Historically Important Studies, Part II

Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49(2), 165-185.

Author: Deborah Brandt – see essays “Remembering Reading” and “Accumulating Literacy” and books Literacy in American Lives (2001) and Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society (2009) a collection of essays and talks; Professor Emerita of English at UWisc-Madison. Focused research on literacy learning and the social contexts of mass literacy, primarily in relationship to economic change. dlbrandt@wisc.edu

Date: In 1998, the Internet was just getting useful and accessible for me. This study could be done again with people born since 1980 – social networking sites became popular when I was ending college, and people younger than me are sure to have different literacy sponsors from childhood beyond my Texas Instruments – Speak and Spell or Teddy Ruxspin.

Research Questions: To where does the tracing of sponsors of literacy in the 20^th centuries through accounts of “ordinary Americans recalling how they learned to write and read” lead (p. 167)?

            Thesis – “The concept of sponsorship is so richly suggestive for exploring economies of literacy and their effects” (p. 167).

Context (need for study): “The field of writing studies has had much to say about individual literacy development. Especially in the last quarter of the 20^th century, we have theorized, researched, critiqued, debated, and sometimes even managed to enhance the literate potentials of ordinary citizens as they have tried to cope with life as they find it….But rarely are they systematically related to the local conditions and embodied moments of literacy learning that occupy so many of us on a daily basis” (166). This essay begins to make the connection of connecting literacy to economic development since ca 1910.

Methods: 100+ interviews of people born between 1900 and 1980 (surely there were children who could have been a great help that were born after 1980, but where would you stop?) where they recounted memories of people and motivations involved in their learning processes. Recognizing patterns lead to tracking cultural attitudes and  

Findings: 169 – “(1)…Despite ostensible democracy in educational chances, stratification of opportunity continues to organize access and reward in literacy learning; (2)…sponsors contribute to what is called ‘the literacy crisis,’ that is, the perceived gap between rising standards for  achievement and people’s ability to meet hem; and (3)…encounters with literacy sponsors, especially as they are configured at the end of the 20^th century, can be sites for the innovative rerouting of resources into projects of self-development and social change.”

            Institutional competition creates forms of literacy. After World War II, the economy went “from a thing-making, thing-swapping society to an information-making, service-swapping society” (173). Sponsors “raise literacy stakes in struggles for competitive advantage” (178). They also can create new literacy requirements and make old ones obsolete or inadequate.

            Multiple identities and sheer access to literacy events and literate people creates a hybrid of literacy formations. When people are in ideological environments where they are comforted, pleased, or even threatened, they  are sanctioned into certain literacies as well as reinforcing that ideology. Brandt points to conservative forces, specifically “Christian conversions and civic participation” (182).

Discussion (my connection): The sponsors, the agents of literacy, are motivated by interest convergence. The sponsor provides or withholds literacy in order to gain some advantage. Isn’t it Jesse Jackson who coined the phrase (if that doesn’t scream literacy = money!) “cash language”? Once companies or governments hired lawyers to deliberate with union leaders, it caused major need for (at least some of) the workers to labor over paperwork and go to conferences about union practice and learn legalese – rough way of pushing down on the lower caste.

            Brandt positions teachers as the brokers, the middlemen between the buyers and sellers of literacy. I know enough to learn to play by the rules, but I believe that talk about the inequities and how the system of sponsors has shaped the practices of many can turn the tide, even a bit.

            Near the end, Brandt calls not only for the study of how individuals pursue literacy, but also how literacy pursues them – this is exciting, to think of literacy as a beast lurking in the woods, oozing through pipes, or engulfing cities. Literacy is on the move, but it has masters who train it to feed and indulge only in certain places…

Emig, J. (1971). The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders. National Council of Teachers of English: Urbana, IL.

Author: Janet Emig - Teacher in high schools and colleges, doctorate at Harvard but couldn’t find someone to chair her dissertation. ’64, but had difficulty publishing Composing Processes of 12^th Graders (not published until 1971 by NCTE) – looked down on her as a woman and in the study of school children as womanly; other writing was essayistic, often for writing across the curriculum (reason not necessarily research).

