Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process (Social and Cognitive Studies in Writing and Literacy)

280 Pages·1990·17.51 MB·English

by  Linda Flower

READING-TO-WRITE
SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE STUDIES IN WRITING AND LITERACY
Oxford University Press and
The Center for the Study of Writing at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon
A series devoted to books that bridge research, theory, and practice, exploring social
and cognitive processes in writing and expanding our knowledge of literacy as an
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The Center for the Study of Writing (CSW), with the support of the Office of
Educational Research and Improvement, conducts research on the development of
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link writing research to classroom practice. A list of publications is available from
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94720.
READING-TO-WRITE
Exploring a Cognitive and
Social Process
LINDA FLOWER Carnegie Mellon University
VICTORIA STEIN University of Arizona
JOHN ACKERMAN University of Utah
MARGARET J. KANTZ Central Missouri State University
KATHLEEN McCORMICK Carnegie Mellon University
WAYNE C. PECK Allegheny Presbyterian Center
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1990
Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reading-to-write : exploring a cognitive and social process /
Linda Flower . . . [et al.].
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-506190-X
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)
2. Reading (Higher education) 3. Cognition—Social aspects. I. Flower, Linda.
PE1404.R375 1990 808'.0427'0711—dc20 89-8845
The project presented, or reported herein, was performed pursuant to a
grant from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement/Department of
Education (OERI/ED) for the Center for the Study of Writing. However,
the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or
policy of the OERI/ED and no official endorsement by the OERI/ED
should be inferred.
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
So I'm just gonna—I don't care, I'm just going to interpret them the only way I
can interpret them. . . . Let's just put what the authors agreed on. Authors
agree—We'll just—If at least two of them concur, we'll say they agree. Authors in
general agree that . . . But then they don't agree—There's nothing you can say
about this. . . .
Can I leave it at that. . . . Oh give me a break, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm
only a freshman. I have no idea what to do.
—Darlene, a first-semester freshman
Darlene's college assignment asked for synthesis and interpretation. The paper she
turned in—a short, simplistic review of material from her sources—failed to meet
her own expectations and her readers'. And yet, a chance to look at the process
behind this unsophisticated product revealed serious thinking, a complicated, if
confused, decision process, and a trail of unused abilities and discarded ideas—an
active encounter with academic discourse that her teacher would never see.
The study presented here takes an unusually comprehensive look at one critical
point of entry into academic performance. It shows a group of freshmen in the
transition into the academic discourse of college, looking at the ways in which they
interpret and negotiate an assignment that calls for reading-to-write. On such tasks,
students are reading to create a text of their own, trying to integrate information
from sources with ideas of their own, and attempting to do so under the guidance of
a purpose they must themselves create. Because these reading-to-write tasks ask
students to integrate reading, writing, and rhetorical purpose, they open a door to
critical literacy. Yet this same interaction often makes reading-to-write a difficult
process for students to learn and to manage.
To provide a rounded picture of cognition in this academic context, the study
examines these students' thinking processes from a number of perspectives, drawing
on their think-aloud protocols of writing and revising, on interviews with and self-
analyses by the students, and on comparisons of teachers' and students' perceptions
of texts the students wrote. It attempts to place these observations within a broader
vi Preface
contextual analysis of the situation as students saw it and the social and cultural
assumptions about schooling they brought with them.
What this study reveals are some radical differences in how individual students
represent an academic writing task to themselves—differences teachers might in-
terpret simply as an indication of a student's ability rather than his or her interpreta-
tion of the task. Students were often unaware that such alternative representations
existed or that they might hold such significance. Some images of the task, for
instance, were dominated by the goals of comprehension, summary, and simple
response, and offered little or no place for critical response, original synthesis, or
interpretation for a rhetorical purpose.
The reading-to-write task students imagined for themselves also had a direct
effect on performance: it affected the goals they set, the strategies they used, and the
