Writing time: A rhythmic analysis of contemporary academic writing

ABSTRACT

Where and when do academics write and what are the feelings associated with it? Is the pressure to write a fulfilling process of joyful exploration, or is it stressful and wracked with self-doubt? Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, this article explores the rhythmic dispositions and orientations of contemporary academic writing, exposing the perils of neoliberal quantification and fragmentation in relation to the practice and experience of writing. The critical examination of Helen Sword’s guide to successful academic writing and a critique of the material and abstract spaces destined to contemporary academic writing inform the analysis, revealing problematic contractions and ruptures in the spatio-temporal continuum that organically connects reading, thinking and writing. The article makes, therefore, a case for the use of Rhythmanalysis as a diagnostic method capable of signalling – by detecting arrhythmias – the increasing disjunction between the institutional demands of accelerated production and the slower, irrational rhythms of craftsmanship. By politicizing the pathologies of contemporary academic writing, Rhythmanalysis discloses its potential as a progressive political resource: both as a radical call for appropriation and as a counter-discourse, it allows to restore a more harmonious relationship between thinking, reading and writing against dominant forms of productivist fragmentation, while shedding light on the non-places and dead times of our everyday writing habits.     

Formative Assessment in EFL Writing: An Exploratory Case Study

In second‐language writing, assessment has traditionally focused on the written products and how well (or badly) students perform in writing. Teachers dominate the assessment process as testers, while students remain passive testees. Assessment is something teachers ‘do to’ rather than ‘with’ students, mainly for administrative and reporting purposes (i.e. summative). Such assessment, being more retrospective than prospective, holds little value for teaching and learning. In recent years, with a major paradigm shift in assessment and evaluation in English language teaching, writing assessment informed primarily by a product and summative orientation, is considered increasingly inadequate. Such assessment, which focuses on measurement – i.e. marking, monitoring and checking, fails to capture the formative potential of assessment for promoting learning. A formative approach to assessment, on the other hand, focuses more on inquiry – i.e. discovering, diagnosing and understanding, as well as the opportunities assessment provides for improving teaching and learning. To harness the potential of formative assessment in the writing classroom, it is axiomatic that classroom assessment practices be geared towards maximizing student learning. This provides the impetus for my study, which investigates an EFL teacher's attempt to implement formative assessment in her writing classroom and its impact on her classroom practice and students' beliefs and attitudes to writing.     

Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

This qualitative case study documents a secondary English teacher's making, writing and teaching. The focal teacher engaged in diverse making practices – including composing, crafting and digital fabrication. She also participated in a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute that focused on both teacher writing and digital composing. Data include observations at this NWP Project Summer Institute and in the focal teacher's English classroom, as well as interviews and artefact collection related to her making practices. The findings describe how this teacher's making mattered for her understandings of writing and for her teaching (or not). The case offers insights into why it may be important to cultivate educator making, as well as potential tensions between experiencing making and incorporating it into writing pedagogy. Ultimately, it contributes to writing research interested in examining how various forms of production and making are enmeshed.     

Using wikis to promote quality learning in teacher training

This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees’ online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces – wikis – might be used to communicate ideas and generate course‐specific content. The study also explored how students, through such activities, were able to improve their academic writing skills and engage more critically in learning. Data captured from student discussion boards and a post‐module email questionnaire (n = 35) were used to map student perceptions of the usefulness of wikis in support of their academic studies. The data indicate that most students raised their skill level in writing directly to the publicly viewable wiki space, in sharp contrast to the more informal content they posted on the discussion boards. The scope of collaborative writing was limited due to students’ reluctance to edit each others’ work, but students appreciated the shared environment as a means of discussing their work and the content of the course. Students reported that their academic writing skills had improved through their formal participation in the wiki.     

