studies should be treated cautiously. Classrooms are not laboratories and there are serious difficulties of holding variables constant in two contexts. Differ¬ences in teaching styles, learner preferences, teacher attitudes, peer rela¬tionships, and so on can all influence results, and experimental methods are best combined with other forms of data for a fuller understanding of writing. Collecting data 263 Reflection 9.13 How might you control the different influences on learners in a classroom in order to conduct an experiment on their use of one writing feature. Case studies Case studies are not an actual technique but the investigation of a single instance, usually a learner, a group or set of texts, explored as a totality using a range of methods for collecting and analyzing data. Case studies seek to provide a rich and vivid description of real people acting in real situations, blending description and analysis to understand actors' perceptions and experiences. This makes them an accessible type of research for teachers investigating their own classes because practitioners can identify with the individuals and issues and often have access to a range of data. Their strength lies in their potential for revealing the wholeness or integrity of human systems working in particular contexts, and while this often means they are of limited generalizability, others may recognize them as representing aspects of their own experience. On the minus side, the very richness and variety of data collected can mean that cases are difficult to organize and the fact they are not easily open to cross-checking makes them vulnerable to researcher bias (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison, 2000: 182). Case studies can take a variety of forms and do not exclude quantitative or structured approaches, but typically they are interpretative and draw on qualitative data collection methods, particularly: • Naturalistic and descriptive observation • Narrative diaries • Unstructured interviews • Verbal reports • Texts and documents Given the potential breadth and complexity of contextual influences on writing, one of the main problems for the researcher is actually deciding where to set the boundaries of the case (McDonough and McDonough, 1997: 205). A teacher investigating a student's writing development must decide whether to include only the teaching aspects of the environment or to expand it to include institutional factors, the student's social networks, the physical conditions in which he or she typically writes, writing done outside 264 Researching writing and writers an academic context, and so on. The researcher will be guided by what is relevant to the problem being studied, but might choose to limit the research to what seem (to the researcher and student) to be key people and incidents. All this data must then be coherently organized, either chronologically, as themes emerging from the data, or in relation to theoretical issues which scaffold the study. A classic case study research of ESL writing is that by Zamel (1983), who used interviews, observations of students' writing, and analyses of their essays to track six students through a composing cycle. A more rigorous, exploratory, and longitudinal approach was adopted by Haas (1994), who followed one student through her entire four-year undergraduate career to trace the development of the student's academic reading and writing and her beliefs about these. Haas conducted a series of extended interviews, ob¬served reading and writing sessions, analyzed essays and teacher comments, recorded think-aloud protocols while the student composed, and examined her log of all her writing and reading and of the activities she engaged in to complete assignments. Even though the study was conducted with an LI student, it not only reveals how one student changed her understandings of texts and writers as she became familiar with her discipline, but illustrates the detail and richness that is possible using case studies. Reflection 9.14 Select a student or a program as a possible case. What would be an interesting aspect to study? Sketch out a research design to show what research methods would be most appropriate. Analyzing writing data The purpose of data analysis is to clarify our understanding of the situation we have researched, exploring the data for patterns which make the situation meaningful, and perhaps provide a basis for action. This is not to say that data collection and analysis are separate activities. Figure 9.1 shows how the two are interrelated, ongoing, and often cyclical processes. Researchers always need to think about their data as it is collected: what it means, how it can be usefully supplemented, how to exploit interesting points, and so on. Clearly the data that have been collected will differ both in form and in the degree of analytical structure the collection method has already imposed Analyzing writing data 265 Collecting data: raw information gathered / Examining data: material examined to determine the events and experiences //* they represent I Selecting data:.important factors distinguished, similarities grouped, complexities simplified Presenting data: selected data represented in an easily understood form (outline, table, etc.) I ^— Interpreting data: relationships explained and a theory developed to fit the situation Figure 9.1: The analytical process. on it. Data gathered by tightly structured procedures such as controlled ob¬servation codings, ticked questionnaire boxes, or transcripts of