ways they solved problems during composing. And it led to differences in teachers'
evaluations of the texts—although, this study suggests, these evaluations may con-
fuse the conventions of organization (e.g., use of topic sentences) with the writer's
control of ideas. When students began to examine their options and attempt the
more demanding task of interpreting for a purpose, certain students, whom we
called the Intenders, showed important changes in their writing and thinking pro-
cess. These changes, however, were not evident in the text nor apparent to teachers.
Finally, this study showed how students' images of the task were rooted in the
students' histories, the context of schooling, and cultural assumptions about writing
they brought to college.
It is not surprising that some of the images students bring with them are at odds
with the expectations they encounter at a university. However, when the expecta-
tions for "college-level" discourse are presented in oblique and indirect ways, the
transition students face may be a masked transition. That is, the task has changed,
but for a number of reasons, the magnitude and real nature of this change may not be
apparent to students, even as they fail to meet the university's expectations.
One of the key implications of this study is that reading-to-write is a task with
more faces and a process with more demands than we have realized. We see students
thinking hard and doing smart things, even when they misgauge their goals or their
written text fails to meet certain standards. This close survey of the cognitive and
social landscape of reading-to-write in a college class gives one added respect for
the students in this transition and for the complexity and sophistication of the
"freshman" task as they face it.
Our heartfelt thanks go to our colleagues John R. Hayes, Karen A. Schriver,
Nancy Spivey, Tom Huckin, Christina Haas, Lorraine Higgins, Stuart Greene,
Jennie Nelson, Tim Flower, Stephen Witte, Mike Rose, Gerald Rutledge, and
Kathy R. Meinzer.
Pittsburgh L. F.
May 1989
Contents
Introduction: Studying Cognition in Context, 3
LINDA FLOWER
Appendix I: Reading-to-Write Assignment on Time Management, 26
Appendix II: Excerpt from Task Representation Lecture, 28
I Reading-to-Write: Understanding the Task
1. The Role of Task Representation in Reading-to-Write, 35
LINDA FLOWER
Task Representation in Reading-to-Write: The Exploratory Study, 41
The Power of the Organizing Plan, 43
How a Task Representation Is Created, 53
Costs, Benefits, Cognition, and Growth, 59
Taking Metacognitive Control: Awareness versus Standard Strategies, 67
Appendix III: Protocol Instructions, 72
Appendix IV: Reading-to-Write Assignment on Revision, 73
2. Promises of Coherence, Weak Content, and Strong Organization:
An Analysis of the Students' Texts, 76
MARGARET J. KANTZ
Rationale for the Two Taxonomies, 79
viii Contents
Promises of Coherence: What Were Those Essays Doing? 81
Appendix V: Essay Categories and Instructions to Judges, 89
Appendix VI: Essays Using the Interpret-for-a-Purpose Organizing Plan, 92
Appendix VII: Inter-rater Agreement on Elaborated Taxonomy, 94
3. Students' Self-Analyses and Judges' Perceptions: Where Do
They Agree? 96
JOHN ACKERMAN
The Study, 98
What Our Students Reported, 99
Conclusions with Implications for Teaching, 108
Appendix VIII: Self-Analysis Checklist, 112
Appendix IX: Total Number of Selections with Percentages
from the Self-Analysis Checklist, 114
II Reading-to-Write: Cognitive Perspectives
4. Exploring the Cognition of Reading-to-Write, 119
VICTORIA STEIN
An Examination of Cognitive Processes, 121
The Cognition of Reading-to-Write: A Case Study Perspective, 125
Looking for Patterns: The Quantitative Analysis, 139
Appendix X: Summary Statistics, 142
Appendix XI: Pearson Correlation Matrix, 142
Appendix XII: Multiple Regression Results, 143
Appendix XIII: Multiple Regression Results, 143
5. Elaboration: Using What You Know, 144
VICTORIA STEIN
The Role of Elaboration in Reading-to-Write, 146
The Protocol Study, 148
Conclusion, 153
6. The Effects of Prompts on Revision: A Glimpse of the Gap
Between Planning and Performance, 156
WAYNE C. PECK
Procedure, 156
Key Observations, 157
The Effect of Prompts on Organizing Plans, 159
Protocol Analysis, 161
Negotiation Within an Instructional Setting, 164
Writers Revise Differently, 168
Contents ix
III Reading-to-Write: Social Perspectives
7. Translating Context into Action, 173
JOHN ACKERMAN
Locating Context: In Writers, In a Culture, 176
The Students' Opening Moves: Origins in a Literate Culture, 182
Asking Questions of a Legacy, 189
8. The Cultural Imperatives Underlying Cognitive Acts, 194
KATHLEEN MCCORMICK
The Need to Place Student Writing in Broader Cultural Contexts, 194
Learning to Recognize Assumptions Underlying Students' Writing, 195
Developing Complementarities Between Rhetorical and Literary Theories:
Reading for Absences, 196
Ideology and Students' Writing, 198
The Invisibility of Ideology in the Educational System, 200
Three Ideological Assumptions Guiding Students' Writing, 202
Appendix XIV: Interview Questions for Students, 216
IV Uniting Cognition and Context
9. Negotiating Academic Discourse, 221
LINDA FLOWER
A Conceptual Framework, 221
Developing an Organizing Idea, 233
The Tacit Transition to Academic Discourse, 245
References, 253
Index, 263