50 Years of Research on Writing: What Have We Learned?
“Three of the world's leading scholars in the field of writing instruction and research examine
the state of knowledge in the field and its relevance to questions about teaching and learning
writing at all levels of education Series: "Voices" (A University of California, Santa Barbara
production)
Presenters:
Charles Bazerman: Professor of Education, UC Santa Barbara
Peter Elbow: Professor (emeritus) of English, University of Massachusetts
George Hillocks: Professor (emeritus) of English and Education, University of Chicago
What follows are some highlights, notes, and quotations from the 60 minute panel
presentation and discussion
Panel moderator, Sheridan Blau, Senior Lecturer in English & Education UCSB, asks the
questions:
What have we learned about how writing is taught and learned—how it’s best taught and
learned? What are the sources of our knowledge and how authoritative are these sources?
First Presenter: Peter Elbow
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People are different. “Nothing works for everybody.”
“You cannot give a valid, reliable, single number grade to a single piece of writing.”
(there are too many factors involved)
Peter Elbow focussed many of his comments on the learning conditions in the writing
classroom:
Students write best when they “feel liked” and “feel supported” – when there is a
positive human connection – a companionship in the writing.
Students work and learn more when they are invested in what they are doing. When
they “feel like a writer”, when it’s a part of their identity, it makes them internalize
their instruction more.
“Many people hate and fear writing.” At the same time, “the desire to write is
amazingly widespread.” (While it may sound contradictory, I think what he is saying is
that, as educators, we need to recognize the vast spread in ‘writing attitudes’ in our
classrooms.)
Audience: “A person’s sense of audience for her words and how that audience is going to
respond has a big effect on the language production.”
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It’s easier to write when we write for a safe audience – an audience of someone who
likes us and wants to hear what we say.
“Teaching goes best if students write for a variety of audiences.”
“It helps for students to have a chance for local publication like a class magazine.”
“For students to see their writing in other’s hands, I’ve found that as helpful.”
The worst of all possible audiences is when... writing only goes to the teacher –
because it’s a judging audience and a high-stakes kind of writing.
A mixture of low-stakes, medium-stakes and high-stakes writing works better.
Second Presenter: Charles Bazerman
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Focussed much of his presentation on empirical studies in composition
“Writing is both a craft and an art.”
“It involves a lot of judgements” – deciding what is the best activity for this particular
group at this time. “This is an important kind of knowing.”
The teaching of writing involves human mentoring – personal interaction.
Writing can also involve the experienced advice of accomplished writers and teachers
such as descriptions of the best way to organize things and sharing thoughts on style.
“Writing is historical” – he goes on to discuss some of the early purposes of writing and
briefly discusses how writing has developed
Why is writing important? “Life is saturated by inscription.”
The longest chapter in his most recently edited book on writing was the chapter on
assessment. “We know too much about assessment in writing!”
Ends his presentation by sharing that medical studies have measured the positive
impact of writing on health and the immune system.
Third Presenter: George Hillocks
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Addressed: What do we know about the teaching and learning of writing?
Most of his career focus has been concerned with teaching writing at the secondary
school level
“There’s a lot we know about teaching kids how to write and a lot that doesn’t get
used.”
“There’s a lot of beliefs and lore about writing (not all of it is accurate).
There are a lot of things in the “lore of teaching writing” that don’t work!
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Discusses the importance of balance of form and content in writing
“Research suggests that people attend heavily to the forms of writing in their teaching.
If they teach the forms of writing there’s a heavy concern with grammar and mechanics.
There’s a heavy concern with how to organize a paper. But, [there’s ] very little concern
with the content. How do you develop the content?”
“I would make the argument that when students attend to developing the content of
the writing and the learning the strategies for doing that, the writing improves. And it
improves more than with other kinds of foci for instruction”.
“When students are learning how to deal with the writing task, learning how to deal
with the content, they are learning how to put language together in new ways.”
Gives the example of a personal narrative. We want students to write in such detail that
the audience will feel what the writer feels and see what the writer sees etc.
However, “most students do not write specifically. They write generalizations; they
write vague things. They write: I was really angry when my brother hit me. “The
problem is how do we get the kids to become more concrete?”
Writing “be more specific” in the margin does nothing. Kids don’t know what it means
to “be more specific”. We need to teach them how to be more specific. You need an
activity.
Provides an example of using a large seashell and asking students to describe it. Kids
are “using figurative language” automatically. “Tell me what it sounds like”. He gets
students to describe sounds on a tape recorder. He sends students out on a “field trip”
to describe sounds.
He discusses traditional school grammar – as one of the oldest parts of our writing
curriculum: The trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric
He feels that “teachers have been glamoured by grammar.” – glamoured – as in having
magical properties and related to “casting a spell on something”. It’s difficult to pull
teachers away from it.
“Teaching grammar is not productive in helping kids improve their writing.”
“They don’t have to parse sentences.” (to become better writers)
In Hillock’s research “Nearly all the teachers we interviewed, something like 80-90% (of
a sample of 300) had grammar as a secondary focus in their instruction.”
“But, we have evidence that it (teaching grammar) is not productive – that it doesn’t
take kids anywhere. Almost anything you test against it is better in helping kids
improve their writing.”
There is a view out there that the best approach to teaching for the test is to show
students examples of the kinds of writing they are expected to do – this is using a
sample. The problem is, they learn the form but they don’t know how to develop the
content. It’s still going to be shoddy writing.
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Discusses examples of strong and weak elaboration. We give kids the message that
“more elaboration is better.” We give them the prompt: “try to write some more” and
the message that length is all that is important. “It’s B.S. – not what I call good writing;
it’s filling up space”
There is a brief follow up discussion amongst the three panelists and the moderator:
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Peter Elbow broaches the topic of “metaknowledge” , stating that it’s important for
students to know what they are doing – as in they are making metaphors (referring to
Hillocks’ example of describing a seashell)
Elbow also quotes John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience…we learn from
reflecting on experience.”