structured interviews are systematic in terms of the researcher's initial formulations of the issue and often produce precisely targeted categories that can be ma¬nipulated quantitatively. More open-ended data, including most interview responses, field notes, narrative observations, verbal protocols, and diary entries, call for more interpretation, and data will need to be reduced and grouped into categories in some way. Textual data, including essays, corpus data, and verbal transcripts of different kinds, can be analyzed in terms of its content or language. Analyzing structured data Most questionnaires and structured observations are designed to be analyzed numerically and allow fairly simple counting and tabulation techniques. The first step usually involves summarizing the figures with other figures, reducing the numbers to a more easily understood general picture. With small numbers of items, each questionnaire response can be plotted on a table with questions down one side and respondents along the top, allowing frequencies for each field to be plotted, grouped, and summarized. Simi¬larly with data from check-box observation sheets, such as that shown in Figure 9.2, the frequencies of particular behaviors marked on the sheets can be combined in different ways to address the research problem. 266 Researching writing and writers Peer review task Student: VCnce*xt observation r Class: 4 Date: Wed/19 Time: 2 -2.20 Frequencies Total Student talks in L1 IIII 4 Student uses reference material Student writes on feedback sheet I I Student talks to teacher Student questions peer Student offers suggestion Student offers praise mn 5 Student offers criticism Student reads essay aloud II 2 Student listens to peer inn 5 Student engages in off-task activity II 2 Figure 9.2: Data from a structured observation sheet. Reflection 9.15 What problems might arise in using the scheme in Figure 9.2 to code peer review behaviors? Can you see any patterns in this data? What higher-level categories might help provide insights into peer review? Numerical data can be reduced to figures for central tendencies (means or modes), to the degree of dispersion around the midpoint (e.g., standard deviation), to how far figures for one feature are related to another (associa-tion and correlation), and to how strong these relationships are (significance tests). Powerful computer statistical packages such as SPSS and Minitabs offer relatively user-friendly means of dealing with these calculations. The role of statistics in language research is often questioned and it is certainly not always appropriate to use them. Decisions about the value of quantita-tive data more generally need to be made with particular research questions in mind and the contribution they can make to answering them, but while numbers lead away from real language use, they can be useful in showing relationships and connections which can then be explored in qualitative ways to reveal more interactive and affective dimensions of a situation. Analyzing writing data 267 Analyzing unstructured data It is likely that most teacher-researchers will be confronted with unstruc¬tured data in various forms which need to be organized into categories through coding. Categories are conceptual tools that help researchers to or¬ganize their data and to reveal its major themes and relationships in order to build theories and explanations about it. This involves repeatedly reading the transcripts, diaries, and other texts and assigning sections of data codes that seem significant to the focus of the study. The categories used to code therefore emerge from the data itself, influenced by the researcher's theoret¬ical knowledge and experience. They are chosen because of their relevance to the research questions and the fact that they represent the content of the data. Categories are therefore key concepts which form the nucleus of ideas about the data and should be: 1. Conceptually useful: help to answer research questions 2. Empirically valid: come from the data itself 3. Analytically practical: easy to identify, specific, nonoverlapping One way of approaching coding is through content analysis, which in¬volves identifying the meanings of structures or expressions by categorizing parts of texts, whether words, phrases, sentences, turns, etc. Coding can be quite challenging and it is a good idea to pass through the data several times, beginning with obvious or recurring topics, vocabulary, registers, and so on looking for themes. Subsequent passes through the data will help to gener¬ate and refine categories, identify core categories, find links, and gradually build a picture of the data. A simple procedure for novice researchers is suggested below: 1. Read through the text highlighting passages or phrases that seem im¬portant to get an overview. 2. Read through the marked passages and decide on categories - one word or phrase that expresses the content of each passage. 3. Read through the entire text again to find further examples of the categories and to expand them. Annotate the passages with category labels in the margin and the text in different colors - possibly double coding for more than one category. 4. Order, reject, combine, and separate the categories. Review the ratio¬nale for coding, list categories on a sheet of paper, count them, draw links between them, express them hierarchically as tree diagrams, and generally explore ways to see connections, core behaviors, and themes. 