University Sector Writing Development: Contextualizing classroom practices within institutional and the wider social environments

Gicela Cuatlapantzi Pichón Nancy Susan Keranen

INSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

AND PRACTICES

CLASSROOM PRACTICES

TEACHERS and

STUDENTS

SOCIAL CONTEXT

REQUIREMENTS (employers)

PHASE ONE

PHASE TWO

= OFFICIAL = ACTUAL

PHASE THREE

Background

Students need to write different kinds of academic papers in English as part of their undergraduate studies. But often the process of writing for students is further complicated because they are not aware of what teachers want.

Both students and teachers approach any teaching / learning task with their own sets of expectations.

Expectations 1

An expectancy is an awareness, belief, or anticipation that some event is very likely to occur in a given situation. Expectancies are thought to arise from three sources: 1) prior experiences, 2) directions given to the person, and 3) motivation of the person.

(Dubois, Alverson & Staley, 1979, p. 108)

Expectations 2

The concept of “expectancy” forms the basis for virtually all behaviour. Expectations are beliefs about a future state of affairs and represent the mechanism through which past experiences and knowledge are used to predict future.

Expectations are based either on personal experience, information from other people, or inferred logically from other beliefs and expectations (Olson, Roese & Zanna, 1996).

Studies examining teachers’ expectations 1. Johns, 1986

Touched upon faculty attitudes towards student writing.

2. Leki, 1995 Examined the criteria used by a group of ESL students, writing teachers, and content area teachers to rank order four essays written by ESL students. The 29 participant teachers were asked to rank order the essays according to the criteria they might apply in looking for good student writing.

3. Research & Education Association (REA), 2000 Focuses on all students’ need to know about college and university writing.

Studies exploring students’ expectations (additional language learning situations)

(inter alia)Geisler,1995 Two major studies, one conducted in England in the late 1960s and one conducted in the United States in the late 1970s.

Leki, 1995 The participant students (twenty college-level ESL students) were asked to rank the essays three times: first, according to the students’ preferences; second, according to what the students thought might be the preferences of their English teachers; and third, according to how the students thought their content area teachers might rank the essays.

Leki, 2008 – Error correction preferences ESL freshmen.

Gap: Writing expectations in EFL settings.

This project was carried out at a public university modern languages faculty located in the central part of Mexico. It is the only faculty of the university which trains future French and English teachers.

Academic writing is a very important area for students who are doing their degree in this language faculty because they are trained to be English teachers.

Methodology

Because the research reported in this thesis sought to discuss expectations about academic writing, it was qualitative in nature (Richards, 2003).

Small scale, non-statistical, and subjective; there is personal involvement of the researcher, and she sought to understand actions or meanings (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2007).

Case study approach (Creswell, 1998; Richards, 2003).

Participants

The participants were chosen from twogroups: Teachers and sixth-term students. Teachers (n=8)They were experienced teachers who teach across the

subject areas and wished to help with the research: One teacher from the linguistics classes, three teachers from the English language teaching

classes, and Four teachers from the research seminar classes.

Participants

Students (n=24) Three students from each teacher’s class:

◦a high scoring student, ◦an average-scoring student, and ◦a low-scoring student.(teachers informally identified the levels of the

participant students)

• Wilkinson (2004) states that the focus group is a way of collecting qualitative data, which involves engaging a small number of people in an informal group discussion, focused around a particular topic or set of issues.

• Composed of 14 items: multiple choice question, closed and open questions, dichotomous questions, and rating scales.

• Adapted from Desmond & Wu, 2001.

• “Stimulated recall is one subset of a range of introspective methods that represent a means of eliciting data about thought processes involved in carrying out a task or activity” (Gass & Mackey, 2000, p. 1).

• Face-to-face (Fontana and Frey, 2003)

• Semi-structured (Fontana and Frey, 2003)

• Informal Conversational (Cohen et al., 2004)

Interviews Stimulate

d RecallsFocus

GroupsQuestionnaires

METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION

Teachers

Students

Expectations emerged from prior

experiences

Expectations emerged

from directions

given to the person

Expectations based

on personal experience

Expectations based on information from other

people

Expectations inferred

logically from other beliefs

and expectations

Data analysis

categories

Predicted categories

guided by the work of Leki

(1995).

The data that could not be fit

into those categories was

used to generate other categories Dey

(1993).

