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See what we're saying: An interpretive approach to teaching writing
Abstract
Current theory, research, and pedagogy in the teaching of writing as a process assume a primarily cognitivist approach to the development of competency in organizing material, structuring sentences, paragraphs and whole essays, editing and revising. Non-cognitive influences on writing are acknowledged, if at all, during the pre-writing or invention stage of the writing process. Reading and interpreting of texts in process is largely ignored, despite access to significant bodies of theoretical and research-based literature on reader response and psychoanalytic interpretation. Furthermore, current research shows that student writers do little if any revising of their texts. In contrast, this study with a Basic Writing class of 18 students at the University of Massachusetts documents a pedagogical approach which applies psychoanalytic interpretation, literary critical theory and reader response theory as students read and respond to their own as well as their peers' emerging texts. Peer and instructor response sheets, self-response sheets, and drafts of essays in progress for the class as a whole, plus taped interviews with eight case-study students are coded and analyzed to show that these student writers demonstrate varying degrees of facility in making a writer-to-reader shift as they become interactive readers of their own texts. The data also shows that these students acknowledge the influence of nonconscious activity in their writing, and use anomalies of form as traces of underlying material which they draw on for substantial revision.
Subject Area
Language arts
Recommended Citation
Mullin, Anne Johnson, "See what we're saying: An interpretive approach to teaching writing" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9120922.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9120922