5. Reflect on the categories and their contents, using your insider knowl¬edge to develop interpretations and note, in particular, the frequency 268 Researching writing and writers (Note: Italics = reading from the essay; underlining = written response) - mm I don't think I'll read that - 1 haven't got time - so I'll read what she called draft first / Mmm very strange - yes actually I have had a look at this before - I remember now - it's a very interesting beginning - and then she's - ah she's making some kind of promise to the reader 1 think about - mmm yep that introduction has poten¬tial but - yes - that definitely needs some work um yeah ! think I'll make a positive comment about that sentence about culture and festivals - um the promise to the reader cos we've dealt with that today - that phrase - / would like to think about how related to between culture and festivals - underline think because that's not appropriate - yeah ignoring the spelling that's pretty amazing - um have a drink of tea - OK - this is good - a bit too strong - ha promise to the reader -um - the next sentence is very general actually - so I'll mark that very general -suggest it goes up the top - maybe it should be earlier in the introduction - that's not a real - not a grammatical sentence - not a complete sentence - um shall I -the first sentence - me is too personal - but is it? - I just don't know where to begin - mm um - it's that word - attractive - just imagine? - catches reader's attention there - this is a very interesting beginning that catches the reader's attention -1 feel that I'm giving quite detailed feedback here, but she is a quite serious student so I feel that it is worthwhile - what does this sentence mean? (pause 7 seconds) -what about a long time ago - that's - oh OK - I'm very interested in that time. And also it is necessary - necessity to know - about that time I suppose - not exactly clear is it? - it's not really connected - the physical wealth and the psychological wealth - how's this related to festivals? I don't see the connection - I suppose I should try and read it all through -1 might just write a comment about that paragraph - I don't see the connection with festivals - just so she knows there's a problem in it - I might just quickly read through the whole thing — Figure 9.3: Extract from teacher think-aloud protocol while responding to a paper. with which they occur, their saliency in terms of the strength of the ex¬pression, and their distribution across the text and other texts collected in the research. 6. Discuss the categories with colleagues and ask them to check them against the data for reliability. Software such as WinMax, NUDIST, and Inspiration can assist with these tasks. They are designed to help researchers keep track of their ideas and analyze unstructured data by retrieving data, labeling segments as variables, hyperlinking different parts of the data, brainstorming connections, and so on. As an example we can consider a possible approach to the transcript in Figure 9.3. This is a record of a teacher thinking aloud while correcting a Analyzing writing data 269 Tuesday 12. Tod^ I tooha/writCng'tett. I could/ not write/welh. I'm/ very worried/ about it. At first I though/ the/ tat would/ be/ ewy heouAA&e/ we/ were/ cfa/ew 40 minute: But I could/ not write/ a& u&ual/. I guetfr because/too- much/prepare/ on/ by myself. It Us yy$fQly. 40 ynCnute/way not enough/ at all/. AytOvne/pa&tl wafrho- i*npattentwhCch'mad&myi£lf: If I had/ enough/ study I would/ have/ had/ letfr prepare/. Twv govng> to- forget about it, I decided/ that. However Twv very happy thUs moment because/ I have/got a//B+ mark4 From/latfrfrid^'yteitwrCtVng'. 'B+! How gladJ. I alwaysdtitike/my wrCUng^butbetter marhU- wonderfuL. Itdoefrhelp to-pre^ertto-^etdAmppoirtwve^t.
Figure 9.4: Entry from a learning diary in a writing class (F. Hyland, unpublished data).
student paper, and was collected as part of an investigation of feedback and revision (F. Hyland, 1998). A first sweep of the transcript might produce these categories:
Form response (spoken) Form response (written)
Meaning response (spoken) Meaning response (written)
This, however, captures only a limited aspect of what is happening, and subsequent readings might lead to a range of more specific categories. The researcher might notice, for instance, that the teacher focuses on either the Writer or. the Text; that she responds with Criticism, Praise, and Suggestion and that these might be double coded according to the focus of the statement {form or meaning) and perhaps mode {Written or Spoken). While these categories might be expanded, collapsed, or rejected later, they provide a way of reducing the data to meaningful categories that help explain the teacher's process of responding to the essay.
While the categories suggested for the think-aloud data illustrate a per¬son's response to their immediate situation, codes can refer to processes over time, activities, events, strategies, settings, participant perspectives, or anything that provides a handle on the data. A great deal of self-report data indicates respondents' definitions of the broader situation, their goals and aims, or their experiences. The extract from a student's learning diary in Figure 9.4, for instance, reveals a number of perspectives on writing includ¬ing learning and writing anxiety, the effects of positive feedback, and the impact of testing.
270 Researching writing and writers
Reflection 9.16
Look at the diary entry in Figure 9.4. What interesting lines of inquiry does this entry suggest to you and how might you follow them up?