Date: Early 1970s growing interest in composing processes, beginning movement – following Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoerr’s call for more rigorous and scientific numbers on composition research.

Research Questions: What can be learned from investigating the writing processes of 8 12^th graders? Do these 8 students share dimensions of process? How much is unique?

Context (need for study): Little exists in researching the composing processes of youths.

Methods: 8 diverse (16 and 17-year-olds) representatives of six different types of high schools in Chicago area used for case studies. Looked at school records of 5 participants. Students were characterized by teachers, and each met with the researcher 4 times: 1) conversation and recorded composing aloud, given the writing prompt for the next week; 2) recall prewriting between sessions, told that the next week would be asked to recall all writing ever done with writing samples; 3) gave a writing autobiography including reading experiences, write and bring back all pieces of an imaginative piece; 4) recall the planning and recount all of the process experiences in creation. All sessions were recorded and transcripts made.

Findings: 54 – “For Lynn, starting to write presents a paradox. Her decision to begin is a swift, and seemingly painless, one. Her enactment of a first sentence, however, is an arduous, even tortuous, matter.” Lynn behaves and wants to please adults, and writing is done on THEIR time. Lynn does not use the term “revise,” opting, instead, for “rewrite”.

            Lynn and the others seemed more at ease with extensive rather than reflective modes, apparently for personal likely for curricular reasons and (lack of) experiences.

            Two boys would write out career plans or autobiographies for college applications but no other self-sponsored writing; four girls are more self-sponsored writers. None have had a male teacher of English. Bradford is the only boy who seems comfortable writing poetry; he is also the only participant who regularly and voluntarily outlines his work during composition.

            78 – None of the students encounter peer writing relationships in school, but peers are the primary motivation for self-sponsored writing.

            91 – Reflexive writing takes students longer, often as poetry, with self as the main audience. Extensive writing is seen as school-based, where the teacher is usually the audience, and “the attitude toward the field of discourse is often detached and reportorial.”

            School-sponsored writing evaluation seems to focus on “the accidents rather than the essences of discourse” (p 93). What a failure!

Discussion (my connection): Chapter 3, “The Composing Process: Mode of Analysis” is an interesting conceptualization of the environment and decisions that one must make in composing, including behaviors and hesitations, moments and motivators. Emig claims “almost every sentence [of the chapter’s theoretical sketch] contains of implies hypotheses upon which one could spend a lifetime in empirical research” (44).

In looking at Lynn’s case study, I see some of my regular school practices, especially the general lack of prewriting. I am also an oral composer, thinking things over in my head so much before I start. When work is timed, this is done with scenes of me looking up, away from the work as if I were speaking to someone or a group of people. To me, so much of language is oral, that the writing feels like an extra step. I have experienced, recently, though, in my creative processes a resurgence of feeling and thinking through writing in a notebook. There were multiple “highly intelligent” students in the study, and I think that writing practices, often dictated by schools (where they see themselves as valuable) do not place much emphasis on the process of writing, but rather the final product, but if you look at the outline and read through Chapter 3, there is MUCH more to writing than the final output, but standardized tests don’t measure them – and it would prove inefficient – uneconomical as Brandt might suggest.

Avoiding the term “revision” and much of the comparison with adult writers (the response of Jerome Bruner on page 56) is reminiscent of Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. I had to change some of my wording in the findings, having written with more “confidence” than Emig, who wrote “assigning causality is especially hazardous in matters of teaching and learning” (p. 73) – there are too many factors in a person’s unique life to narrow one cause effect relationship down to the final answer.

Perl, S. (1979). The composing processes of unskilled college writers. Research in the Teaching of English,13(4), 317-336.

Do the citation for Cross-Talk in Comp Theory

Author: Sondra Perl – English Department at Lehman College. She lists academic interests in writing, teaching, creative nonfiction, ethnography, women's studies, holocaust studies, cross-cultural dialogue, urban education, collaborative projects, writing across the curriculum (ought to be similar or informative for Nancy Sommers’ book about the Harvard students). http://www.lehman.edu/academics/arts-humanities/english/faculty-perl.php She looks at attitudes, processes, and teaching of writing.

