Writing as a Learning Tool: Integrating Theory and Practice PDF
Preview Writing as a Learning Tool: Integrating Theory and Practice
Studies in Writing 7. P. 1)'nji1â et al. (eds.): Wrj,jng as a uarning Tool. 2001 For Volumes 1 - 6 please contact Amsterdam University Press, at www.aup.nl SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Writing as a Learning Tool Integrating Theory and Practice Edited by Păivi TynjăHi University of Jyvăskylă, Finland LuciaMason University of Lecce, Italy and Kirsti Lonka University of Helsinki, Finland SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.l.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-7923-6914-1 ISBN 978-94-010-0740-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0740-5 Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2001 No part of the material protected by this copyright notJce may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. WRITING AS A LEARNING TOOL STUDIES IN WRITING VOLUME 7 Series Editor: Gert Rijlaarsdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Editorial Board: Linda AHal, University of Geneva, Switzerland Eric Esperet, University of Poitiers, France David Galbraith, Staffordshire University, UK Joachim Grabowski, University of Heidelberg, Germany Lucia Mason, University of Padova, Italy Marta Milian, Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, Spain Sarah Ransdell, Florida Atlantic University, USA Liliana Tolchinsky, University of Barcelona, Spain Mark Torrance, University of Derby, UK Annie Piolat, University of Aix-en-Provence, France Pai"vi Tynjala, University of Jyviiskylii, Finland Carel van Wijk, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Kluwer Academic Publishers continues to publish the international book series Studies in Writing, founded by Amsterdam University Press. The intended readers are all those interested in the foundations of writing and learning and teaching processes in written composition. The series aims at multiple perspectives of writing, education and texts. Therefore authors and readers come from various fields of research, from curriculum development and from teacher training. Fields of research covered are cognitive, socio-cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, curriculum development, instructional science. The series aim to cover theoretical issues, supported by empirical research, quantitative as well as qualitative, representing a wide range of nationalities. The series provides a forum with research from established researchers, with contributions of young researchers. TABLE OF CONTENTS PROLOGUE David R. Olson WRITING AS A LEARNING TOOL: AN INTRODUCTION 7 Paivi Tynjala, Lucia Mason & Kirsti Lonka WRITING TO LEARN: One Theory, Two Rationales 23 Nancy Nelson WRITING, LEARNING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERTISE IN HIGHER EDUCATION 37 Paivi Tynjala ON THE ECOLOGY OF CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION: The Case of Writing in High School English and Social Studies 57 Martin Nystrand, Adam Gamoran & William Carbonaro WRITING TO LEARN, WRITING TO TRANSFER 83 Pietro Boscolo & Lucia Mason SEQUENTIAL WRITING TASKS' INFLUENCE ON SCIENCE WRITING 105 Brian M Hand, Vaughan Prain & Larry Yore NOTE TAKING AND ESSAY WRITING 131 Virpi Slotte & Kirsti Lonka PORTFOLIO: INTEGRATING WRITING, LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT 145 Pirjo Linnakyla NEW TECHNOLOGY, WRITING AND LEARNING 161 James Hartley & Paivi Tynjala REFERENCES 183 NAME INDEX 205 SUBJECT INDEX 213 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 219 PROLOGUE LITERATE MINDS; LITERATE SOCIETIES DA VID R. OLSON The Ontario Institute/or Studies in Education, University o/Toronto, Canada 'The essential innovation which writing brings is not a new mode of exchanging and storing information but a new mentality' (Roy Harris, 1986: 99). The relation between mind and society is fundamental to many of the human sci ences. The direction of influence is the problem. Does social change entail changes in mentality or do changes in mentality produce social changes? If both, how? The study of the implications of literacy provides a forum for examining this complex relationship. A literate society can be viewed as the social organization produced by minds made literate through ·schooling. Conversely, literate minds may be viewed as the product of participation in a literate society. What would seem to be needed is a clearer conception, on one hand, of what a literate mentality is, and on the other, of what a literate society is. I will suggest that a literate society is not to be defined by the fact that a substantial segment of the population is literate although that is an important part of it. On the other hand, neither is personal literacy assured simply by the creation of and participation in literate institutional structures. Our puzzle is how to understand each in turn and then to suggest some of their interrelationships. First, the mind. In this day of emphasis on domain specific competencies, the notion of anything as general as a literate mentality may strike some readers as implausible. Yet writing and literacy in modern societies is so pervasive and employed in so many contexts that there may be merit in characterizing this competence in quite general terms. There is precedent for looking at general forms of competence and yet none of the standard views acknowledge the cognitive implications of writing generally as Har ris suggested in the epigram that introduced this prologue. The modular theory of mind, suggested by Chomsky (1980) but turned into an explicit theory by Fodor (1983) was advanced primarily to explain the peculiarities D.R Olson (2001). Prologue: Literate minds; literate societes. In G. Rijlaarsdam (Series ed.) & P. Tynjala, L. Mason & K. Lonka (Volume eds.), Studies in Writing, Volume 7, Writing as a Learning tool: Integrating Theory and Practice, 1 - 6.