Cet article s’inscrit dans une recherche plus large qui analyse l’acquisition de l’écriture du français par de jeunes élèves, dans le cadre de pratiques régulières d’écritures approchées. La présente ...étude compare deux corpus comprenant les écrits et explications associées d’une soixantaine d’élèves ayant pratiqué ces écritures approchées tout au long d’une année scolaire, avec autant d’élèves qui n’en n’ont pas bénéficié. Les élèves des deux groupes sont scolarisés dans deux écoles de la banlieue ouest de Paris, inscrites en Réseau d’éducation prioritaire. En fin d’année scolaire, les résultats montrent que les élèves du premier groupe, dont les enseignantes ont été formées à ces écritures approchées, développent des compétences scripturales et métalinguistiques bien supérieures aux seconds. Ils investissent plus rapidement et massivement le domaine phonographique et en perçoivent les formes linguistiques régulières ou non, tout en intégrant d’autres composantes spécifiques comme la morphographie. À l’inverse, les élèves du deuxième groupe, non initiés à ces activités d’écriture-encodage autonomes, évoluent peu dans leurs conceptions de l’écriture de leur langue ; ils se contentent d’inscrire des graphes sans lien avec l’oral et souvent sans visée sémiographique. Cette étude prolonge et précise de précédentes recherches qui montrent que ces activités d’écriture avec un étayage de l’enseignant, les verbalisations explicatives des élèves et un retour à la norme ont un impact positif sur l’acquisition de la lecture-écriture.
Approaching French writing in preschool context by developing efficient linguistic procedures.
This article is part of a larger research project which analyses the acquisition of French writing by young pupils within the context of regular practice of approached writing. The present study compares two corpora comprising the writings and associated explanations of some sixty pupils who have practiced these approached spelling throughout a school year, as well as a control group of as many pupils with no exposure to the method. The pupils in the two groups attend two schools in the Western suburbs of Paris, which are part of the "Priority Education Network". At the end of the school year, the results showed that the pupils in the first group, whose teachers have been trained in these invented spelling methods, developed scriptural and metalinguistic skills at a much higher level than those in the second group. The speed and depth at which they assimilated the phonographic dimension and perceived the regular or non-regular linguistic forms is much higher. At the same time, they also integrated other specific components such as morphography. Conversely, the pupils in the second group, who were not initiated into these autonomous writing-encoding activities, did not develop much in their conceptions of writing; they were content to write graphs that displayed no connection with the spoken word and often had no semiographic purpose. This study extends and clarifies previous research demonstrating that these writing activities with teacher support, explanatory verbalizations by pupils and a return to the norm have a positive impact on the acquisition of reading and writing.
De quelle manière les processus d’écriture peuvent-il peser sur la structure d’un récit médiatique ? Et quel rôle y jouent les idéologies langagières des journalistes ? Pour répondre à ces questions, ...la présente contribution propose une analyse de cas, à partir de données récoltées dans une salle de rédaction. D’une part, elle décrit les méthodes d’écriture permettant aux journalistes de produire un récit cohérent à partir de fragments de texte. Elle montre le rôle crucial de la mise par écrit de l’oral. Dans le cas étudié, la mise en paragraphe conduit à l’assignation progressive de fonctions narratives aux différents fragments d’un même témoignage. D’autre part, la contribution rend compte des motivations qui participent aux choix rédactionnels, celles-ci sont redevables d’idéologies langagières qui tendent à privilégier l’intelligibilité des textes sur leur authenticité. La fabrication du récit médiatique se révèle être davantage le fruit d’une orientation collective vers un prototype culturellement attendu que le résultat des choix rédactionnels d’un seul individu.
The making of news stories: between entextualization and language ideologies.
