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This introductory chapter delineates the basic premises underlying the inquiry that is currently carried out in a variety of fields on writing as sociocultural practice. Different arguments, terms, and methodologies that address writing as a socioculturally constructed and historically embedded communicative act have been formulated in different fields, including, among others, the genre literacy movement (in its various instantiations), various composition research strands on disciplinary writing, the post-Vygotskian sociocognitive research, the interactional sociolinguistics paradigm. While the chapters of this volume may draw in different ways from these traditions, all are united under the premise that writing should be seen as an inherently dialogic and a socially-situated process of making meanings through texts; written texts are not seen as neutral structures produced by autonomous writers but as units of social action conveying ideological meanings. According to this approach, then, learning to write is not simply a linguistic process but a sociocultural one, which requires that learners appropriate those meanings which are constituted in the communities (and the various contexts) within which learners operate and which they themselves construct. The emphasis of this volume is on school and academic contexts of writing across cultures. Analyses indicate how participants, full and novice members of their discourse learning communities, through their written texts, and composing acts, learn how to produce meanings by drawing upon community-valued resources, how they redefine them or, even, diverge from them. A group of chapters focuses on texts produced by student writers of different age groups, illustrating the ways by which students emerge, through their writing, as social actors, by engaging in dialogic negotiations with teachers, other members of the school community and with other texts (other “voices” in Bakhtin’s terms). A different group of chapters indicates how contexts around writing get co-constructed in various settings across communities and traces the processes that facilitate or hinder students’ appropriation of school and academic literacies.

Texts are an integral part of people’s everyday lives in current literate societies. People deal with texts in a variety of social settings: at home, at work, at school and on the streets. Indeed, children may learn a lot about texts by observing adults using them, by looking at print materials, by being read to or by reading books, newspapers, letters and so on themselves. But are these textual experiences the same for all children? How do different social contexts shape children’s experiences with texts and written language in general? This chapter addresses these questions and provides answers on the basis of data drawn from a specific cultural context, the Brazilian context. It is expected that some groups of Brazilian children (such as middle-class children) would have frequent encounters with a broad range of text genres and, as a result, their generic textual knowledge would be quite rich. In Brazil, however, we find a special group of children — the street children — who do not live with their families, and do not attend school. What do street children know about texts? Where does their knowledge come from? To explore these issues, we devised a study in which Brazilian middle-class and street children were asked to produce and identify different text genres: a story, a letter and a newspaper article. We also talked informally with the children about their exposure to these genres in contexts created at home, at school and on the streets. The results show that streets can be regarded as an important literacy environment to street children just as home and school is to middle-class children, and that children’s generic knowledge is mediated by the social practices around certain types of texts children from different social backgrounds engage with.

The project Genre, positionings, and task ideologies studied primary school students’ task positionings. The basic aim of this chapter is to outline parts of the triadic semiotic framework used in this project and illustrate how this relates to a specific text and its context. This study focuses on second grade students in a Norwegian primary school, where a physical workshop (“verksted”) was used to stimulate writing. The theoretical framework functions as a basis for interpretations of a text written by René (aged 8). Videotaped incidents and the final version of the written text René produced allow for a problematizing of school writing as a context for meaning making. The semiotic and communicative approach advocated draws from the work of Bakhtin (1986), Bühler (1934), Habermas (1984), and Halliday (1978). The main idea is that communicators, while uttering, are positioning themselves by and between the mutual dynamics of expressivity , which is connected to form, referentiality , which is connected to content, and addressivity , which is connected to action. René’s text is interpreted in detail from these different positionings. Thus, the close dynamics of a text’s form, content and use (or more precisely structure, reference and action) becomes the main focus. The text is interpreted in detail from different positionings. The analyses reveal that writing should be seen as a delicate, simultaneous interplay between expressing, referring and acting, as well as between utterance and genre. The student, René, when writing, is seen as searching for ways to mean by positioning himself between these major aspects. Finally, the notion of validity is problematized in order to relate more adequately to the openness of an interpretative approach. It is suggested that to avoid disciplinary onesidedness, research on writing should validate itself by making explicit its own ideological positionings within this triadic, semiotic communicative framework.