Analyzing linguistic data
Finally, discourse data of various kinds, transcripts as well as texts, can be analyzed for the linguistic choices writers and speakers make to convey their meanings. Texts can be analyzed descriptively (revealing what occurs), analytically (interpreting why it occurs), or critically (questioning the so¬cial relations which underlie what occurs). Thus, we can seek to identify not only what is on the page or the tape, but also to establish what led the writer to make those choices. Analysis of transitivity, theme, or modal¬ity in a Systemic Functional framework, for instance, can reveal how the diarist or interviewee sees the topic he or she is discussing. Text analytic studies can focus on text-internal features such as tense or lexis, cohesive elements, move structure, interpersonal devices, and so on, and the work can be examined in isolation or compared with that of different proficien¬cies, genres, time periods, first language backgrounds, or social contexts. We know little about the characteristics of many genres or the influence that different cultural experiences, community expectations, teaching environ¬ments, social purposes, or proficiency levels have on writing, and all offer areas for small-scale research.
Reporting research
Disseminating the findings of writing research is important to prevent the knowledge gained from simply disappearing and to maintain the momentum of professional or curriculum development which got the research under way in the first place. Reporting can range from loose anecdotal accounts to formally published papers, but there are good reasons for writing up the research since it can:
• Increase the amount and the quality of reflection on both the research and practice.
• Increase the clarity of the topic through discussion with other teachers.
• Act to "repay" collaborators, participants, and sponsors.
• Facilitate further research, by the researcher or others, by providing mod¬els and ideas.
Reporting research 21A
• Influence institutional or curriculum change.
• Increase teacher self-confidence, reporting skills, and professional development.
• Improve the reputation and profile of the profession through participation in public debate.
While teachers often underestimate the possible interest that others may have in their research, the potential audiences for it might be quite con-siderable, including students, colleagues, administrators, participants at in-service workshops, parents, employers, faculty members, course assessors, expert practitioners, and so on. The choice of methods for reporting are also varied, particularly as access and use of the Internet grows, and while teachers should not automatically reject the idea of scholarly publication, particularly in more teacher-oriented journals, they are not restricted to these. In fact, because much teacher writing research deliberately sets out to address local pedagogic, curriculum, or workplace writing practices and issues, rather than academic problems, other outlets may actually be more appropriate. Burns (1999) discusses distribution formats and venues in more detail, but potential venues for teacher research include:
Internet lists and Use group In-house newsletters and staff bulletins
postings Personal or institutional Websites In-service workshops and summer
schools
Online journals Videos of classroom/workplace
practices
Conference presentations Exhibitions and displays
Teacher journals (Forum, Conference poster sessions
Prospect, ELT Journal)
While these different sources imply different genres of reporting, all pre-sentation of research needs to be both appropriate and persuasive to its audience. Engaging with these different audiences helps to free teachers from the constraints of formal academic styles and formats and offers col-leagues and students greater access to the research. Web and other forms of visual presentation allow creativity and imagination in representing re¬search activities and findings, while written formats provide opportunities for more narrative and personal texts which recognize the sequence of ac¬tivities and emphasize concrete detail rather than academic abstractions. In these ways research can be seen as relevant to those most likely to be interested in it and to make use of it.
272 Researching writing and writers
Reflection 9.17
Select two of the methods listed above for reporting research and consider how they might differ as genres. What adjustments must the researcher make in reporting in these two formats?
Summary and conclusion
This chapter has stressed the importance of research as a central form of professional development for writing teachers, enhancing their understand¬ing of writing and how they teach it. It has also set out ways of carrying out research projects. The main points of the chapter can be summarized as follows:
• Teachers need not limit themselves to the issues and approaches of "ac¬tion research," but employ whatever methods they see as appropriate and feel comfortable with to address questions that may originate from a range of sources.
• Time invested in clearly formulating a research question and designing a viable and valid means of investigating it helps to ensure successful and productive research.
• Teacher-researchers need to consider the ethical implications of their research and have a clear commitment to professional integrity and the interests of participants.
• Teacher-researchers should assess the relative merits of different ways of collecting and analyzing data for a particular question. This involves issues of validity and the degree of structure and control used to gather data and the extent analysis will involve quantification.
• . There are good reasons for sharing research with others and a variety of
ways to do this.
Discussion questions and activities
1 Write a short essay to discuss what you see as the main consequences of adopting a qualitative or quantitative approach to writing research. Sketch the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two broad approaches.
2 Keep a teaching or learning diary for two weeks. Set aside some specific times every day or so to record fairly freely your experiences in a particular
Discussion questions and activities 273
class, recording what you did and how you felt about the activity. After two weeks, reflect on the entries and look for patterns. Do any salient features emerge? How do you interpret these in terms of your teaching/learning in this class? How could you focus the study farther to address these issues in more detail?