Essential skills for creative writing: Integrating multiple domain-specific perspectives

The aim of this work was to gather different perspectives on the “key ingredients” involved in creative writing by children – from experts of diverse disciplines, including teachers, linguists, psychologists, writers and art educators. Ultimately, we sought in the experts’ convergence or divergence insights on the relative importance of the relevant factors that may aid writing instruction, particularly for young children. We present a study using an expert knowledge elicitation method in which representatives from five domains of expertise pertaining to writing rated 28 factors (i.e., individual skills and attributes) covering six areas (general knowledge and cognition, creative cognition, conation, executive functioning, linguistic and psychomotor skills), according to their importance for creative writing. A Many-Facets Rasch Measurement (MFRM) model permitted us to quantify the relative importance of these writing factors across domain-specific expertise, while controlling for expert severity and other systematic evaluation biases. The identified similarities and domain-specific differences in the expert views offer a new basis for understanding the conceptual gaps between the scientific literature on creative writing, the writer's self-reflection on the act of writing creatively, and educators’ practices in teaching creative writing. Bridging such diverse approaches–that are, yet, relatively homogeneous within areas of expertise – appears to be useful in view of formulating process-oriented writing pedagogy that may, above all, better target the skills needed to improve children's creative writing development.     

Understanding the growth of ESL paragraph writing skills and its relationships with linguistic features

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students’ written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix – a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and coherence – and the scores assigned by human raters. The raters’ reliability was investigated using many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM); the growth of students’ paragraph writing skills was explored using a factor-of-curves latent growth model (LGM); and the relationships between changes in linguistic features and writing scores across time were examined by path modelling. MFRM analysis indicates that despite several misfits, students’ and raters’ performances and scale’s functionality conformed to the expectations of MFRM, thus providing evidence of psychometric validity for the assessments. LGM shows that students’ paragraph writing skills develop steadily during the course. The Coh-Metrix indices have more predictive power before and after the course than during it, suggesting that Coh-Metrix may struggle to discriminate between some ability levels. Whether a Coh-Metrix index gains or loses predictive power over time is argued to be partly a function of whether raters maintain or lose sensitivity to the linguistic feature measured by that index in their own assessment as the course progresses.     

Genres of high-stakes writing assessments and the construct of writing competence

High-stakes writing assessments currently exert a strong influence on the writing curriculum and instruction in schools across the United States. Under these circumstances it is important to examine the construct of writing competence on which these assessments are based, as well as the extent to which this construct supports the goals of secondary education. In this paper we conduct an exploratory analysis of the genre demands of high-stakes writing assessments from three states – California, Texas, and New York – with the aim of discerning, comparing, and evaluating the role that genre knowledge plays in the construct of writing competence measured by these assessments. Our method of inquiry includes both task analysis of the prompts and genre analysis of high-scoring benchmark papers written in response to these prompts. For the analysis of benchmark papers we employed both structural analysis and quantitative counts of key linguistic features to characterize the genres represented in these assessment tasks. Our results suggest a lack of alignment between the genres of the benchmark papers designated as exemplary and the genre demands of the prompts to which they were written. Exceptions to this pattern were most common on the New York assessments, which contextualize writing tasks in tests of subject–matter knowledge. Findings from our exploratory analysis lead us to argue for greater consistency and clarity of expectations in the design of high-stakes writing exams, and for the design of writing tasks that adequately represent the demands of discipline-specific forms of written discourse.     

The need for effective writing instruction

Many students with writing difficulties have negligible editing skills at best. Existing research supports that a strategy approach to teaching writing conventions to students with learning disabilities is effective, particularly when the strategies involve mnemonics. Recognizing that classroom teachers are increasingly overburdened, our study offers an alternative setting for academic intervention – the after-school program – and focuses on an intervention utilizing a mnemonic designed to increase the efficacy of the time spent on editing in the writing process. This study investigates the impact of two instructional conditions on participants' editing skills: (1) the effects of direct instruction regarding writing conventions to a combination of direct instruction and (2) a mnemonic writing strategy from Step up to writing. Both approaches produced significant gains (p < .05). However, the combined approach exhibited a larger effect size of d = .77-.84 at post-test, as measured by TOWL-3 Contrived Composite scores.     

