A socio-cultural view of writing

development

The development of writing abilities, therefore, may be investigated on at least four levels

– the phylogenetic—the emergence and practice of writing at the species level

– the socio-cultural—evolving writing practices at level of human systems of interaction

– the ontogenetic—writing development which impacts the individual and their identity, knowledge, and social relations

– the microgenetic—small incremental changes in individual writing abilities

What do people learn when they learn to write?

Towards what developmental outcomes are you aiming your students?

What are the most effective means of fostering student writing development?

What are the mechanisms of change in writing development?

The problem

From the socio-cultural perspective individual human psychological processes emerge through culturally mediated, historically developing, practical activity (Cole, 1996, p. 108), rather than a natural progression through fixed stages or steps.

When does writing begin?

• After children learn to read?• When they begin to write words

conventionally?

A Different Perspective

• Literacy development begins long before formal schooling

• Children learn about reading and writing simultaneously in their everyday experiences

Learning to write is about cognitive development and social participation

Children engage in writing to explore the characteristics of

writing materialsthe cognitive development

Children write to engage in positive interactions with adults and to form relationships with peersthe social participation

What motivates children to learn to walk and talk? To learn

anything?

By what mechanisms do children learn to walk and talk? Do children learn anything?

Focus on Engagement

What are the Basic Skills of Writing?

• Spelling and punctuation?• Thinking, memory, and language

a(speaking), plus fine motor skills.

Children’s handwriting develops sequentially “through stages of

drawing, scribbling, the making of letterlike forms, moving to well-learned units, invented spelling, and conventional orthography”

(Boscolo, 2008)

Scribbling

Drawing

Random Letters

Invented spelling

Conventional Spelling

It gets complicated from here

Writing, as a higher order psychological process, is always context specific and context dependent i.e., writing activities are contingent, and stand in direct relation to tools that are embedded in particular historical, social, and cultural circumstances.

• As Luria’s studies of twins showed, “culturally determined forms of information processing come to be relied on more and more, the children’s environment will have a greater effect on behavior than does their genotype”

Writing development also happens one learner at a time.

Writing ability involves more than mastery of fixed sets of practices, traits, or “abstract systems of linguistic forms” (Volosinov, 1986) because “the organizing center of any utterance of any experience is not within [the individual] but outside in the social milieu surrounding the individual being” where “signs, language systems, and technologies of communication emerge in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another” (Volosinov, p. 93), i.e., the organizing principles of discourse originate and are centered in ongoing dialogues (Burke, 1941, pp. 110-111).

A Dialogic Model of Writing Development

Three qualities of dialogic interaction

• a change of speaking subjects, the finalization of the utterance (the possibility of responding to it ), and addressivity (pp. 76-78)

Three qualities of dialogic interaction

• a change of speaking subjects, the finalization of the utterance (the possibility of responding to it ), and addressivity (pp. 76-78)

The Mechanism of Change: Fine Tuning

The primary was to fine is to

“keep communicating with them [their children], for by so doing one allows them to learn how to extend the speech they have into new contexts, how to meet the conditions on speech acts, how to maintain topics across turns, how to know what’s worth talking about—how indeed to regulate language use”

Jerome Bruner

• Language acquisition takes place primarily through ongoing chains of communication that are coordinated and synchronized towards appropriate social performance through fine tuning .

Fine Tuning

• Additionally, mothers and teachers, as more mature members of the social and culture milieu, “restrict tasks to the degrees of freedom that children [and students] can handle, and once he shows signs of doing better than that, she raises the level both of her expectancies and of her demands of the child” (Bruner, 1983, p.124).

The asymmetry of teaching and learning

• In order to accomplish this “information has to be given at the right moment, in the right amount, and of the right kind”

Development consists in a large measure of the synchronization of activity between individuals and systems of activity; this synchronization is the essence of dialogic interactions, which involves not only alternation, but also reflection on preceding statements—one’s own statements and that of the other.

Foster a grand dialogic zone

• Social interaction and participation are both the means and the end of writing development.

The National Writing Project

Another kind of theory What and why?

Dialogic Curriculum (Stock, 1995): Pillar 1

Invite and empower students to join me in a broadly defined field of inquiry.

Stock, P. The Dialogic Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 1995.

Many challenges require cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary solutions.

Dialogic Curriculum: Pillar 2

Invite and empower students to join me in a broadly defined field of inquiry.

Engaging diverse groups of learners as whole persons.

Dialogic Curriculum: Pillar 3

Invite and empower students to join me in a broadly defined field of inquiry.

Engaging diverse groups of learners as whole persons.

Fostering a highly interactive classroom culture in which knowledge is truly co-created from among a variety of rich inputs.

Dialogic Curriculum: Pillar 4 Invite and empower students to join me in a

broadly defined field of inquiry. (co-constructing knowledge)

Engaging diverse groups of learners as whole persons. (not just cognitive but social)

Fostering a highly interactive classroom culture in which knowledge is truly co-created from among a variety of rich inputs. (the grand dialogic zone)

Focus on what they can do right now and what they want to do in the future. (relevance)

Thank you for your attention.