3 Decide on a feature of writing instruction that interests you and arrange to observe an L2 writing class to study it Either (a) brainstorm the behav¬iors that might provide insights about the feature and devise a systematic observation scheme to use or (b) observe the class and write as comprehen¬sive field notes as possible. Do any significant patterns emerge from your data?
4 Which methods of collecting data might you use to address the following writing questions? Select one question and consider (a) how different meth¬ods could make a contribution to answering it; (b) the effect of each method on the findings of the research.
a. What are the effects of peer comments on revisions?
b. What do readers regard as an effective text in a particular context?
c. What is the typical move structure of a particular genre?
d. How do writers go about planning and preparing to write a particular
genre?
e. How often do teachers give writing assignments and what kinds of as¬
sessments do they use?
f. What do students write about outside of class?
g. What writing tasks are typically required of participants in a target con¬
text?
h. Does using a word processor make a difference to the quality and quantity
of revisions? i. Does a student's culture or LI make a difference to their attitudes to
writing instruction? j. What do particular students think about group writing projects?
5 Select a research issue, either from those listed in Appendix 9.1 or another question that interests you. Focus the question and draw up a research design to investigate it including a time schedule. Outline the kinds of data you will need, how you will collect and analyze it, who the participants will be, how you will address issues of ethics, reliability, and validity, and how you will disseminate the results of the study.
6 Consider the narrative classroom observation notes in Figure 9.5. Do you think the observer has already formulated issues of potential interest? Using a content analysis, identify potentially useful categories in the notes and search for patterns which might help characterize the lesson. What productive lines of inquiry does the description suggest? How might these be followed up?
274 Researching writing and writers
Class B 11 A.M.-12A.M.
11:10A.M.
T tells the students to choose a question.
11:13A.M.
Tasks if they have decided but there is no response. She asks those who are doing question 1 to put up their hands. There is no response to this or to question 2. Many people choose question 3. Jo and Di on table A then say they are doing question 1. Polly says so is she. Polly is told to move to table A and all the other students are told to work in a group or pairs.
T says that the second thing that you do is to brainstorm ideas. She tells them to do this in a group but to write down their own ideas. She tells them to move. Polly moves to table A and the two Thai girls on table A move to table B.
11:15A.M.
Tables A, B, and C are talking in English. On tabfe D students are reading their theme booklets. T sits with table A and listens as Mo talks about the question in relation to Thailand and the other students listen. T says "You have to understand exactly what the question says," They discuss this together. Polly gets some paper.
Tabfe C start talking in Chinese. They whisper and one takes notes. They switch from Chinese to English and back again. Lydia speaks more English than the others. The students on table D start to talk in English. They are discussing ideas. Li says "advantages and disadvantages. Anything else?" Table B are still talking in Thai. Mo says "Speak English" and they switch. "Plan OK, plan " one says and they get out some paper. They laugh and talk in English. They also write from time to time.
11:20 A.M.
By now all tables are talking and English is dominating. Table D is quieter than the others and Li and BJ are doing nearly all the talking.
T is still sitting with table A and they are talking about the difference between general ideas and specific examples. T is telling the students they will need to start in general terms. The students interrupt and ask questions. All three students are contributing.
11:24 A.M.
T leaves tabfe A and stands in front of table D. The students talk quietly. She moves away to table C and asks " How are we doing here?" She sits down. Fa is consulting his dictionary. T jokes with him telling him to put it away as it makes her blood pressure rise. He goes red and does so. Lam reads the question aloud. T asks them what compare means. They are unable to tell her immediately and start to read the relevant sheet to find out. T asks them what they are going to do and Lam says they will talk about similarities. T asks to see their list. They say that they are sorry but they don't have one. T says that this is slack but she laughs as she says it. Lam gets out a piece of paper. They decide to think of a definition.
Groups D and A are talking a lot, with contributions from nearly all students. Li is leading table D. Table B are leaning forward and writing. They look absorbed.
Source: F. Hyland, unpublished data.
Figure 9.5: Extract from observational field notes of an L2 writing class.
Appendix 9.1 275
Apppendix 9.1: Some topics and issues in writing research
Researching writers
• What strategies does this group of writers use to write or revise a specific writing task?
• How do they interpret prompts, plan, draft, edit, make use of sources and other students, etc.?
• What sources of feedback do students make use of?
• Do L2 learners transfer composing strategies from their LI?
• Are the processes of writing on computer different from writing on paper?
• What intervention strategies can teachers use to make these processes more effective?