Developing a Theoretical Framework for Response: Creative Writing as Response in the Year 6 Primary Classroom

Focusing on the creative writing of Year 6 boys as they make the transition to Year 7, this article establishes a theoretical model for creative writing as response. In line with Bakhtin's notion of utterances as ‘interpersonal’ (1986), the model demonstrates the complexity of creative writing – the text is influencing of and influenced by an author's participation in ‘figured worlds’ (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain 1998), but also influencing of and influenced by future respondents. This article suggests that ‘weaker framing’ (Bernstein 2000) in creative writing pedagogy has the potential to alter boys' identities and refigure their worlds.     

Use of Facebook,students’ intrinsic motivation to study writing,writing self-efficacy and writing performance

The study aimed to scrutinise how incorporating Facebook into a conventional writing class might impact on students’ intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy and writing performance, and to uncover how best to provide corrective feedback on students’ writing posted on Facebook. Sixty-four subjects from an intact group were recruited by means of purposive sampling. All participants sat the pre-test measuring intrinsic motivation to study writing, writing self-efficacy and writing performance. Following the pre-test, participants attended a regular conventional writing class incorporating Facebook for four months. At the conclusion of the study, participants sat the post-test and were interviewed regarding their learning experience. Participants were also requested to indicate which type of feedback provided on FB is preferred and to justify their responses. It was found that students’ intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, as well as writing performance, improved markedly in the post-test and that direct corrective feedback is more favoured by students. Overall, the study suggests that not only does incorporating Facebook into a conventional writing class benefit students academically, but it also helps boost their intrinsic motivation to study writing and writing self-efficacy – two critical variables that dictate success in foreign language learning.     

Constructing scientific explanations through premise–reasoning–outcome (PRO): an exploratory study to scaffold students in structuring written explanations

This paper reports on the design and enactment of an instructional strategy aimed to support students in constructing scientific explanations. Informed by the philosophy of science and linguistic studies of science, a new instructional framework called premise–reasoning–outcome (PRO) was conceptualized, developed, and tested over two years in four upper secondary (9th–10th grade) physics and chemistry classrooms. This strategy was conceptualized based on the understanding of the structure of a scientific explanation, which comprises three primary components: (a) premise – accepted knowledge that provides the basis of the explanation, (b) reasoning – logical sequences that follow from the premise, and (c) outcome – the phenomenon to be explained. A study was carried out to examine how the PRO strategy influenced students’ written explanations using multiple data sources (e.g. students’ writing, lesson observations, focus group discussions). Analysis of students’ writing indicates that explanations with a PRO structure were graded better by the teachers. In addition, students reported that the PRO strategy provided a useful organizational structure for writing scientific explanations, although they had some difficulties in identifying and using the structure. With the PRO as a new instructional tool, comparison with other explanation frameworks as well as implications for educational research and practice are discussed.     

Can You Make an Artist?

The novelist Andrew O’Hagan remembers his own early days and suggests writers are both born and made. Now the university – creative writing courses, in particular – may become the clearing houses for new literary talent as book publishing shrinks.     

Peer-formativity: a framework for academic writing

The system currently deployed to assess research outputs in higher education can influence what, how and for whom academics write; for some it may determine whether or not they write at all. This article offers a framework for negotiating this performative context – the writing meeting. This framework uses the established theoretical underpinning of motivational interviewing, which involves autonomy, self-determination, environmental factors and social support. A study showed that the framework helped academics negotiate performativity and re-connect their writing to their values. In this way, they could both privilege writing that was meaningful to them and meet personal and institutional targets. Writing meetings did this by developing writing-oriented peer relationships, defined in this article as peer-formativity. Using writing meetings, academics can submit for research assessment systems without surrendering to performativity.     

Leveraging reading-writing connections through three transformative reading lenses

ABSTRACT

In surveys and semi-structured interviews, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) discussed the role of reading in their first-year composition (FYC) courses infused with ‘writing about writing’ and ‘teaching for transfer’ perspectives. Three transformative reading lenses played a pivotal role in instructors’ pedagogies – deconstructing genres, situating texts in discourse communities, and reading like a writer – that each embody a paramount threshold concept in Writing Studies: writing is a social and rhetorical activity. GTAs’ responses indicate that these transformative reading lenses facilitate students’ ability to make reading-writing connections. When students engage texts through these lenses, the act of reading becomes a tool for shaping students’ current and future writing development.     

