What students say they do when they are writing Progetto Poseidon – Apprendimenti di base Carmen Dell’Ascenza Anna Rosa Guerriero

Objectives of the survey This survey, based on a meaningful data collection, aims at analysing attitudes, procedures and strategies 3rd, 4th and 5th year Students of Secondary school employ to deal with tasks of DOCUMENT BASED WRITING (expected final writing competency) In order to: Detect students writing strategies Detect possible didactic interventions Plan specific training actions Addressed to the teachers involved

Document based writing For their writing task, Students are provided with selected, assembled documents of limited length: excerpts from newspapers, essays, literary excerpts as well as a variety of maps, including geographical maps, graphs, graphics, images, and so forth Document based writing brings into play procedural skills such as: Reading, understanding and using documents “Playing with ideas” leading to the elaboration of different texts for different purposes

Why writing texts based on a dossier of documents? Because writing texts produced in response to processed input promotes cognitive elaboration of ideas “ Only the higher levels of these activities can enable a learner to meet the requirements of university studies or professional training ” CEFR: 95

Type A PROFILE FEATURES 1 Random: extemporaneousness in the methodology of performance The dossier is basically a source of ideas, not a documentary source; self expressive subjective writing is prevailing, processing cognitive strategies are missing. 1. The descriptions provides types which are placed at the opposite ends of an ideal continuum. In real performances we look for the dominant features; features of different profiles may co-occur but in different ratios and distribution

Type B PROFILE FEATURES Strategic: strategy awareness aiming at purposes He can cope with the writing task as it were a problem solving activity, he can use procedural strategies in a flexible way in order to evaluate, work out again (revise) and integrate dossier materials, he can deliberately handle textual typologies with a view to communicative aims.

Type C PROFILE FEATURES Field dependent: methodical task performance based on the acquired procedures He proves to be systematic in handling separate steps of the analytic handling of dossier data, he can evaluate the final product as a result of procedural correctness, he can apply models and textual conceptual schemata with limited strategic flexibility.

Type D PROFILE FEATURES Synthetic: procedural economy He can select dossier materials according to a personal filter, he is product oriented and not process centred, he can work out an informative dense text, yet not always functional from the communicative point of view.