• What are the effects of teacher/peer written/oral feedback on writing?
• What do teachers/peers focus their feedback on in given contexts?
• What interactions occur in teacher-student/peer conferences and how do these influ¬ence revision?
• Are there individual/cultural/proficiency differences in use of teacher feedback?
• What kinds of feedback do particular learners prefer and why?
• What are students' attitudes to particular forms of instruction, texts, materials, or assignments?
Researching texts
• What lexical/syntactic/discoursal features characterize a given genre?
• What are the main stages of this genre and how are these realized?
• How does a set of texts differ from those in another genre or in the same genre in other contexts?
• What writing tasks are typically required of this group of learners in the target context?
• What features characterize the texts of this specific group of learners?
• Do these features differ from those in texts produced by other writers?
• Can these differences be explained by reference to language proficiency or LI conventions?
• In what ways do genres link with other genres in a given context?
• What instructional strategies are most effective in this particular context?
Researching readers
• What does this audience typically look for in a text and how do they read it?
• What do writers need to know about the target audience to write successful texts?
• What text features are important to engage a particular audience?
• In what ways are expert texts more "reader-friendly" than those of novice L2 writers?
• What do readers regard as an effective text in a particular context?
• What strategies are most effective in helping students learn to address audiences in their writing?
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Author Index
Bachman, L., 221
Ballard,B.,38,39
Bazerman, C, 18
Benesch, S., 18,64,65, 131
Bereiter, C, 11,38
Bizzell,P, 13
Bolitho,R., 102, 104,106
Brown, J. D., 56, 58, 61, 67-8, 81, 88,
235 Bruffee, K., 24 Burns, A., 246, 252, 259, 271
Carson, X, 17, 38, 41-2, 198,203-4 Clanchy,X, 38-9 Connor, U, 35,46, 199,205 Cumming, A., 2, 9, 183
Elbow, P., 8,135
Ellis, R., 32, 33, 94, 137
Faigley, L., 13
Feez, S., 80, 137-8
Ferris, D., 12, 71, 146, 179, 180, 181,
184,186,192,206 Flower, L., 11,135,200
Grabbe,W., 13, 17
Halliday, M. A. K., 19 Hamp-Lyons, L., 4, 29, 62, 134, 214,
228-9, 235, 238, 256 Hinds, X, 47, 52 Hinkel, E., 46 Hyland, E, 132, 151, 179, 184, 187-8,
190-1, 192, 198, 201, 256-7, 269,
274
Hyland, K., 14, 43, 48, 90, 121-2, 132, 148-9, 151, 179, 181-2, 184, 187-8, 190-2,201,256-7,274
Johns, A. M., 25, 135, 190, 233, 234 Jolly, D., 102,104, 106
Kaplan, R., 46, 47, 78, 235
Kramsch, C, 36, 92
Kroll, B., 130, 133, 222, 224, 226
Leki, L, 17, 35, 38, 41, 179, 198, 203
Martin, X R., 19,20 Milton, X, 167,170 Mittan,R., 198,204 Murray, D., 8-10
Nunan,D., 112, 116, 136,253
Paltridge,B.,71
Pennington, M. C, 121, 145, 147
Pennycook, A,, 40
Purves, A. C, 34, 235
Raimes,A.,2, 12,204
Reid, X M., 30, 43-5, 52, 96, 129, 133,
186, 190, 196, 203, 222, 224, 226 Richards, X, 56, 59, 69, 76, 79, 81,
117 Rothery, X, 86, 137
Scardamalia, M., 11, 38 Silva,T.,3,31,34-5,38 Smagorinsky, P., 257 Snyder, I., 144, 147
295
296 Author Index
Spack,R., 130
Swales, X, 13, 25, 63, 87, 88, 126, 179, 256
Tribble, C, 90, 169,208 Truscott, X, 12, 183
Vygotsky,L.,21, 137, 151, 177
White, R., 15, 135, 197, 227-8, 235
Zamel, V, 11, 35, 37, 127, 178, 183, 192, 264
Subject Index
action research, 246, 272
anxiety (exam related), 213, 232-3,
269 appropriation (of student texts), 103,
190-1,193,205,208 assessment, 12, 38, 45, 56, 57, 212-41,
269 formative, 177, 212-13, 237, 240 purposes, 213-15 summative, 208, 213, 240 audience, 24-8, 31, 42, 50, 93, 118, 123,