How can writing processes weight on a news story’s structure? And what is the role of the journalists' linguistic ideologies? To address these issues, this paper presents a case study. Based on data collected in a newsroom, it describes the writing methods that enable a team of journalists to produce a coherent narrative from a series of fragments. The analysis shows how writing (re)structures a conversational narrative: paragraphing leads to the progressive attribution of narrative functions to different parts of the story. The paper also reports on the motivations relating to writing choices, which are caught up in language ideologies that tend to favor the intelligibility of texts over their authenticity. The making of news stories appears to be more the result of a collective orientation towards a culturally expected prototype than the result of a single individual’s writing choices.
La présente étude compare l’usage de l’écriture inclusive dans le journal français
Le Monde
et le journal québécois
Le Devoir
entre octobre 2017 et septembre 2021. Le corpus est constitué d’un ...ensemble de 192 articles, soit 96 articles du
Monde et
96 articles du
Devoir
, ce qui équivaut à deux articles par mois par journal. Les phénomènes inclusifs recensés dans le corpus sont les suivants : la féminisation des noms de métiers, l’accord de proximité, les mots épicènes, les doubles flexions et les abréviations. L’analyse des données révèle que les techniques de l’écriture inclusive sont plus répandues dans
Le Monde que Le Devoir
, dans la mesure où la plupart des techniques sont relevées dans un plus grand nombre d’articles du
Monde
que du
Devoir
. Par ailleurs, les analyses statistiques montrent que les occurrences des phénomènes inclusifs augmentent considérablement entre octobre 2017 et septembre 2021 dans les deux journaux. L’écriture inclusive est donc de plus en plus répandue dans les médias écrits.
The usage of gender-inclusive writing in a French and a Quebec print media.
The present study compares the usage of genderinclusive writing in the French newspaper
Le Monde
and the Quebec newspaper
Le Devoir
between October 2017 and September 2021. The corpus is composed of a total of 192 articles, that is 96 articles from
Le Monde
and 96 articles from
Le Devoir
, which is equivalent to two articles per month per newspaper. The inclusive phenomena studied in the corpus are the following: the feminisation of job titles, the proximity agreement or proximity concord (
accord de proximité
), epicene words, double flexions and abbreviations. The data analysis reveals that the techniques of genderinclusive writing are more widespread in
Le Monde
than
Le Devoir
, in the sense that most of the techniques are present in more articles in
Le Monde
than in
Le Devoir
. Moreover, the statistical analysis shows that the occurrences of inclusive phenomena increase significantly between October 2017 and September 2021 in both newspapers. Gender-inclusive writing is therefore more and more prevalent in written medias.
Feedback is important to improve writing quality; however, to provide timely and personalized feedback is a time-intensive task. Currently, most literature focuses on providing (human or machine) ...support on product characteristics, especially after a draft is submitted. However, this does not assist students who struggle
during
the writing process. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the use of keystroke analysis to predict writing quality throughout the writing process. Keystroke data were analyzed from 126 English as a second language learners performing a timed academic summarization task. Writing quality was measured using participants’ final grade. Based on previous literature, 54 keystroke features were extracted. Correlational analyses were conducted to identify the relationship between keystroke features and writing quality. Next, machine learning models (regression and classification) were used to predict final grade and classify students who might need support at several points during the writing process. The results show that, in contrast to previous work, the relationship between writing quality and keystroke data was rather limited. None of the regression models outperformed the baseline, and the classification models were only slightly better than the majority class baseline (highest AUC = 0.57). In addition, the relationship between keystroke features and writing quality changed throughout the course of the writing process. To conclude, the relationship between keystroke data and writing quality might be less clear than previously posited.
Very Like a Whale White, Edward M; Elliot, Norbert; Peckham, Irvin
03/2015
eBook
Open access
Winner of the 2015 CPTSC Award for Excellence in Program AssessmentWritten for those who design, redesign, and assess writing programs,Very Like a Whaleis an intensive discussion of writing program ...assessment issues. Taking its title fromHamlet, the book explores the multifaceted forces that shape writing programs and the central role these programs can and should play in defining college education.Given the new era of assessment in higher education, writing programs must provide valid evidence that they are serving students, instructors, administrators, alumni, accreditors, and policymakers. This book introduces new conceptualizations associated with assessment, making them clear and available to those in the profession of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. It also offers strategies that aid in gathering information about the relative success of a writing program in achieving its identified goals.Philosophically and historically aligned with quantitative approaches, White, Elliot, and Peckham use case study and best-practice scholarship to demonstrate the applicability of their innovative approach, termed Design for Assessment (DFA). Well grounded in assessment theory,Very Like a Whalewill be of practical use to new and seasoned writing program administrators alike, as well as to any educator involved with the accreditation process.