Date: Early 1970s growing interest in composing processes, following in the lines of Britton, 1975; Burton, 1973; Cooper, 1974; Emig, 1967,1971).

Research Questions: “(1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? and (3) What does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature o composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in the schools?”

Context (need for study): Early 1970s growing interest in composing process. Response to 1963, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer calling for direct observation and case studies. Need for non-narrative descriptions of composing processes for graphic evidence that describes patterns and move from experimental research into controlled experimental studies. No study has focused primarily on unskilled writers.

Methods: Fall semester of 1975-76 school year at a CUNY community college. Students selected from writing samples indicating “unskilled” proficiency. Each met for five 90-minute sessions with researchers. Four sessions focused on writing with students (composing aloud). One session allowed for talking through individual writing profile. Three kinds of data: written product, composing recordings, responses in interview. Processes were coded.

Findings: One of the participants, Tony, would stop and reread all or part of almost every sentence he wrote – indicated an overall rhythm of composition. Tony showed a repeatable and suitable way of organizing and breaking down the writing task. His writing, however, was generalized and when ideas were more distant from his personal experience, the task became more difficult. He regularly voiced and read through in complete ideas and thoughts, but he would only partially transcribe the full sentence. When finished, Tony would distance himself from the writing; he did not even want to comment on it.

            Labeling of “remedial” implies something is wrong and a remedy is necessary. Because so much emphasis is placed on the writing fitting rules of standard code, students begin to see writing as “cosmetic” and “concern for correct form supersedes development of ideas” (book p 38).

            Teachers should look more to identifying beneficial and oppositional student processes in their writing rather than jamming another message of writing instruction to “fix” a problem.

            Composing is a mixture of “construction and discovery” (book p 35). Even though there is significant attention paid to editing during the writing processes, “serious syntactic and stylistic problems remained in their finished drafts” (book p 35) – stopping the work flow and more concerned with finding errors rather than idea generating: “What they seem to lack as much as any rule is a conception of editing that includes flexibility, suspended judgment, the weighing of possibilities, and the reworking of ideas” (book p 38)..

Discussion (my connection): “The conclusion here is not that Tony can’t write, or that Tony doesn’t know how to write, or that Tony needs to learn more rules: Tony is a writer with a highly consistent and deeply embedded recursive process. What he needs are teachers who can interpret that process for him, who can see through the tangles in the process just as he sees meaning beneath the tangles in his prose, and who can intervene in such a way that untangling his composing process leads him to create better prose” (book p. 31). – This is what everyone needs, right? Tony has been so beat down with “school way of writing,” struggling to employ methods he partially remembers, and his consistent mistakes that he reads over are common for students in classrooms. I can see this continued

            I have a visual lesson in which I use videos to talk about the difference between revising and editing, but I had only really thought of it as an activity near the “end”. I obviously edit and revise along the way,  and to think about students who have an even cloudier vision of their own processes, it pushes me to be that teacher who exposes and names processes rather than tries to get something new from my students or even to pretty it up.

                        http://youtu.be/D1ZYhVpdXbQ - Gene Kelly

                        http://youtu.be/rJBOZqZGNhk - Edit, Usher

                        http://youtu.be/ZAW3-F8oOdU - Revision, BMW

2012 09 18 Historically Important Studies Pt. 1

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4). 365-387.

I will work on the citation for this printing in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. What version are the pdfs from?

Author: Linda S. Flower: lf54@andrew.cmu.edu BA – English and French, Simpson College ‘65; PhD – English, Rutgers ’72. Professor of Rhetoric, Dept of English at Cernegie Mellon University. Early work in cognitive processes in writing, looking to problem-solve in instruction. More recent focus on constructing negotiated meaning within competing identities and cultures. Looking at new literacy and inner city, multi-cultural communities, she is researching “intercultural rhetoric and education for community consequences.” http://english.cmu.edu/people/faculty/homepages/flower/default.html

John R. Hayes: jh50@andrew.cmu.edu Also at CMU, in the Psychology Department, funds the John R. Hayes Award for excellence in writing research ($1000) published in Journal of Writing Research. Pioneer in cognitive psychology within writing research – HEAVILY cited. Necessary to read for background on Authors’ Study. Looks at expert vs. novice; processes of planning, composing (even down to sentence level), and revision; the role of knowledge base for creative masters.