134-6, 141,154-7, 160-1, 177, 184,
218,223-5,271,275 audience awareness, 135-6 authenticity, 27, 28, 62, 85, 88, 92-4, 99,
105,107,109,117,127,146,158,
160,165, 169, 198,217 authoring software, 165-6
bramstorming, 11-12, 15, 68-9, 72, 92, 145, 149, 260, 268, 273
case study research, 261, 263-4 cognitive view of writing, 11-14, 23, 27,
145, 190 cohesion and coherence, 14, 76, 79, 92,
200, 226 composition, 8, 47, 120, 127-8, 138-9, 150,206 controlled, 4, 6, 93, 94, 104, 114-15, 120, 124, 127-8, 136-8, 140, 150-5, 166,172,196,201 free, 4, 6, 114-15, 120, 130-6, 150-4,
161,179,200 guided, 4, 6, 10, 28, 88-9, 114-15, 120, 126-9, 137-8, 149, 170-2
computer assisted language learning
(CALL), 19, 162-7, 121-2 computer conferencing software,
152^ computer-mediated-communication
(C-M-C). See computer writing computer writing, 121-2, 143-1, 158,
160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 172,173,
174,266,275 asynchronous writing, 156-8 email, 108, 144, 151, 156-7, 173-4,
183,200,261 synchronous writing, 151-6 word processing, 110, 121, 146,
148-50, 170 concordancing, 90,125,143, 160,
167-72,183,261,276 conferencing (teacher-student), 152-6,
177,192-8,259 content approach to writing, 14-18 contrastive rhetoric, 45-52 corpora, 107, 145, 159, 160, 167-71,
261,265 creative writing, 8-10 cultural difference, 36^16, 51, 219 culture, 19, 36-50, 51, 66, 93, 103, 158,
224
Daedalus writing software, 149, 152 diary studies, 252, 257-8, 263, 265, 267,
269, 272 discourse analysis, 5, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28,
32,48,64,87,117,144,152,157,
162, 184, 197,261,270 discourse community, 25-27, 64, 93, 117,
173, 184-6, 198,270
297
298 Subject Index
drafting, 11-12, 74-5, 113-15, 130-6, 139, 144-5, 148, 180, 194, 196, 200, 203-5, 235
editing, 11-13, 22, 75, 89-90, 97, 118,
122, 128, 130, 144-5, 148, 181,
184-5, 197,203 electronic texts, 90, 111, 117, 144,
150-1, 162,174, 183,261 English for Specific/Academic Purposes
(EAP/ESP), 58, 79 error (responding to), 12, 179, 181,
184^6, 190, 197,201 experimental research, 22, 245, 251, 260,
262 expressivism, 10,41
feedback (from teacher), 5, 9, 12, 41-3, 49, 55, 135, 136, 139, 152, 161-4, 170, 177-217
mitigation of, 190-2
oral (see conferencing)
purposes, 186-90
student preferences, 179-80, 194
types of, 180-5
written, 178-92 functional approach, 6-8
genre, 2, 18-28, 32, 47, 59, 63, 71-5, 88, 92-4,96,99, 101, 109,113-14, 123-8, 133, 134, 137-41, 164-71, 185, 186, 193, 200-9, 215-18, 223, 224, 228-30, 235, 240, 248, 261, 275
goal setting, 57, 67-70, 83, 99, 109, 117
hypertext, 151, 162
identity, 38, 50
ideology, 9
individual differences among learners,
32-4, 184, 186-7 internet chat, 145, 151, 154-6 internet writing resources, 158-61 content, 158-9
internet publishing, 160-2 language data, 159-60 language materials, 160 interviews, 61, 63, 248, 253-6, 267
key pals, 157
LI transfer, 35, 275
learning styles, 42-5, 49, 50-1, 64
lessons and lesson planning, 54, 76,
79-81,84, 141,273 literacy, 17, 35, 41, 45, 49, 75, 135, 144,
148, 162 literary texts, 9, 92, 105, 110
materials, 16, 85-109, 160, 162-7, 275
design, 100^, 109
evaluation, 95-8, 104
electronic, 160, 162-7
modification, 98-100
roles, 86-92
selection, 95-8, 104-9 metadiscourse, 48
models for writing, 3^*, 7, 22, 26, 86-9, 91, 105, 107, 120, 124, 127-9, 140, 164-5, 238
needs, 58-67, 74 needs analysis, 58-67 student needs, 17, 33, 54-9, 113,
117-18, 160, 186 target context analysis, 49, 64-7
objectives, 29, 65-72, 76-7, 82 observation research, 67, 247, 259-60, 263, 265, 266, 273
peer response, 11,42, 134, 145, 150-2,
194,198-207,235,247,266 plagiarism, 38, 40, 158 portfolios, 12, 232, 233-9, 241 pre-writing techniques, 9, 11, 12, 25, 90,