The perspective of situated cognition provides a conceptual framework for studying social mediation in activities of text production. The investigation presented here concerns two forms of social mediation: (1) whole-class interactions that prepare the students for drafting and revising their texts; (2) peer interactions occurring when dyads engage in joint revision of their drafts. The data collected in three fifth-grade classrooms include observations of whole-class interactions, recordings of dyadic interactions and classifications of text transformations that students carried out during individual and joint phases of revision. The analyses examine the relationships between qualitative indicators of interaction dynamics and quantitative data on text transformations. The findings show that differences in the whole-class interactions are reflected in the students’ revisions particularly with respect to the degree of rewriting that they undertake, as compared to simple error correction. Although analysis of the dyadic interactions reveals important variations in the dynamics of the exchanges, two general findings emerge. In the large majority of cases, the activity of joint revision leads to a substantial increase in the number of text transformations, beyond those made by each author individually. Even in cases where no new transformations occur, the authors engage actively in interaction about revision (e.g., they propose revisions of the other student’s text, explain revisions made individually to their own text, argue against proposals of the other student, etc.). Implications of the results for future research on writing instruction are discussed.

The aim of this chapter is to delineate a specific perspective to tracing children’s developing understandings of genre writing; this is described as a socially-situated, intertextual process that is mediated by interaction. The discussion focuses on two writing conferences in two 5^th grade Greek classrooms (characterized by a working-class and a middle-class student population, respectively), and attends to the discourse strategies used by participants, teachers and students, for the construction of the thematic and interactional structure of these units. The analysis provides evidence on the discourse processes through which children of different sociocultural groups gain access to literacy learning and considers how the learning contexts created through talk within each writing conference may in fact, limit or facilitate children’s access to learning opportunities. To attain this aim, I proceed as follows: Rather than analyzing conference discourse through a pre-established set of descriptive categories, attention is directed to the way by which the teacher and the children navigate through discourse patterns and varying perspectives to reflect upon narrative texts and construct a “shared” pool of the criteria that make a school narrative text effective (according to communicative standards co-constructed within each classroom community). The questions I raise are the following: How does the teacher cooperate with the children and how do all participants manage to coordinate their varying resources and construct a “shared” perspective toward meaning making? Is this construction possible in all cases and on what factors does it depend? The conferences under investigation point to two distinct styles of knowledge construction, i.e., scaffolded versus collaborative learning. While, on the theoretical front, these two styles seem to be differentiated in rather clear-cut terms, the data reveal a more complicated picture. This chapter illustrates how scaffolding attempts made by the teacher are taken up (or rejected) by the students (and vice versa) and how, through these processes, the teacher and (some of) the students, as active participants in these classroom contexts, negotiate their divergent understandings of the nature and functions of writing.

This chapter draws on recent research on genre literacy to investigate aspects of British children’s school writing, as revealed in the texts produced by children at different age levels and sociocultural groups. Specifically, this chapter explores the way developing writers’ prior knowledge shapes their learning about how to produce written texts in school and become confident writers. The discussion singles out different constituents of the notion of prior knowledge; this is conceptualized in terms of both sociocultural conventions for organizing meanings (or formal schemata) and register choices, as well as knowledge of visual design and text layout. The discussion builds upon the premise that detailed textual analysis of written texts can reveal important information on the types of prior knowledge with which children approach genre writing in the school context, and illustrates some of the difficulties children face in the production of genres which constitute advanced school literacy tasks. Evidence is discussed of how some children use the semiotic meaning-making resources from their out-of-school literacy experiences in ways that can be effective (or ineffective) according to school standards. Furthermore, the discussion takes into account the extent to which this prior knowledge is acknowledged in the British school context, especially in its examination and assessment processes. Finally, the chapter highlights the role curriculum requirements and pedagogical practices play in establishing school writing as little more than sociocultural reproduction of culturally valued genres.

This chapter develops out of a broader study of 250 texts which were produced by 11^th–13^th grade students from both the US and France and were collected over a five-year period. The students were asked to create argumentative texts in which they explored questions about social issues after having read various (full or excerpted pieces of) published texts on these issues. The texts produced by the students are analyzed not as constellations of a stable set of linguistic-textual features, but as the result of a dynamic set of social and rhetorical negotiating moves in the discursive spaces of the school situation. The discussion explores a few of the interesting points of the tension between convention and creativity that have been located in six French students’ texts. Student writers use what M.L. Pratt calls “literate arts” to construct their texts. We can localize these arts in the identification and description of students’ movements of “ reprise-modification ” (François, 1998). This concept is a natural extension of Bakhtin’s dialogics, with each utterance acting as “a link in a chain.” Attention is directed to the identification of those textual movements with which students play with reproduction, reprise of the expected, but also proceed to the invention of the new, and modify the texts they encounter in the act of appropriating school discourse. The writer’s work between the common and the specific is part of the essential nature of school writing. As proposed, this analysis permits a better understanding of how average students’ texts interact with readings and with both cultural and educational commonplaces, working from the already-said and respecting — at least some but rarely all of — the limits of school expectations. This insight into students’ discursive activities subtly changes the way we read students’ work.

