The first three articles from Villanueva discussed various aspects of teaching/learning writing. Murray promotes teaching the process of writing, not the product, to evaluate the student’s effort and not worry if the product is ever finished. Teach the process of brining language to life (or life to language). He discusses three stages of writing as prewriting, writing and rewriting and feels that 85% of time is spent in prewriting stage. “The amount of time the writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, is maturity as a craftsman and the challenge of what he is trying to say” (4).
He illustrates ten implications for teaching the process which are student focused and process oriented. The student is to be rewarded for the effort put into the process with recommendations for improving the product. He feels that grades stop the process, the same way publication does. The student needs to be allowed to take the time necessary for the creativeness to emerge, with some thought about deadlines but not about how the final piece will be evaluated as correct or incorrect.
Murray speaks with authority, succinctly and to the point. I found his essay easy to read and understand and have no trouble agreeing with him. I can see how this is a very dynamic process, but never having studies or taught “language arts”, I cannot say how it would work. I will be interested in the opinions of others.
Emig follows this with a discussion about writing as a form of learning. She see writing as distinctly unique and corresponding uniquely to powerful learning strategies.
Her discussion includes aspects of philosophy, psychology and neuro functioning of the brain to emphasize her point that by writing, we use more of our brains and therefore, reinforce learning. We learn by seeing, doing and symbology (of language) using the hand, the eye, and the brain. “Writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain. A slower process, it utilizes our thoughts to past, present and future. She makes comparisons between learning strategies and selected attributes of writing. She does not say where these strategies were developed. I would assume from one of the language theorists she references, like Viytosky. Luria or Brunner. I feel her analogy is a little “self serving” but she presents an interesting concept and promotes some interesting questions for research.
As a visual and “hands-on” learner, I would tend to agree with her concept that learning to write is best learned by writing (regardless of what is written?) I suppose that the act that we are using “blogs” for presenting our thoughts, that this is an exercise in leaning to write by public writing.
The following two essays by Perl and Sommers were on the comparison of the process of writing of unskilled college students and experienced writers. The first, a study of the composing process and the second on the revision process of the students and writers. Sondra Perl discusses her study of observing students as they write. She developed a tool and coding system to make observable and measurable behaviors in the composing process. I won’t discuss her entire study, just her findings which indicate that 1) students edited frequently for grammatical and other errors, yet still made mistakes. 2) Their editing was superficial and not a reworking of ideas and was disruptive to their thought processes.
These concepts were almost repeated by Sommers. Her study looked at revision of papers by students vs. experienced writers and her findings, I feel, strongly mirror Perl’s study.
The importance of these studies reflects on the processes discussed by the first two articles. It is interesting to me that looking at the way in which students compose their pieces could affect the way teachers expect them to learn. It seems that students write with a methodological approach that has already been ingrained and would need to be changed before new teaching/learning theories are presented. They are writing with evaluation in mind instead of their creativity. The students will need to learn that the teachers are respectful of their creativity more than their lexical, syntactic and grammatical choices.
The Hillock meta-analysis provided an interesting reflexion on the previous article/essays. Through meta-analysis, Mr. Hillock and colleagues review the studies done on experimental treatment for teaching writing over a 19 year period.
The analysis of these studies discovered that none of the most used or favored teaching strategies of that time were effective, and yet that is how students were taught to write. My question is; did the teachers know that their methods weren’t effective or were the strategies not studied well enough to make a determination? According to Hillock, the researchers of that time were against using experimental teaching studies to define and revise teaching strategies. As he quotes Graves (1980) “this research wasn’t readable and was of limited value. It couldn’t help teachers in the classroom. Experimental research is written for other researchers, promotion or dusty archives in language guaranteed for self-extinction”... Teachers cannot transfer the data to the students they teach.
Hillocks challenges, that, if this is true, then there should be little in common among these strategies and they should be studied for that very reason.
The results of this meta-analysis reveled that the most favored teaching strategy (the presentational mode) is not the recommended strategy by the National Writing Project (the natural process mode) and neither of these strategies are the most effective.
The most effective mode seemed to be the environmental mode that “brings together the student, teacher and materials more nearly into balance and takes advantage of all the resources of the classroom” (160). This mode encourages high levels of student involvement, problem solving, using expert examples of good writing and allows students to interact with each other. Many of the traditional methods of teaching writing that were used as experimental treatment studies showed less than effective results. The researchers developed several research questions that, I presume have yet to be answered. The focus of instruction and the mode of instruction together give rise to many other areas for study according to Hillocks. So then, why has the teaching of writing not changed and still includes a focus on grammar and use of language and the mode of instruction is on the use of models and free writing in many schools? I have to admit my ignorance, again. I have not studied the theories that prevail in teaching writing, I am making assumptions from our readings that there has not been a method or strategy developed that can be identified as “the most effective” I also presume as we continue in the “discovery” that we will be able to make our own assertions as to the “best practice”.
This article was helpful to me, even though I did not understand all of the jargon and philosophy discussed, because it gave me a glimpse into the technical features of writing that I have not been exposed to. I was able to understand the concepts and application of the various researchers that we have been reading about from the perspective and insights of other authors. I guess time will tell with whom I agree or disagree.
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Patti, good response here. These articles have big implications for any teacher really. The Hillocks and Emig articles, for example, demonstrate that having students write more in *ANY* class is a better way to learn than sitting in a lecture dominated class (Hillocks' "presentational" mode). These articles correspond to educational reserach that shows students learn more with hands-on activity than passively listening to a lecture and taking a test. I would encourage any teacher to aspire to setting up an "environmental" classroom where the teacher presents a concept in first part, sets up an activity that applies the concept, and then has students work in groups to complete the task. Some whole group discussion could follow, depending on task. Student can still work individually, too, and share results.
I agree with your observation that Emig's rationale of writing as a superior mode of learning is self-serving. Some of questioned the reasonablenss of this claim. As you said yourself, some people are visual learners (although most people make this claim). Different modes of learning might be more appropripriate depending on the task. Reserach has shown that students who use writing to understand concepts and solve problems see bigger gains. So in class and out-of-class writing cna be a useful tool for any teacher in any discipline or level.
Research by Emig and others led to a movement called writing across the curriculum in K-12 & college, which pushed more writing, from informal journals etc. to more formal types of discipline-based assignments. I know there has been some articles published on nursing writing and teaching nursing in this vein, you might be interested in looking at.
BTW, I typed in nursing as a search term in CompPile and got 99 results!
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