Date: Early 1980s – process model (exposure to broad content – encouraging process that lead to competency growth) is different than heritage model (transmitting culture and values with a cannon of study) and competencies model (producing mastery in hierarch of skills in sequence). Donald Graves, Lucy M. Calkins, and Nancy Atwell are big names in Process.

Research Questions: What guides the decisions writers make as they write? Creation of Cognitive Process Theory:

Goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing.

Context (need for study): Talk of the composition process of choice making needs to be backed up with answers. Kinneavy says, “Informing persuading, expressing, or manipulating language for its own sake” while Moffett and Gibson say, “Sense of the relation of speakers, subject, and audience” (Odell, Cooper, and Courts) (p. 365). Bitzer = response to a rhetorical situation.; Vatz = all response and situation “are determained by the imagination and art of the speaker” (p. 366). James Britton = process led by syntactic and lexical choices.

Methods: First: defining sub-process categories, show how these elements interact, want model to speak to what has remained unseen. Protocol analysis – not introspective, used in other cognitive process studies. Participants were to write an article on their job for Seventeen magazine, prepping as normal, but “composing out loud near an unobtrusive tape recorder” (p. 370). Transcript, together with manuscript, details writer’s process.

Findings: 370 – “The act of writing involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: the task environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing process.” Writing is a process of setting goals, testing/reevaluating them, and consolidating/regenerating into new ones, often more complex. The writer is the creator, the decision maker, the one working – rather than being manipulated by forces.

Discussion (my connection): Moffett and Gibson seem to be getting at my general leaning for what constitutes voice. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Lloyd Bitzer’s “rhetorictcal situation, which he succinctly defines as containing an exigency (which demands a response), an audience, and a set of constraints”  (pp. 365-266) in my program at Utah State. As far as using a protocol analysis since it has been used in other cognitive studies I feel that you are going to find what you want when you look through a lens that leads you there. Perhaps it is the bent of the psychologist who can speak the language of composition. The writer is no longer on a conveyor belt, being pushed along by external forces although a timed writing sample to be created in front of a computer you may or may not know how to use can seem forceful. Students often see the process of writing as a three-step process, which gives the impression of final drafts really being final. It is tough now with instant publication on the Internet, but the process for writers to get a published piece out takes much more time than many give to school assignments. I am intrigued by the protocol analysis, hearing someone talk out their decisions while also getting their manuscript. I do not think, though, that I could be the subject and not go into introspection during the session.

Perl, S. (1990). Understanding composing. In T. Newkirk (Ed.), To compose (41-51). Portsmouth, NH: Heineman.

Author: Sondra Perl – English Department at Lehman College. She lists academic interests in writing, teaching, creative nonfiction, ethnography, women's studies, holocaust studies, cross-cultural dialogue, urban education, collaborative projects, writing across the curriculum (ought to be similar or informative for Nancy Sommers’ book about the Harvard students). http://www.lehman.edu/academics/arts-humanities/english/faculty-perl.php She looks at attitudes, processes, and teaching of writing.

Date: 1990s – movement toward greater accountability in field of education. NCTE and IRA joined in developing a common set of national standards for ELA (viewing, visually representing, reading, writing, listening, and speaking) – specific outcomes students should be able to do. Demographics are changing and linguistic and cultural diversities are growing in school populations.

Research Questions: To what do writers move back? What exactly is being repeated? What recurs?

Research in class brought teachers to questions of: What basic patterns seem to occur during composing? What does this type of research have to tell us about he nature of the composing process?

Context (need for study): Emig (1971), Flowers and Hayes (1980), and Sommers (1979) are among those questioning the traditional and linear model of writing (plan-write-revise).

