Students’ and teachers’ perceptions of genre goals: Self-regulation and performance of students writing a BA essay in literature

Raffaella Negretti & Špela Mežek Stockholm University Stockholm University Chalmers University*

Outline

• The study: aims and design

• What we actually did

• Progress report: theoretical concepts and examples of

analysis

• Some preliminary recommendations about supporting

BA essay writers

Aims of the study

General RQs:

– How do BA students in literature experience writing an essay?

– What aspects of their experience lead to success? (not just grade, but actual completion and defense)

AIM:

To provide insights about how best to address the needs of

BA essay writers, and ultimately to prepare the ground for

the development of a future pedagogical intervention that is

supported by research.

Previous research and theory

• Students who learn to self-regulate towards concrete,

achievable writing goals obtain higher levels of writing

performance, i.e. text quality

(Rogers & Graham, 2008; Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara & Harris, 2012; Graham & Perin, 2007)

• Writing instruction needs to be connected to the needs and

genres that students are required to produce in context

(Johnson, 2002; Johns, 2008; Perin, 2011, 2013)

• Writing for academic purposes = developing genre knowledge

contextual, disciplinary, genre-oriented and communicative

(e.g. Hyland, 2007; Tardy, 2009)

What do we know about the strategies and goals adopted by

university writers? How do they develop the ability to meet these

situated ”genre” expectations?

Design:

What we did and what we are doing

- Elicit the experiences of 3 BA literature essay writers (elicited through 3 interviews for each student)

- Elicit the examiners’ evaluation (elicited through an post-defense interview)

Analysis:

- Longitudinal analysis of students’ task perceptions and goals,

metacognitive genre awareness, metacognitive monitoring

and self-regulation

- Comparison of students’ goals and the ’contextualized’ genre

expectations (i.e. the examiners’ views)

- Analysis of development through a participatory appropriation

perspective (Rogoff, 1990, 2008)

Background and data analysis

How do BA essay writers develop in each of these aspects?

Negretti (2012): analysis of task perceptions, metacognitive awareness, regulation and metacognitive monitoring (also Negretti & Kuteeva, 2011; Linares, 2015).

• How students perceive the task affects their ability to self-regulate during writing;

• Qualitative changes in task perceptions and metacognitive awareness affect self-regulation: conditional awareness most difficult to develop;

• Task perceptions become goals for self-regulation and criteria for accurate monitoring of performance (Negretti, forthcoming).

• Participatory appropriation (Rogoff, 1990, 2008):

• From Vygotsky’s concept of internalization

• Cognitive development in the individual

• Participatory experience as source of change

• Communication as a source of development

(Appropriation) is the change resulting from a person’s own participation in an

activity, not on his/her internalization of some external event or technique.

• Useful to capture the students’ experience as an instance of

development:

– An ongoing event towards socially relevant goals

– An experience of communication and participation with a

supervisor

Development as

participatory appropriation

Examples

• What the task is (and what it entails in practical terms)

• What the task requires: rhetoric and genre (goals to achieve)

so I am not sure if I am going to go there at all, you

know, I mean, it’s a BA essay and it has certain

limitations and I might not be smart enough to do

that... do I want to touch upon the historical aspects of

it, in one, and if I do it in one would I want to do it in all

three? So, there are questions of how consistent I have

to be, and what I have to be to make not just an

individual analysis work but all three make sense.

The initial goal was to write an

essay but I mostly learned

about the process of writing,

how to express an idea through a

thesis, through argument, and

how to present it

Examples

Interview 3:

Q: … do you think with the end product that you have you’ve done what you set out to do?

Um, yea, I think it’s better than I thought it would be.

Q: Mhm. Why did you think it’s better?

‘Cause. I don’t know, um. Um. I’m not sure I, I (don’t) think it’s that good but um. I thought it would be worse. … Kind of because I (feel) like the BA essay is kind of a like you’re pretending to write a real essay, ‘cause it’s like smaller and no one’s reading it really except like yourself. But, um, it felt like it was like, it feels like like it’s an actual essay.

Participatory appropriation: Examples

Interview 1:

So, I haven’t talked about this with supervisor yet, because … I am going to work on it a little bit more and then get feedback from her, in regard to questions like ‘am I in the right direction’, you know

Q: What do you think needs more work, what aspects of your text?

It’s difficult to say I think I’ll need to talk to my supervisor; I know I am not off the track completely; I am not going in the wrong direction, but it could be that I need to tweak some things, so I’m thinking she might tell me ‘I have read this passage you wrote’…

Interview 3:

Q: what was your initial goal?

I sort of had an area I was interested in, but it was mostly when talking to my supervisor, she directed me towards an area … So I have learned a bit about the area, about allegory etc., and I opened my eyes to Author as a writer, but I mostly learned about the process of writing, how to express an idea through a thesis, through argument, and how to present it.

Participatory appropriation: Examples

Interview 3:

I don’t think that looking at the criteria would have helped me in the beginning, and it didn’t really because it was a little bit too abstract, …

it’s a bigger task, it’s really difficult to envision where you are going to end up uh.. so I think the experience of writing an essay is the experience of writing an essay in a way, it’s difficult to know what’s around the corner, or in a way if you go from draft to draft, every draft I produce is the best one yet and is the best one I am capable of producing, and then I get the feedback from my supervisor and it becomes obvious that these things are not working very well…

so what I’m saying is that I get to the next level, and the next draft and the next draft, and you look back and well.. this stuff was easy right, and the stuff becomes obvious, and it prepares you to work more independently… but in the beginning, you really know very little, and you don’t know what you don’t know, right?

Conclusions, suggestions

• Also advanced L2 BA writers need scaffolding: new genre with new expectations, which need to be translated into metacognitive awareness of how to adapt to the task conditions, how to self-regulate towards genre-relevant goals, and how to evaluate one’s progress in a way that reflect the quality criteria of the genre;

• Importance of scaffolding for development: the communication with the supervisor provides a participatory experience in which students develop and appropriate ways of thinking (areas above);

• The interviews also helped:

• think aloud (conceptualize the text);

• self-regulate: become aware of strategies, goals, and decide what to do next;

• metacognitive monitoring: assess the quality and effectiveness of one’s thinking, become aware of criteria for evaluation.

Thank you! Please send feedback and questions to:

negretti@chalmers.se

spela.mezek@english.su.se

References

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Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99, 445–476.

Hyland, K. (2007). Genre pedagogy: Language, literacy and L2 writing instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 148-164.

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Johnson, E. B. (2002). Contextual teaching and learning: What it is and why it’s here to stay. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Perin, D. (2011). Facilitating student learning through contextualization: A review of the evidence. Community College Review, 39, 268-295.

Perin, D. (2013). Best practices in teaching writing for college and career readiness. In S. Graham, C. A. MacArthur & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Best practices in writing instruction (pp. 48-72). New Youk, NY: The Guilford Press

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Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford University Press.

Rogoff, B. (2008). Observing sociocultural activity on three planes: Participatory appropriation, guided participation, and apprenticeship. In Pedagogy and practice: Culture and identities, 58-74.

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