Results Teachers’

expectations

Teachers’ expectations

organization mentioning the

importance of an introduction and a

conclusion (8 teachers)

importance of instructions to be

followed by students (5 teachers)

references (5) length of paragraphs (5)

coherence and cohesion (3)

number of words (3)

purpose of the writing (3)

students’ personal voice (3)

titles/subtitles (3)flow of language-

sophisticated language (2)

topic sentence and supporting sentences (2)

punctuation (2)

clarity (2) sentence length (2)

Results Students’ expectations

1. Of the 24 students in the study, 24 chose organization and appropriate vocabulary usage as elements of good writing,

2. 22 selected coherence/cohesion linguistic markers, 3. 16 chose spelling accuracy and topic sentences, 4. 15 critical thinking and that the writing begins with

prewriting strategies, and 5. 14 writing for a specific audience.

Student Questionnaire

Student focus groupconclusions

focused on the topic

a main idea a specific topic

a sentence at the beginning to

attract the reader’s attention

short concise well-structured paragraphs

short clear sentences good grammar good punctuation

and spelling

no run-on sentences

Appropriate use of slang and idiomatic

expressions

Avoidance of informal phrasal

verbs or contractions

phrasal verbs or contractions

flow of the language

Other expectations mentioned by students

They also expected good writing to be helpful or useful for others, innovative, concise, interesting, attractive to the reader, logic, and valid. Students expected good writing to contribute to human knowledge, to follow a format, to go from the general to the specific, to use passive voice, to have a purpose, and to get to the point. They expected good writing not to be long and vague.

Areas of student – teacher expectation agreement

The results of this study suggested that teachers’ expectations and those of their students revealed a certain match. Teachers and students agreed on “organization” as the most salient element of good writing; and other elements such as “length”, “cohesion”, “coherence”, “sophisticated language”, “topic” and “supporting sentences”, “good punctuation”, and “clearness”. Nevertheless, teachers and students mainly differed on the following:

Incongruence

Firstly, most teachers mentioned the importance of instructions to be followed by students, of references, and of paragraph length, whereas few students mentioned those. It is important to mention that teachers did not state whether the instructions were verbal or written; and students didn´t mention “following instructions” as an element of good academic writing until they were asked about them.

Secondly, vocabulary was the most salient element for all students, while just one teacher mentioned that term.

Thirdly, for most students critical thinking was important as well as writing for a specific audience while those elements were only mentioned by a few teachers

Incongruence

Fourthly, most students expected their academic writing to contribute to knowledge; they were concerned about writing an innovative interesting useful and/or valid assignment. In contrast, just one teacher commented on that.

In addition, some faculty comments led to further differences in: following instructions, first drafts, format, content, cohesion and coherence, quoting, and conclusions. Students’ comments led to differences in types of writing, length of the assignments, individual teachers’ background, prior knowledge, writing experience and requirements, and organization.

Expectations construct

Expectations expressed

Teachers Students

Prior learning All teachers PL/PT1/PT2/PR1/PR3/PR4

Directions given PL PL/PT1/PT3/PR1/PR2/PR3

Personal experience PR3 PL/PT1/PR1/PR2/PR4

Information from other people

PL Most students

Inferred logically from other beliefs and expectations

PR2 PR4

Implications and Recommendations

o For departmental chairpersonsHairston (1999) stated that most departmental chairpersons do not believe that an English instructor needs special qualifications to teach writing.

o For teachersMake standards as explicit as possible.Teachers of this department should make an effort to raise students’ awareness of expectations on the teachers’ parts and teach them that they will need to learn how to negotiate writing in each discourse community they will potentially face.

Study limitations• The results could not be that

representative of this setting because there were just eight participant teachers and 24 participant students.

• At least three more teachers from the linguistics area and one more from the teaching area were needed to have a balanced representation of the three areas.

Study limitationsThe assignment used by teachers during the

stimulated recall was not a piece of writing written by any of the participants since teachers had not collected any. It could have affected the level of agreement.

Another limitation was that there was no way to document the data gathered from the focus group identifying individual speakers; consequently, at times when I wanted to corroborate some information given by an individual student in the questionnaire, it was not possible.

For further researchData would be more trustworthy with a

larger sample and matched numbers of participants from each area in the case of teachers.

Further research could be carried out to analyze the relationship between students’ background (educational, economic, social, family factors) and their expectations.

Another possibility for further research can be the analysis of the pieces of writing that teachers selected as good.

THANK YOU!