Methods: Group of 20 teachers in research and basic writing at NYU in 1979, all tape recording their thoughts while composing aloud in “My Most Anxious Moment as a Writer”. Understanding of controlling.altering  process with assigned topic and asking to compose aloud. Protocol analysis? On page 45, it seems the observations come from a career of observations, not just the moment at NYU.

Findings: “Recognition of recursiveness in writing” (p. 44). Writing is recursive, but the parts that recur vary from writer to writer. 1) Writers reread chunks 2) Returning to key word or notion of the topic 3) Movement to feelings and perceptions that the already present text evokes in the writer. “Those who realize that writing can be a recursive process have an easier time with waiting, looking, and discovering. Those who subscribe to the linear model find themselves easily frustrated when what they write does not immediately correspond to what they planned or when what they produce leaves them with little sense of accomplishment” (pp. 49-50). Projective structuring puts the writer into the place of the reader, imagining what other readers could need from the piece – to do so requires one to have experience as a reader. Other focus on process (turned into finding and doing what the teacher wants) and ignore their felt sense and do not connect to the writing.

Discussion (my connection): I wonder, since this study is done with teachers and the Flowers and Hayes group used professionals to describe their job, what the writing process looks like for students of all ages, but I think quickly to my students at Sweet Home High School – not the ones who would write along the lines of what I asked, but the ones who were dragging their feet, refusing, or providing me with minimal product. The environment and instruction I presented were not ideal nor would I want to reenact what I have done, but I assume that this is a very real place for teachers to confront the person who does not live (in school) “like a writer”. Are there similar studies with fly-under-the-radar-type students? Have these students made it through school without having experienced the momentum-high of creating through writing?  I involve myself with the felt sense often. I move my hands, say some words over and over, [doing it right now], in order to grasp a sense of my own understanding before, not through, my fingers on the keys. Even projective structuring that calls me into the reader role requires me to return to my felt sense of being a reader.

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388.

I will work on the citation for this printing in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. What version are the pdfs from?

Author: Nancy Sommers: nancy_sommers@gse.harvard.edu; Adjunct Lecturer on Education at Harvard. Ed.D from Boston University.  Interested in writing development and literacy skills of college and high school students – tracking 400 students from Harvard class of ’01 to understand role of writing in undergraduate education.  Also look for “Responding to Student Writing” (I’ve read it…I think with Brock Dethier). http://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/faculty-detail/?fc=82044&flt=s&sub=all

Date: Early 1980s – process model (exposure to broad content – encouraging process that lead to competency growth) is different than heritage model (transmitting culture and values with a cannon of study) and competencies model (producing mastery in hierarch of skills in sequence). Donald Graves, Lucy M. Calkins, and Nancy Atwell are big names in Process.

Research Questions: What roles does revision play in the writing processes of college student writers and experienced (professional) writers?

Context (need for study): Absent research on revision within the writing process since current (1980) models are mostly linear and move away from revision (inner speech – meanings of words – in words…revision is not there).

Methods: Case study – 20 freshmen at Boston University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbals between 450-600 while in their first semester of college composition. 20 experienced, adult writers from Boston and OKC (journalists, editors, academics). Series of studies over 3 years. Each writer wrote an expressive, explanatory, and persuasive essay. All three essays were rewritten twice resulting in nine drafts or final drafts. Interviews and suggestions for other authors three times after each final revision. Essays were analyzed and changes were categorized. Interview transcripts were used to create a scale of concerns that each writer had.

Findings: Revision is “a sequence of changes in a composition—changes which are initiated by cures and occur continually throughout the writing of a work.” Four revision operations: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. Four levels of change: word, phrase, sentence, theme (the extended statement of one idea). Students hardly used the terms “revision” or “rewriting,” instead using alternate definitions and see this step as changing words – hardly meaning – in order to clean up speech. Their text was solid and existed in its entirety but needed to be communicated better. They see no need to revise if one can read and not get tripped up. Changes in ideas came in modifying an introductory paragraph, as if the hook was all that was needed. They lack the procedures or experience to reason through questions of purposes and readers. Experienced writers are rewriting to find “the form or shape of their argument” in patterns, frameworks, or designs. The initial writing is done to find what to say. Their second drafts are looking toward structure. Revisions are necessary when they recognize a disconnect between intention and execution. Experienced writers change mostly on the sentence level, but they change on all levels – unlike the students.

