Single Paper Session 31

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A Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies on Secondary Writing Instruction from 1968-2023

Keywords
meta-analysis;pedagogy and instruction;writing at school;writing instruction
Domain
Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper examines fifty five years of qualitative research in English on teaching writing in secondary (6–12) classrooms to address a critical gap in the field. Although scholarship on writing instruction has expanded across disciplinary, methodological, and geographical boundaries, the last review (Hillocks, 2008) focused specifically on qualitative studies of secondary writing and was not empirically grounded. The aim of this study is to provide a systematic, empirical synthesis of qualitative research on secondary writing instruction published between 1968 and 2023, offering historical and contemporary insights into how writing is taught, supported, and conceptualized in classroom contexts across the globe.Guided by a sociocultural theoretical framework, we investigate how writing instruction is shaped through social relationships, disciplinary expectations, and the contexts in which literacy practices occur (Bazerman, 2000; Brandt, 2001; Early, 2010). From this perspective, writing is contextual, purpose-driven, and developed through sustained practice and guided participation (Bazerman & Bonini, 2009). We conducted a systematic review in collaboration with content specialists and a research librarian. Using a three-part search strategy within a comprehensive academic database, we generated a keyword search aligned with our research questions and thereby identified studies published from 1968–2023. We developed screening criteria, established interrater reliability procedures, and completed three iterative rounds of analysis to examine theoretical orientations, methodological approaches, data collection practices, and reported findings. Through this process we reduced our initial result set from 1,471 publications by 86% to just 201 journal articles, dissertations, ERIC documents, etc.Our findings highlight major shifts in the theoretical and methodological landscape of secondary writing research, recurrent themes in effective writing instruction, and trends in how classroom writing has been conceptualized over time. The review also identifies persistent methodological challenges, including issues of discoverability, keywording, and documentation of research contexts. This paper contributes to the field by offering a descriptive overview of best practices in both the study and teaching of secondary writing and by outlining recommendations for conducting systematic reviews in writing research, particularly when constructing historical corpora.

Gender differences in self-reported audience awareness in middle schoolers’ argumentative writing

Keywords
developmental aspects of writing ability;proficiency;social and cultural aspects of writing;writing processes
Domain
Motivational, Social and Affective Processes

Abstract

Purpose:Girls consistently outperform boys on writing assessments (e.g. Reilly et al. 2019), yet the sources of these differences are not fully understood. One potential contributor is audience awareness during writing, a construct closely related to perspective-taking and theory of mind, where gender differences have been documented (e.g. Van der Graaff et al. 2014). However, few studies have examined students’ own judgements of audience awareness during the writing process. This study investigated gender differences in self-reported audience awareness among middle school students writing argumentative texts.Method:Participants were 137 sixth- and seventh-grade students (69 girls, 68 boys) in Norway. Students read a short dilemma involving a sustainability issue relevant to their age group and were asked to write an argumentative text advising the protagonist on what stance to take. Immediately after writing, students completed an online questionnaire assessing their thoughts about the audience at different stages during the writing process, as well as specific dimensions of audience awareness.Results:Fifty-five percent of girls, compared to 29% of boys, reported thinking about the audience often or very often while writing. In contrast, 49% of boys reported that they did so rarely, never, or did not know, compared to 22% of girls. These gender differences were consistent across pre-planning, drafting, and revision phases. When specific dimensions of audience awareness were examined, boys more often than girls reported focusing on making the language easy to understand for the audience. Conversely, more than twice as many girls as boys reported considering whether the content and arguments were appropriate for their audience.Conclusion:Substantial gender differences in self-reported audience awareness suggest that this construct may potentially be a meaningful factor in explaining gender gaps in writing performance. The findings also point to the importance of differentiating between surface-level (e.g. linguistic) and content-related audience awareness when designing writing interventions.References: Reilly, D., Neumann, D. L., & Andrews, G. (2019). American Psychologist, 74(4), 445. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000356 Van der Graaff et al. (2014). Developmental psychology, 50(3), 881. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034325

On-line spelling revision in elementary and middle school children: a focus on revision time

Keywords
developmental aspects of writing ability;errors and error correction;experimental approaches;writing processes
Domain
Cognitive Science

Abstract

This research focuses on on-line detection and correction of lexical and grammatical spelling errors inserted in written sentences performed by primary and secondary school students. The objective was to determine, from temporal measures and revision scores, which errors produced the biggest difficulties for participants and, from a developmental point of view, how the revision process evolved with grade level. This study was based on the postulate that time taken for revising should be a good indicator of the difficulty encountered by participants to detect and to correct spelling errors. Thus, not only detected and revised errors were considered, but also the time needed by students to revise each sentence and the nature of the correction. Several types of surface spelling errors were introduced in 24 experimental sentences: (1) 10 sentences each containing a lexical error (consistent vs. inconsistent word, derivable finale letter vs. non derivable, contextual graphemes); (2) 14 sentences each containing a grammatical error (number and gender agreement errors on verbs, adjectives, nouns). There were equally 10 training and distractive (without error) sentences. The experiment took place online. We measured the number of errors detected, the number of errors detected and correctly (vs. incorrectly) and the number of non-corrected errors. We also measured the time taken by the participants to detect and correct the different types of errors. In a first analysis (e.g., Chanquoy, 2023, 2024), we only analyzed the various possible corrections (as mentioned above) based on the nature of the errors presented.In this second part, we want to compare the nature of correctly corrected errors with the time taken to make these corrections. Here only sentences whose errors have been both detected and correctly corrected are considered. Results showed that participants, regardless of their grades, took significantly less time to correct lexical than grammatical errors. There was an expected effect of school level: older children detected and corrected more rapidly than younger ones. As large inter-error and inter-individual differences had been highlighted, several analyses involving revising times and nature of revised errors are currently in progress.