Instructors' uses,experiences, thoughts and suggestions regarding Calibrated Peer Review

This paper presents a qualitative study conducted with faculty members who participated in a project funded by the National Science Foundation focusing on student development with Calibrated Peer Review (CPR)?, a web‐based tool created to promote writing and critical‐thinking skills. The purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of faculty members' thoughts and opinions about CPR. Interviews with 12 faculty members – six in biology, three in physics and three in mathematics – were audiotaped, transcribed and analysed. Findings revealed various aspects of instructors' experiences, thoughts and opinions regarding CPR. Findings provided information about how instructors used CPR, how CPR helped their teaching and enhanced students' critical‐thinking skills and writing skills, and positive and challenging aspects of CPR, as well as various observations and suggestions for others using CPR.     

Multidimensional motivation and engagement for writing: construct validation with a sample of boys

Given recent concerns around boys’ literacy, this study examined multidimensional writing motivation and engagement among boys. We explored internal and external validity of 11 adaptive (e.g. self-efficacy for writing) and maladaptive (e.g. disengagement from writing) factors of writing motivation and engagement. The sample comprised 781 male Australian high school students (aged 11–18 years). We used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to conduct our analyses. Results confirmed the internal structure of the factors and revealed that parent education, and to a lesser degree language background, predicted several motivation and engagement factors. In addition, the adaptive motivation and engagement factors were associated positively with several writing (e.g. enjoyment of writing) and literacy outcomes (e.g. literacy achievement), whereas the maladaptive factors tended to be negatively associated. Invariance was found in the associations among the motivation and engagement factors and the outcomes across several participant subgroups (e.g. by gender, language background). There was also measurement invariance between the study’s sample and five randomly drawn samples of students from archived data on domain-general academic motivation and engagement. Combined, our analyses shed light on a domain-specific area of motivation and engagement – writing – that could benefit from an integrative multidimensional examination.     

A good student subject: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of an adolescent writer negotiating subject positions

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student’s subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written artifacts, we use Foucauldian concepts and discourse analysis, along with one James Gee’s discourse analysis tools – the identities building tool – to conduct a microanalysis of James’s efforts to objectify himself as a good student subject. The data show how James acquiesced to the truths and practices of the regime of school, including how he mobilized truths of the regime through a process we call masked confession. That is, he negotiated his good student subject position by masking or silencing other subject positions. James’s masked confession was his way of negotiating the realm of ‘multiple truths,’ or multiple subject positions.     

Gambling with Nonsense: Play and the Secondary English Classroom

Dominant and common-sense contemporary conceptions of practice tend to frame the emotional volatility of the classroom – most commonly explored in discussions about student behaviour – as a fundamental obstacle to teaching and learning. The ‘outstanding’ classroom is both orderly and, paradoxically perhaps, characterised by its passionate, and vocal, student engagement. In this piece I draw on D.W. Winnicott’s writing about play and aggression, exploring his ideas in the context of my work with two classes as a secondary English teacher at an inner-city comprehensive; doing so, I attempt to reframe both my own and my students’ affectively charged experience of the classroom as valuable rather than problematic. I posit certain moments of playfulness as a kind of pedagogical patience: less an evasion of, or a disruption to, the business of the curriculum, and more a route to meaningful engagement with it.     

COMPARE FORUM

The three articles comprising this Forum bring together reflections from practitioners working on aspects of education marginalization – the International Non-Government Organizations Save the Children and Handicap International – and a global reflection on issues confronting the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report in its focus on education inequalities, contributed by Kevin Watkins, its outgoing director at the time of writing.     

How IT workers learn in the workplace

The professional development needs of early career academics (ECAs) are increasingly subject to scrutiny. The literature notes writing groups can be successful in increasing research outputs and improving research track records – a core concern for ECAs. However, the pressure on ECAs to publish takes the pleasure out of writing for many. We argue writing groups, created by and for ECAs, can provide an environment for ECAs to (re)produce pleasure in writing and participation in the processes of academic review and debate. In addition, our experience of a writing group was that it provided a platform of social and emotional support contributing to our personal well-being and professional development.