Teachers' conceptions of second language writing instruction: Five case studies

JOURNAL

OF SECOND

LANGUAGE

WRITING,

4

(2), 87-l 11 (1995)

Teachem’ Conceptions of Second Language Writing Instruction: Five Case Studies LING

%-II

ALISTERCUMMING Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

We interviewed five experienced instructors weekly obout their ESL writing classes in selected courses over 2 years at o Conodion university, oiming to document the qualities of their thinking obout their pedogogicol practices OS well OS the ways in which three of the teachers’ thinking accommodated o specific instructional innovation. Anolyses of 48 tope-recorded interviews showed each instructor’s conceptions to be highly consistent in their individual, expressed views about their teaching practices but olso individuolly grounded in o specific set of personal beliefs about teaching ESL writing. The instructors using the pedogogicol innovotion focused much of their ottention initially on composing processes (seemingly in response to the innovation). This focus then declined morkedly over time OS they incorporated the innovation into their existing beliefs obout teaching ESL writing. These findings suggest thot curricular changes in second longuoge writing necessarily need to be situoted in reference to the individuol qualities of teachers’ pedogogicol conceptions OS well OS long-term views on the occommodotion of pedogogicol change.

Research on teachers’ thinking has recently emphasized the intentional qualities of pedagogical actions--describing teachers’ implicit, organized representational systems that guide and justify their overt teaching behaviors. These descriptions have been formulated in reference to a range of interrelated theoretical frameworks (Clark, 1986; Clark & Peterson, 1986; Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992). Some frameworks portray teachers through models derived from cognitive or organizational psychology, for example, as decision makers who “make This article reports one part of a three-year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Grant 410-91-0722 to Alister Cumming as well as OISE Graduate Assistantships to Ling Shi. We thank the participating teachers for their sincere willingness to share their personal views and experiences, Sue Elgie for helpful advice on data analyses, JSLW reviewers and Merrill Swain for helpful comments on an earlier draft, as well as Michael Lessard-Clouston, Jiang Li, Susanna Lo, Kara Moscoe, Abdolmehdi Riazi, Hiroko Saito, and Christina Wu who assisted in pilot studies, data collection, or analyses. Aspects of this study were presented on March 10, 1994 at the Annual TESOL Convention in Baltimore, MD and on October 7, 1994 at the Second Language Research Forum in Montreal, Canada. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Alister Gumming, Modem Language Centre, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S lV6.

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judgments and carry out decisions in an uncertain, complex environment” (Shavelson & Stem, 1981, p. 456), as information processors who “perceive, select and interpret bits of reality on the grounds of . . . ideas and naive models” (Lowych, 1986, p. 183), or as problem solvers who persistently engage in “problem finding and problem formation as well as problem solving” (Clark & Yinger, 1977, p. 285). Other frameworks base themselves on phenomenologitally oriented, practice-generated inquiry that describes teachers’ personal pructical knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 1987), knowledge structures (Calderhead, 1987), or personal constructs (Ben-Peretz, 1984)-following John Dewey’s (1933) declaration of the aims and processes of education as “reflective thinking” and “intelligent action” (p. 17). This article pursues these lines of inquiry within the domain of writing instruction in a second language. Although several illuminating studies have recently appeared on teachers’ beliefs about mother-tongue literacy instruction (e.g., for reading, see Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, & Lloyd, 1991; Zancanella, 1991; for writing, see Freedman, 1987; Langer & Applebee, 1987), empirical studies in second language education are few in number (e.g., Woods, 1993) and scarcely exist in direct reference to second language writing (apart from Cumming, 1993; Wirier, 1992). This situation limits the extent to which findings from other curricular domains may currently be applied to second language writing instruction, except in very general terms. As Freeman and Richards (1993) observe: “To date there has been virtually no organized examination of the conceptions of teaching which undergird the field of second language instruction” (p. 193). Moreover, educators such as Shulman (1986) have proposed that skilled teachers possess specific “subject matter knowledge,” “pedagogical knowledge” for teaching certain subject matter, and “curriculum knowledge” for teaching a program of “particular subjects and topics at a given level” (pp. 9-10). These views imply that inquiry is needed in particular curriculum areas, such as second language writing, to determine the unique characteristics of teachers’ domain-specific knowledge. Two distinctions are important to observe in regard to research on teacher thinking in general and the scope of the present study in particular. One distinction concerns the purposes of such inquiry. Much research on teacher thinking seeks findings relevant to initial teacher education (e.g., Freeman & Richards, 1993; Richards & Nunan, 1990, for second language education). A principle guiding such inquiry is that novice or developing teachers may benefit from acquiring knowledge that more experienced, skilled teachers possess. The focus of the present inquiry, however, is aligned with other studies that have aimed to describe the qualities of teachers’ thinking with a view to understanding curriculum practices and change. For example, various studies have either documented teachers’ progressive adoption of changes in their routine curriculum practices-for instance, in mathematics (e.g., Hunsaker & Johnson, 1992), mother-tongue writing (e.g., Bratcher & Stroble, 1994), or classroom uses of computers (e.g., Cumming, 1988)-or teachers’ resistance to externally

