Single Paper Session 17

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Becoming Writers, Becoming Teachers: Student Teachers’ Literacy Attitudes Across Contexts

Presenting author
Lindgren, Eva , Umeå University, Sweden
Keywords
reading and writing;writing beliefs;writing processes;writing skills
Domain
Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

This study explored how student teachers in their first semester of teacher education conceptualized writing and broader literacy practices. The aim was to identify the attitudes, beliefs, and orientations that future teachers bring to writing before receiving formal instruction in teaching writing. Understanding these early conceptualizations is essential for informing the design of effective writing pedagogy within teacher education programs. The study was grounded in research on writing attitudes and writer identity, particularly work emphasizing the multifaceted nature of writing as an affective, cognitive, and socially situated activity (Ivanič, 2004). This framework guided our investigation of how student teachers position themselves as writers and how these orientations vary across educational contexts. We employed a questionnaire-based design using the Writing Attitude Survey for Teachers and Pupils (WASP), complemented by additional items targeting broader literacy practices. Participants were drawn from multiple universities in Türkiye and Sweden, ensuring diversity not only across countries but also across institutional contexts. Factor analyses were conducted to identify underlying dimensions of writing attitudes and to generate profiles of student teachers’ orientations toward writing. We identified four factors: creativity in writing, digital tools, personal writing and writing for school. There was a cross-country difference regarding creativity and digital tools. These profiles point to differing levels of confidence and investment in writing, highlighting the need for teacher education programs to address variation in incoming literacy attitudes. The study contributes to the writing research domain by offering cross-national evidence on how student teachers conceptualize writing at the outset of their training. These insights can inform curriculum design, support the development of writer identity in teacher education, and contribute to a broader comparative framework for studying writing-related attitudes across educational systems.

Bursts of writing and their relation to text quality in children’s writing

Keywords
acquisition;text composition;writing at school;writing processes
Domain
Cognitive Science

Abstract

Writing acquisition requires the progressive coordination of transcription, linguistic formulation, and monitoring processes. Burst-based analyses offer a fine-grained approach to capture how children temporally organize their writing across learning (e.g., Alves et al., ; Cislaru & Olive, 2018 ; Olive, 2014). Process coordination indeed develops through the progressive automatisation of transcription simultaneously to growing skills in higher-level processes such as planning and revision. In this framework, we examined how the duration and length of production and revision bursts change across 3rd, 5th, and 6th graders who typed narrative and expository texts. We also analyzed the relations between process and product measures. Grade differences appeared in both process and product measures. Younger students produced longer-duration bursts but shorter texts, whereas older students showed shorter bursts and produced richer written products. Burst dynamic was only marginally influenced by text type, suggesting that the temporal organization of transcription and higher-level processes remains relatively stable across genres. Narratives were longer in size and syntactically more complex than expository texts. Orthographic spelling, however, did not follow a linear pattern: 5th graders made the most errors overall, and narratives elicited more errors than expository texts, with this genre difference being strongest among younger writers. Correlations indicated that short duration and larger bursts were associated with higher writers’ productivity and higher syntactic complexity, particularly among younger students, supporting the view that gains in lower-level fluency contribute to more developed written products. Together, these findings show how improvements in fluency facilitate the emergence of more complex and productive writing, illustrating how temporal and textual dimensions of writing evolve during learning to facilitate the emergence of more complex and productive writing.

Effective Revision in Upper-Primary Writing: Strategy Use and Text Quality

Presenting author
Lopez, Paula , University of León, Spain
Keywords
L1;writing at school;writing processes;writing skills
Domain
Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

Producing written texts that meet genre conventions and readers’ expectations is a cognitively demanding activity, particularly for developing writers. Revision plays a central role in improving text quality, as it allows writers to evaluate and modify their texts beyond initial formulation. However, revision effectiveness depends not only on detecting problems, but also on the strategic operations used to address them. Despite its importance, less is known about how specific revision strategies contribute to text quality during the later years of primary education.The present study examines the use of revision strategies in upper-primary students and analyses how different strategies relate to writing quality. Participants were 834 typically developing students from Grades 4 to 6 (10-12 years old). Students completed two tasks: (a) writing a narrative text, and (b) revising a researcher-created narrative text containing six mechanical and six substantive problems. Writing quality was assessed using anchor texts, considering textual structure, lexical diversity, coherence, and overall discourse quality. Revision strategies were identified by analyzing the changes made by students and classifying them into eight categories: edit, add, delete, transform, replace, permute, distribute, and consolidate according to previous studies (e.g., Chanquoy et al., 2009).Results showed that students relied predominantly on editing and permutation strategies, being the most frequently used across grades. A clear developmental trend was observed, with older students employing a greater variety of strategies than younger students. Importantly, strategies involving the addition and reorganisation of information emerged as the strongest predictors of text quality, regardless of grade level.These findings highlight the functional value of specific revision strategies in writing development and suggest that instructional practices should move beyond error correction to explicitly support more substantive forms of revision. Implications for models of writing development and educational practice will be discussed. This work is part of a project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union (ref. PID2021-124011NB-I00).