© 2001. Kluwer Academic Publish ers. Printed in the Netherlands. 2 OLSON of language, but when generalized offered the possibility of different modes of thought, one associated with each module. The 'theory of mind' module, for exam ple, would explain the special human competence to understand the intentional states of oneself and others. But as no one is prepared to suggest that nature is so prescient as to have anticipated the need for a specialized module for literate thought, modular theory would seem to have little to offer to the explanation of a literate mentality. Howard Gardner's (1993) 'multiple intelligences', an updated version of Thurstone's (1938) primary mental abilities, attempts to identify modes of thought with such faculties as spatial ability, numerical ability, verbal ability and the like. Cultural activities, such as drawing and writing (Gardner & Wolf, 1993) are seen as trading on these basic abilities. However, there is no way of using this concept of abilities to address the differences between oral competence and those special com petencies associated with writing and literacy. There is no space for a 'literate men tality'. Indeed, there is every chance that what we take as verbal ability is more cor rectly characterized as literate ability in that measures of verbal ability frequently trade on just those aspects of and orientations to knowledge that are shaped up in a literate tradition. The ability to define isolated words is a case in point; it is a literate tradition which tends to pull words apart from things. Piaget's theory of 'formal operations' comes closest to what may be thought of as defining a literate mentality (Piaget, 1929). It is the ability to deal with abstract symbols such as words or numerals as if they were objects in their own right and then applying formal rules to those symbols to turn them into other symbols. The result is logic on the one hand and mathematics on the other. But these activities, too, would seem to be dependent at least in part on the invention of appropriate nota tions and algorithms for operating on them (Damerow, 1999), activities that are characteristic of distinctively literate thought. The 'literacy hypothesis', however, differs from all of these in suggesting that knowledge in any domain is altered by constructing written representations and then operating on these representations as a means of thinking about the domain repre sented. Although the project of capturing the distinctive properties of thought in each domain as it takes on the resources of writing and notations is at an early stage, some features seem clear enough. First, there is a well established link between learning to read and write and 'consciousness' of such aspects of language as words, sentences and phonemes. Second, the actual practice of writing and reading, at least in some contexts, contributes to a style of thinking which is more literal and decon textualized (Olson, 1994) and, indeed, more language based. Although writing can have such effects, many writers resist the idea that there is such thing as a 'literate mentality.' Roy Harris and I seem to be the exceptions although we have allies in some older traditions. The 'literate mentality' thesis is not a new one. The thesis began in the Enlight enment as a theory of the evolution of culture in the hands of such writers as Vico, Condorcet, Kant, Hegel, Herder and, in this century, Cassirer, who proposed that mankind had progressed through a series of stages from primitive, to totemic, to heroic, to the modern view of 'inclusive humanity' (Cassirer, 1957). In the hands of Durkheim (1948), this became a sociological theory in which social forms of or- PROLOGUE 3 ganization were seen as determining psychological states. Levy-Bruhl (1923) and Vygotsky (1962), to come to our own time, cast these mentalities into psychological terms, the former with the theory of 'primitive' mentality characterized by a contex tual-dependence which he described as participatory thought, the latter with the the ory 'socio-historical' cognition. The 'literate mentality' theory is of a piece with that of Vygotsky. Vygotsky (1962) discussed the effects of writing in terms of consciousness, suggesting that writing turned speech into an object of analysis and, with the collaboration of Luria, attempted to show how forms of reasoning changed when one became literate. Vy gotsky's hypotheses about thinking have not fared well empirically. Scribner and Cole (1981) showed that non-literate subjects reasoned just as logically as literate ones, the differences being accounted for in terms of 'familiarity with school-like tasks.' Bernardo, et al. (1995) reported similar findings in a study of 5 Filipino communities. Street (1984) argued that literacy had an impact only within certain, relatively narrowly defined, social contexts. This point becomes particularly clear in the ambitious study by Doronila (1996) who studied the acquisition, use, retention and implication of adult literacy in some 11 Filipino communities. In only some contexts was there any impact from sustained literacy programs. Those in which literacy had an impact were those in which literacy became a significant part of the activities of the community, that is, in communities which developed a 'literate tra dition.' Mere reading and writing seemed to have little effect. Yet, within a literate, schooled society, writing and