97, 120, 130-2,150,200 process approach, 3, 9-14, 22-7,42, 67, 72-5,85,112-14,130-3, 145, 177, 183-5, 198, 200, 205, 247, 275
Subject Index 299
prompt, 120, 136, 141-2, 222^1, 230,
240 publishing, 256, 271-2
questionnaire research, 64, 103, 180,
252-4,265
reference materials, 89-90, 107, 158,
170-1 register, 63, 83, 267 reliability (of assessment), 212, 215-20,
227, 235 researching writing, 245-75
collecting data, 11, 61, 119,252-64,
273 ethics, 249-51, 273 qualitative, 251-2, 253-61, 263-4,
267-70 quantitative, 251-2, 262-3, 265-7 questions, 247-8, 261, 266-7 research design, 246-71 revision, 170, 179 rights analysis, 64 rubrics
in feedback, 181,209 in questions, 38, 133-6, 141, 221-3 in scoring guides, 227-9, 230-1, 237, 241^1
scaffolding, 21, 86-7, 89, 118-20, 122-30, 137-^1,163, 185-6, 203-7, 264 schemata, 15, 17, 24-5, 33, 36^0, 45,
51,110, 127,203,224 scoring techniques, 212, 216, 219, 226-32,237,239-41 analytic, 43, 229-30, 232, 241, 243^ holistic, 62, 227-30, 238, 241-2 multiple trait, 229-32, 238 primary trait, 229-32 stimulus to writing, 9, 86, 91-2, 105,
133,179,221 structural approaches, 3-6, 16-18, 145
syllabus, 20, 54^83, 109, 136,173
approaches, 73-6
definition, 54
design, 55-8 Systemic Functional Linguistics, 19
tasks, 6-18, 21-7, 38, 43-5, 72, 88, 90, . 112-141, 148-50, 167-71,220-6 components, 116-20 composing, 112, 130-6 graphology, 120-2, 140 scaffolding, 21, 118-19, 124-30, 132, 137 teaching-learning cycle, 21, 136-9, 185,
203 textbooks, 14, 28, 92, 95-105, 108 assessing, 95-8, 109, 110 modifying, 98-100, 110 selecting, 95-8, 110, 118 themes for writing, 14, 76-9, 83 think-aloud protocols, 105, 135,256-7,
264-5, 268-9 topics for writing, 72-3, 77-9
units of work, 7, 74, 76-9, 83 unstructured data, 267-8
validity, 215, 217-20,235
consequential, 219-20
construct, 219
criterion related, 218-19
face, 103, 220 verbal reports 256-7 (see also think-aloud protocols)
washback, 214-15, 230, 237, 240 word processing, 110, 121, 146, 148-50,
170 writer vs. reader responsible writing,
47-8, 52 writing networks, 36, 152, 161
Zone of Proximal development, 177, 200
CAMBRIDGE LANGUAGE EDUCATION
Second Language Writing is a highly accessible and authoritative approach to the theory and practice of teaching writing to students of English as a Foreign/Second Language. While assuming no specialist knowledge, the book systematically sets out the key issues in second language writing instruction to offer both pre- and in-service teachers a guide to L2 writing instruction grounded in current theory and research. The book includes chapters on approaches to writing teaching, needs analysis, syllabus design, lesson planning, task design, materials development, and feedback and assessment as well on using technology in writing classes and conducting research into writing. The book takes the clear stance that student writers not only need realistic strategies for drafting and revising, but also a clear understanding of genre to structure their writing experience according to the demands and constraints of particular target contexts. There are review exercises, reflection questions, and copious examples to make the book extremely useful to prospective and practicing teachers alike.
Ken Hyland is a Reader of Education in the School of Culture, Language and Communication and Head of the Centre for Academic and Professional Literacies at the Institute of Education, University of London.
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
www.cambridge.orq
ISBN 0-521-53430-5
78
0521n5343
Second Language WRITING {KEN HYLAND} (ตอนที่ 1)
Second Language WRITING {KEN HYLAND} (ตอนที่ 2)
(ตอนที่ 2)
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