Reading-to-Write Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process

by Flower, Linda; Stein, Victoria; Ackerman, John; Kantz, Margaret J.; McCormick, Kathleen; Peck, Wayne C.

• ISBN13: 9780195061901
• ISBN10: 019506190X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1990-09-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Social and Cognitive Studies in Writing and Literacy Series , is devoted to books that bridge research, theory, and practice, exploring social and cognitive processes in writing and expanding our knowledge of literacy as an active constructive process--as students move from high school to college. This descriptive study of reading-to-write examines a critical point in every college student's academic performance: when he or she is faced with the task of reading a source, integrating personal ideas, and creating an individual text with a self-defined purpose. Offering an unusually comprehensive view of this process, the authors chart a group of freshmen as they study and write in their dormitories, recording their "think-aloud" strategies for reading, writing, and revising, their interpretation of the task, and their broader social, cultural, and contextual understanding of college writing. Flower, Stein, and colleagues convincingly conclude that the legacy of schooling in general makes the transition to college difficult and, more important, that the assumptions students hold and the strategies they use in undertaking this task play a significant role in their academic performance. Embracing a broad range of perspectives from rhetoric, composition, literacy research, literary and cultural theory, and cognitive psychology, this rigorous analysis treats reading-to-write as both a cognitive and social process. It will interest researchers and theoreticians in rhetoric and writing, teachers working with students in transition from high school to college, and educators involved in the links between cognition and the social process.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Studying Cognition in Context	p. 3
Reading-to-Write Assignment on Time Management	p. 26
Excerpt from Task Representation Lecture	p. 28
Reading-to-Write: Understanding the Task
The Role of Task Representation in Reading-to-Write	p. 35
Task Representation in Reading-to-Write: The Exploratory Study	p. 41
The Power of the Organizing Plan	p. 43
How a Task Representation Is Created	p. 53
Costs, Benefits, Cognition, and Growth	p. 59
Taking Metacognitive Control: Awareness versus Standard Strategies	p. 67
Protocol Instructions	p. 72
Reading-to-Write Assignment on Revision	p. 73
Promises of Coherence, Weak Content, and Strong Organization: An Analysis of the Students' Texts	p. 76
Rationale for the Two Taxonomies	p. 79
Promises of Coherence: What Were Those Essays Doing?	p. 81
Essay Categories and Instructions to Judges	p. 89
Essays Using the Interpret-for-a-Purpose Organizing Plan	p. 92
Inter-rater Agreement on Elaborated Taxonomy	p. 94
Students' Self-Analyses and Judges' Perceptions: Where Do They Agree?	p. 96
The Study	p. 98
What Our Students Reported	p. 99
Conclusions with Implications for Teaching	p. 108
Self-Analysis Checklist	p. 112
Total Number of Selections with Percentages from the Self-Analysis Checklist	p. 114
Reading-to-Write: Cognitive Perspectives
Exploring the Cognition of Reading-to-Write	p. 119
An Examination of Cognitive Processes	p. 121
The Cognition of Reading-to-Write: A Case Study Perspective	p. 125
Looking for Patterns: The Quantitative Analysis	p. 139
Summary Statistics	p. 142
Pearson Correlation Matrix	p. 142
Multiple Regression Results	p. 143
Multiple Regression Results	p. 143
Elaboration: Using What You Know	p. 144
The Role of Elaboration in Reading-to-Write	p. 146
The Protocol Study	p. 148
Conclusion	p. 153
The Effects of Prompts on Revision: A Glimpse of the Gap Between Planning and Performance	p. 156
Procedure	p. 156
Key Observations	p. 157
The Effect of Prompts on Organizing Plans	p. 159
Protocol Analysis	p. 161
Negotiation Within an Instructional Setting	p. 164
Writers Revise Differently	p. 168
Reading-to-Write: Social Perspectives
Translating Context into Action	p. 173
Locating Context: In Writers, In a Culture	p. 176
The Students' Opening Moves: Origins in a Literate Culture	p. 182
Asking Questions of a Legacy	p. 189
The Cultural Imperatives Underlying Cognitive Acts	p. 194
The Need to Place Student Writing in Broader Cultural Contexts	p. 194
Learning to Recognize Assumptions Underlying Students' Writing	p. 195
Developing Complementarities Between Rhetorical and Literary Theories: Reading for Absences	p. 196
Ideology and Students' Writing	p. 198
The Invisibility of Ideology in the Educational System	p. 200
Three Ideological Assumptions Guiding Students' Writing	p. 202
Interview Questions for Students	p. 216
Uniting Cognition and Context
Negotiating Academic Discourse	p. 221
A Conceptual Framework	p. 221
Developing an Organizing Idea	p. 233
The Tacit Transition to Academic Discourse	p. 245
References	p. 253
Index	p. 263
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