This research investigates writing from sources in two educational contexts as it specifically relates to the academic task of constructing a high school research paper. In order to look closer into this issue, the following research questions were asked: (a) What are the synthesizing styles of writers composing from sources in two different cultural contexts and to what extent do they differ cross-culturally? (b) How do the similarities and differences between the two samples reflect the “nature” and “context” of the task? To answer these questions the research papers of thirty English-speaking senior high school students in the U.S. and the research papers of forty Hebrew-speaking senior high school students in Israel were analyzed using a Taxonomy for Research Paper Evaluation, especially developed for this study. To analyze the data, t-tests, size of effect (d) and the sum of absolute differences statistics were conducted. The results show that the composing styles of both samples were low on synthesizing, showing preference for alternative styles of composing from sources. The results also suggest that while the research paper is a universal norm-based product defined by the international academy, the products of the two cultural groups were situated at different points along the approximative systems of research paper writing. In light of this interpretation of the findings, theoretical and pedagogical implications are drawn for mainstream literacy acquisition.

This chapter analyzes language planning processes undertaken by student writers when producing an academic text in English as L2. While the use of first versus second language in L2 writing has been investigated principally in relation to cognitive factors, more recently this language choice has been analyzed as the outcome of institutional and social setting factors, identifiable as part of a writer’s social writing network. This network assists students in their process of acquiring academic discourse. Additional factors that influence this process is the writer’s social motivation and the identity s/he wishes to project. Since acquiring and producing disciplinary language is a means of projecting a number of valued academic images important to the student’s academic network, it is worth inquiring whether there is a correspondence between the writer’s use of disciplinary language, the identity the writer wishes to project, the composition of his/her academic network and writer ’s use of LI vs. L2 during the activity of planning an academic paper in English as L2. Although through the academic network the writer is exposed to academic language and genres, the relationship between the writer’s social network and choice of language, LI vs. L2, during planning has yet to be investigated in detail. This chapter examines this relationship through qualitative analyses of data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews with L2 graduate students. As shown, the academic network is an important factor that shapes language choice, and ultimately, writers’ more versus less successful attempts at producing academic texts in English.

This study analyzes college writing by focusing on texts produced over the course of a single semester by students working under 3 different conditions: independently and in permanent versus changing groups. Focusing on collaborative writing groups (i.e., on groups whose members share full responsibility for the production of a text), this study aims to (1) measure the efficacy of using collaborative writing groups (over other conditions) in a college level composition class and (2) determine how issues related to group cohesion (whether students remain in the same group for an entire semester or for the duration of a writing project) shape writing improvement. The method employed for gathering and analyzing data integrated two social scientific research paradigms: a process-product quantitative design, which measured student writing performance and writing improvement vis-a-vis group cohesion (students’ attitude, retention and absentee rates); and a qualitative design, which described participants’ impressions of the social and interactional processes involved in collaborative writing groups. Participants were approximately 150 college freshmen at a mid-sized, public university, enrolled in 6 sections of a second semester freshman composition course; 2 instructors, and the author. For an entire semester, two sections wrote the majority of their assignments in permanent groups, two sections wrote in groups that changed with each writing task, and two wrote independently. Groups consisted of 4–5 students, heterogeneously mixed. Results show that collaborative writing groups are efficacious; all students significantly improve their writing; retention rates for group classes are significantly higher than individual classes; and students enjoy writing more in (permanent and changing) group classes. From researcher observations, and from analyses of participants’ comments (as noted in the transcripts of tape-recorded sessions) it was observed that permanent groups engaged in more dialogic collaboration, while changing groups used more hierarchical collaboration. Although there are benefits to all groups, students in permanent groups approached and constructed the activity of writing in line with a more process-oriented pedagogy.