Discussion (my connection): Sommers notes that linear models are based off of classical rhetoric for oratory – revision isn’t existent in speech. I need to be thinking about structure origins. I am reminded of the letter that Joey writes in support of Monica and Chandler as adoptive parents in an episode of Friends when he used a thesaurus on every word he could, signing the letter “Baby kangaroo Tribiani”. In order to recognize your own incongruities, you have to be a critical reader, as Perl states the necessity to be an experienced reader. It takes more time than students generally give, because writing is only a way to get through to the grade for many – sweeping generalization. Similar to the felt sense, “at the heart of revision is the process by which writers recognize and resolve the dissonance they sense in their writing” (p 51). At issue is maturation. The child smashes more trash into the trash can. The father takes the trash out. Students respond to what they are taught - that writing is linear and are simply doing what comes next in order to clean up appearances. The experienced writers have taken the risks to discover through reading and writing and to look for problems in their own writing. Students have a sense of writing to placate, not to disturb.

Recent Studies in ELA 9/11

Jeffery, J. V. (2011). Subjectivity, intentionality, and manufactured moves: Teachers’ perceptions of voice in the evaluation of secondary students’ writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 46(1), 92-127.

Author: Jill V. Jeffery is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies and the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. According to academia.edu, her “scholarship focus on constructs of writing competence as perceived by students, teachers, and writing assessment designers.” I need to pay special attention to what she is producing because she is interested in understanding transition experiences from “secondary to postsecondary writing demands”. She studied English Education (post-bacc) here at the University of Texas and earned her PhD in English Education from New York University.

Date: Like Vieira, very recent publication in 2011. She is two years out of her doctoral study. An early impression on the academic scene.

Research Questions: From page 92:

1)      What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing?

2)      How do they explain their associations?

3)      Ho do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers?

Context (need for study): Continued questioning of “voice” as a writing standard – inequity when applying same standard to ELLs in high-stakes writing assessment. “Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice” (p. 92). Leaning on the 60s comp theorists Peter Elbow, Don Murray, and Stewart? voice had a big presence, but 80s and 90s saw the emphasis had gone too far – undermining goal for academic writing. Late 90s and early 2000s brought up the fairness to ELLs. Despite the academy’s discreditation of  voice, still remains in classrooms.

Methods: Think-aloud interviews (talk about voice as they read the papers with follow-up questions) with 20 teachers (at least three years, master’s degree, and National Writing Project, from West, Northeast, and Midwest – 1 is discarded over poor recording quality) over samples of secondary narrative and expository writing (high scoring from OR exit-level test 2007). Inductive analysis? of interview transcripts. Look through developmental and sociocultural lenses – “how developmental approaches to voice might be integrated within sociocultural models” (p. 93). Systemic functional linguistics? Narrative and expository should have certain characteristics with associated with development.

Findings: The  teachers involved showed a bent in recognizing voice toward  “appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment” (p. 92). What does this mean? All 19 used the “evaluative code” of “tone” to mark voice, 16 used “explicit stance”. Most also talked about structure patterns of diction, specificity, sentence structure, coherence, and development. Talk on language features included connecting voice to effectiveness  of intentionality (choice, control, command)). There is a feeling of sensing commitment and passionate with positive associations and academic or perfunctory with negative views on voice. There is an imagination of an author. They don’t know the student who wrote the piece, but they are connecting to developing writers. Associations of youthfulness and personality were positive in narrative and maturity in expository. 9 of 12 teachers who associated gender to the author, thought female because of the age and perceived maturity level of insight.

