1. Learning-to-write argumentative texts about literature
Marleen Kieft & Gert Rijlaarsdam
Graduate School of Teaching and Learning, University of Amsterdam
BACKGROUND
The claim that writing facilitates students’ learning, although widely accepted, has little support from empirical research. A possible explanation for the lack of empirical evidence is that writing-to-learn research has disregarded that students use different writing strategies.
Several studies, both empirical and anecdotal, described different writing strategies:
planning writing strategy
revising writing strategy
METHOD
HYPOTHESES
Students participated in a course ‘writing argumentative texts about literature’ in two versions:
adapted to a planning writing strategy
adapted to a revising writing strategy Literary interpretation skills were measured by pretest and posttest.
The stronger a student tends to use a planning writing strategy, the more beneficial the planning condition will be.
The stronger a student tends to use a revising writing strategy, the more beneficial the revising condition will be.
THE STUDENTS
THE LESSONS
In each lesson students wrote an argumentative text about a short literary story.
planning condition: students generated ideas by filling in a thinking scheme and planned their texts before writing.
revising condition: students generated ideas by free writing and wrote different drafts of their texts.
113 students, 16 years old, 10th grade senior general secondary education and pre-university education.
RESULTS & CONCLUSION
For students with low scores on revising writing strategy, the revising condition was more effective for learning to interpret literature. For other students the planning condition was more effective.
Conclusion: when using writing as a learning tool in the classroom, teachers should assign different writing tasks to students with different writing strategies.