What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, ...this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.
In this study we examine process configurations in synthesis tasks. We study whether these configurations are students traits or vary within students per task. In a national survey with a ...representative sample of 658 Dutch upper-secondary school students, we collected writing tasks, registered students' writing behaviors (via keylogging) and their task perceptions and assessed the quality of their texts. Each participant completed two informative and two argumentative synthesis tasks. Writing process configurations were based on a preselected set of writing behaviors that proved to be related to text quality: time spent on sources and production activities, switching between sources and between sources and text production, and speed of production; with reference to the phase in the process (first, mid, final part). Latent profile analyses distilled four process configurations, some of which were more likely to occur with the informative genre. One process configuration, that is, "Fast text production," was related to qualitatively higher text quality scores than the others. Additionally, at the age of 16-18 a writing process configuration is not a student trait: in most instances, we observed two or more task configurations within students. Writers' task experiences such as topic knowledge and topic interest predicted the occurrence of certain process configurations which could indicate adaptivity. The finding that writing configurations of writers vary even between similar tasks has important implications for the generalizability of (synthesis) writing research on the basis of a single writing task and process per student.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Students have many options to approach a source-based writing task. The predominant belief has been that a task approach is a student trait. This study, however, shows that 16- to 18-year-olds vary their approaches to both similar source-based tasks and source-based tasks differing in rhetorical aim (to argue or to inform). This has implications for writing research using a single task and for writing instruction and feedback on students' writing processes.
This study aimed to validate a newly-developed instrument, The Writing Strategies for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) Questionnaire, with respect to its multifaceted structure of SRL strategies in ...English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. A total of 790 undergraduate students from 6 universities in Northeast China volunteered to be participants. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) through structural equation modeling (SEM) were applied to evaluate 3 hypothesized models. The results of the CFA validated a 9-factor correlated model of second language (L2) writing strategies for SRL with satisfactory psychometric characteristics. Model comparisons confirmed a hierarchical, multidimensional structure of SRL as the best model, in which self-regulation, as a higher order construct, accounted for the correlations of the 9 lower-order writing strategies, pertaining to cognitive, metacognitive, social-behavioral, and motivational regulation aspects. Multiple regression analysis revealed that 6 out of 9 SRL strategies had significant predictive effects on EFL writing proficiency. The empirical evidence lends preliminary support to a transfer of SRL theory from educational psychology to the field of L2/EFL education, particularly L2/EFL writing. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Research into
discourse synthesis
examines the ways in which writers make use of, and transform, multiple other texts in writing their own. It is intertextual research that has blurred boundaries of ...various kinds, not only the boundary between the processes of reading and writing but also boundaries across disciplines as well as regions of the world. Guided by a cognitive constructivist perspective, this research into discourse synthesis drew at its origin—and continues to draw now—from multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical work. This article, which establishes the foundations for this research and traces its development, attends to writers’ transformations of multiple source texts resulting from operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting. Studies into synthesis writing for varying academic tasks have shown that, by applying these operations to multiple textual sources, writers produce discourses that function as new texts in new contexts. Following a discussion of historical background, attention in this article goes to three major issues: the variation in synthesis associated with different academic genres; the kinds of insights into product and process that come from different research approaches; and the nature of new instructional approaches that emphasize elements of discourse synthesis. All facets of this research reveal continuity as well as change, the latter occurring, in large part, through contact and convergence of discourse synthesis research with related bodies of work. The conclusion, which centers on the notion of transformation, summarizes research conducted thus far and points to future directions.
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