Discussion (my connection): A paradox in teaching voice – voice seems to be so individual that it conflicts with structures that can be taught or measure up to academic writing. Can voice be “manufactured” through following specific traits? I have the feeling that although everyone used tone (an evaluative code) the more used indicators of voice were structural patters – I see those more as tricks to make the reader perceive a powerful voice. In high school, my AP English teacher gave everyone awards – I received the “confidence” award. Looking back, I think I figured out that you could play the AP game – that certain structures could elicit the feelings of “rightness” or something to that effect. But half of the teachers talked as if they could spot natural vs forced effectiveness.

Purcell-Gates, V., Duke, N. K., & Martineau, J. A. (2007). Learning to read and write genre-specific text: Roles of authentic experience and explicit teaching. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(1), 8-45.

Authors: Victoria Purcell-Gates received her Ph.D from UC Berkely in 1986. She was awarded Most Promising Researcher from NCTE in 1987 and has seemed to live up to that – hitting some high-point awards and appointments in the early 2000s. She is on faculty at the University of British Columbia: victoria.purcell-gates@ubc.ca. Interested in purposes for and attitudes toward reading and writing and designing educational experiences for young children that build on knowledge gained in home communities. Cognitive learning and sociolinguistics are focuses. She is currently working with family literacy and doing study in Guatemala.

Nell K Duke was on faculty at Michigan State University in Teacher Education and Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education. She just started at the University of Michigan this fall: nkduke@umich.edu. Ed.D from Harvard. According to her page at umich.edu: expertise in “development of informational reading and writing in young children, comprehensions development and instruction in early schooling, and issues of equity in literacy education.” She highlights a lack of nonfiction texts (written outside of narrative?) in primary grades.

Joseph A. Martineau is a member of the state of Michigan’s Department of Education in the office of Educational Assessment and Accountability/Bureau of Assessment and Accountability. MSU in 2004? I am interested in his 2010 publication in Phi Delta Kappan about value-added models in accountability for teacher effectiveness and how parents see the situation.

Date: 2007 is near the end of President G.W. Bush’s second term – perhaps some NCLB backlash? Recent work in genre studies.

Research Questions:

1)      What is the impact of explicit teaching of genre features of informational and procedural text in science on children’s ability to read and write these texts? Does this impact differ from children from homes of different parental education levels?

2)      Is the degree of authenticity of literacy activities, or the degree of explicit teaching of language features, with these texts related to children’s growth in the ability to read and write them? Does this impact differ from children from homes of different parental education levels?

Context (need for study): From page 8: “This study addresses the long-held debate regarding how language is best learned, particularly language forms that are not acquired as one’s primary discourse (Gee, 1992), such as reading and writing.” Spectrum: language acquired only through situated experiences to explicit instruction. Question has been addressed in decoding individual words, indicating explicit teaching is best. Grades 2 and 3 are at “a developmental level rarely included in studies of genre learning of content area written discourse” (p. 11). Critical mass agreement on necessity of authentic literacy activities in genre learning, but little research, “nor is there even a well-established meaning of this variable” (p. 13). What combination of experience and explicit instruction best facilitates learning of new language forms? Exploring “the roles of (a) authentic, communicatively functional reading and writing and (b) the explicit explanation of genre function and features on growth in genre-specific reading and writing abilities of children in grades two and three” (p. 9).

Methods: Within constructivist perspective, view of language as essentially social. Experimental and correlational designs? Longitudinal (at classroom level) for a year, possibly two. 420 students (student level is quasi-experiemental) from 16 2^nd grade classes, 10 were followed to 3^rd grade, growth measured 6 timeusing Hierarchical Linear Modeling. 2 groups – authentic reading and writing with science texts (informational and procedural genres) OR authentic experiences WITH explicit language feature explanations. Teachers attended summer workshop, taught science 2 times a week for 45-60 min at a time. One or more researchers in on a weekly basis to code implementation and coach instruction. Each teacher bought a library of science books for purposes of research – fitting criteria. Study not in change of curriculum, but of increased use of authentic literacy activities and (for one group) “explicit teaching of genre functions and features” (p. 17).