reading are thought to have important effects on learning. Reading gives private access to information that would otherwise be out of reach. Writing appears to allow one to gain some distance from one's own thoughts. A well known writer, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in an in terview with the biographer of Charles Lindbergh, claimed that 'Writing allows one to put ideas and feelings on a shelf', in a sense freeing oneself from the burden of entertaining them. Empirical research on writing and thinking (Klein, 1999) tends to confirm this hypothesis but the evidence tends, like that of Lindbergh's, to be anec dotal. And now, society. Elwert (in press) has advanced the concept of 'societal liter acy' to describe the kind of literacy which is embedded in the large scale institutions of a modern bureaucratic society. Law, commerce and science are all institutions in which access to and use of written documents and written procedures such as laws, contracts and wills, along with the appropriate institutions for enforcing them, are critical to the functioning of such a society. A 'literate mentality' is the specialized mode of thought required to participate in a society organized, in part, around these complex bureaucratic structures with their historical, written archival resources. Lit erate societies, however, can vary greatly. Medieval scholastic philosophers were highly literate, living in a literate society but one which was quite different from a modern one. Both their society and their literacy differed from ours in the ways that texts were read, understood, consulted, and composed. Modern bureaucratic socie ties involve yet another form of 'literate mentality' partly because institutions them selves have changed and partly because of altered conceptions of how to read, write and use written texts in specialized domains. 4 OLSON Even allowing for these differences one may yet talk of societal literacy. It is the formulation and implementation of explicit procedures for the ordering of activities in terms of rules, norms, formal procedures or algorithms set out in codes, docu ments, and manuals such as 'Rules of order', contract law, rules for interpretation and the like. Such rules of course depend upon the ability to monitor and enforce such rules. Personal honour is not enough but the entire implement of state, whether ancient empire or modern democracy, is so ordered as to carry out these rules. Power goes hand in hand with procedure but the procedure is explicit and rule gov erned and generally complied with. Finally, the relations between a literate mentality and societal literacy. The rnis take was, perhaps still is, the belief, common to theories of social developers, that learning to read and write in itself will generate democratic institutions, a disci plined, trained work force, and a critical mind. The parallel mistake, from the other side, is to assume that literacy is only a matter of the ability to participate in those societally literate institutions. Personal literacy is significant in two ways. First, it is significant to the extent that it buys access to literate institutions and resources. But second, it is significant in that all forms of literacy have some impact on cognition, the impact depending upon the form of the script and the ways in which it is taught, as well as the ways in which it is used (Olson, 1994). Thus, literacy comes to have an effect, not only on consciousness of language, but on the forms of argument, the explicitness of arguments, the uses of evidence, the preference for one genre rather than another if integrated into such specialized institutions as economics, law, sci ence or literature. Formal education is the primary means of introducing learners to the competencies required by these specialized institutions. However, even this is not enough. Although institutions are composed of indi viduals, the institutions themselves are altered when they become literate institu tions. That is to say, institutions in a document or bureaucratic society come to func tion by 'the rule of law', that is, the rules of explicit procedure and formal, enforce able agreements and accountability. Institutions themselves change as they develop these procedures developing a form of 'societal literacy'. It is in the context of so cietal literacy that the personal literacy of individuals comes to be of major signifi cance. A modern bureaucratic society is often scorned for its impersonal attitude and rigid procedure. 'Rules are rules' is the refrain of the unreflective. Nonetheless, a society without documented and enforceable rules, laws, contracts and agreements is neither by definition nor practice a 'literate society'. A literate society is one which is both societally literate, having in place the infrastructure for the systematic, bureaucratic management of social affairs, and personally literate, a citizenry with both the knowledge and willingness to use their literacy in those institutions as well as in their everyday lives. To participate in such institutions, individuals, primarily through the school, learn how to read the specialized documents of those institutions, and equally impor tantly, learn how to write them. Each form of writing requires a special kind of analysis, structuring the relationships between ideas, relating new information to the already known, shaping texts to fit the expectations of readers working in that do main. The ability to express oneself through writing may be a somewhat generaliz able skill but it is elaborated by learning to meet the requirements of the special in-
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