Findings: “No effect of explicit teaching on reading and writing growth for six of seven outcomes” (p. 9). Strong correlation of degree of authenticity with growth for 4/7. Addition of “growing empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of involving students in reading and writing for real-life purposes in the classroom” (p. 9). Parent education levels did not seem to be a factor – page 30: 1/7 outcomes in 2^nd grade. Some schools supposed to be A+E fell into A-only distributions – not every class had the same degree of explicitness. Degree of authenticity of events shows faster rate of student growth.  Findings do not indicate that the amount of time is not the simple answer, looking directly at the nature of the experience.

Discussion (my connection): How is there a degree of authenticity? Either it is authentic or it is not. Be on the look out – page 14 answers this…”This term relates specifically to the nature of the reading and writing acts, or events, in which students engage while participating in the activity of schooling” (p. 14). The idea of teaching of language and genre features matches with Jeffery’s article about teachers associating certain features with positive assessments of voice. How does one’s interpretation of tone and skill (and whether these are natural or forced) differ across the board? Does teaching a formula or being explicit lead to students trying too hard to have a good lead, for example? In regards to the note that it is not just the quantity of time spent reading and writing – I think Wilt Chamberlain said something against the idea of practice makes perfect. You can practice incorrectly all the time. It will just make you good at doing the wrong thing. There are times for intervention – perfect practice makes perfect. So, I see the value in regularly making authentic events, but there are times for the explicit direction. The evidence doesn't find a correlation, though.

Vieira, K. E. (2011). Undocumented in a documentary society: Textual borders and transnational religious literacies. Written Communication, 28, 436-461.

Author: Kate Elizabeth Vieira writes on discourse study, immigration in education, cultural difference, acculturation. She finished her dissertation, “an ethnographic study of the writing of two Portuguese-speaking immigrant groups” in Massachusetts, in 2010 at The University of Wisconsin - Madison. Currently at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; kvieira@illinois.edu.

Date: Like Jeffery, very recent publication in 2011. She is two years out of her doctoral study. An early impression on the academic scene.

Research Questions: How has the transnational movement of a particular group of people, from Brazil to Massachusetts, shaped their literacy lives?

Context (need for study): Looking at migrants’ literacy practices as shaped from crossing national boarders – subset of interest in transnationalism within Writing Studies. Note the demographics of the 22 participants on page 438.

Methods: Ethnographic study – undocumented Brazilian community in Massachusetts. Ethnographic observations, study of writing samples (from whomever was willing to supply – see page 439), and analysis of participants’ accounts of own literacy practices on both sides of migration experiences. Heavy on literary history interviews. Constructivist approach to grounded theory. Open coding of interviews for all literacy practices.

Findings: Crossing borders keeps certain literacy experiences out of reach, especially for those who are undocumented in the new nation. Refuge or revitalization of literacy practices within institutions not connected to the sate – specifically churches. “Writing practices became increasingly religious in the United States when compared with writing practices in Brazil” (p. 441) – political immigrant status drove participants to religious literacy events. Trauma often led to increased involvement at church – an exploitation of non-dominant/marginalized positions. Workplace literacies remained similar, but a general increase in digital literacy practices. Pro-immigrant readings of the Bible designate the difference between what is man-made (governments and borders) and what is part of the inclusive law of God (p. 453).

Discussion (my connection): Church seems to be a safe place from the government. I have a sense that there is a substantial hope in the spiritual or honored tradition that the uncertainty of government cannot provide. There is a sense of community and reality that the church can provide – easier? to be open about yourself at church than with a government that doesn’t seem to want you there – you have a PLACE at church. (p. 445). The increase in digital space literacies is a way to be known – both in their new situations as well as back at “home”. Teenagers in PBS Frontline’s “Growing Up Online” flock to digital spaces in order to find community. Knowledge transfer is a big part of this new identity in The United States; look at the transformation of secular genre practices to religious genres in the US on page 448. I am intrigued by Washington. His plan to return to Brazil after 5 years and refusal to have an “artificial” US marriage shows me that his hope is in the return, the past? So there is not a look to the divine for the future. On page 457: “If bureaucracies have a historically documented need to count, participants in this study had a corresponding need to be counted.” WOW! I do not think I have engaged this idea of textual belonging yet – this is a must watch for me.