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imposed curriculum innovations in areas such as writing across the curriculum (e.g., Swansen-Owens, 1986) or portfolio assessment (e.g., Roemer, 1991). A principle guiding this latter inquiry (as well as this article) is that accounts of teachers’ implicit beliefs may help to understand better how practicing teachers conceptualize their pedagogical actions and consequently how curriculum change might appropriately be facilitated (cf. Fullan, 1982). No efforts were made in this study to determine what novice teachers of second language should know, nor are claims made here about the kinds of beliefs that may be desirable to foster generally in second language writing instructors. The second distinction concerns the perspective taken in obtaining data on teacher thinking. Existing research on teacher thinking has tended to consider one of three discrete phases of teaching activity: (a) preactive planning in preparation for teaching lessons, which tends to find teachers focusing on the content and types of learning activities (e.g., Clark & Yinger, 1977); (b) interactive teaching, which tends to find teachers making decisions about instances when activities are disrupted or have not gone as intended (e.g., Shavelson & Stem, 1981); or (c) postinteractive reji’ection after teaching is completed, which tends to find teachers rationalizing their practical knowledge and considering future plans (e.g., Lowych, 1986). We selected the latter situation to collect data because of our interest in understanding how second language writing instructors conceptualize their beliefs about teaching English as a second language (ESL) composition. We wanted to describe the qualities of these conceptualizations, assess their stability over time, and see whether they might be amenable to developmental change in response to a specific instructional innovation. Specifically, the present research aimed: 1.

2.

3.

To document several experienced ESL writing instructors’ postinteractive reflections on their teaching, identifying which factors the instructors tended to take into account as well as the relative emphasis they placed on each factor; To identify individual instructors’ beliefs about ESL writing instruction, investigating how each instructor personally conceptualized his or her classroom behavior; and To trace how some of these instructors accommodated a specific pedagogical innovation over a significant period of time, comparing this accommodation to that of instructors not using the specific innovation. CONTEXT

This research was part of a larger project on teaching and learning second language composition. A central goal of the larger study was to help ESL students model their thinking while composing on behaviors found in previous research (e.g., Cumming, 1989, 1990) to be characteristic of expert writers composing

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in a second language. As Cumming (1995) describes, we focused on five particular behaviors, formulated as questions (or thinking prompts) for students to guide themselves while they were writing, following Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1987) idea of procedural facilitation. As the term procedural facilitation suggests, it aims to enhance the processes of composing by prompting students to attend, while they write, to key aspects of their thinking or their texts as they are producing them. In principle, this approach represents an innovation from conventional ways of responding to students’ writing, such as error correction or teacher conferencing, which occur after writing is completed and which rely on external input rather than learners’ control over their own thinking processes. The thinking prompts we developed were for ESL students (a) to set and monitor goals to accommodate readers of their writing, (b) to choose appropriate words or phrases, (c) to compare equivalent expressions in first and second languages, (d) to use relevant grammar rules, and (e) to assess the fit (or coherence) between parts of a text (see Appendix A). Rather than focusing this research solely on students’ behavior, however, we also wished to understand the viability of this approach to procedural facilitation for ESL writing curricula by tracing how several experienced ESL writing instructors conceptualized this pedagogical innovation and by comparing these conceptualizations to those of other, similar ESL writing instructors not utilizing this innovation. To this end, we worked with several teachers in one university’s intensive ESL program over a period of 3 years, paying each teacher a stipend to be observed in their usual classes once per week in certain courses, to be interviewed afterwards, and (in the case of three teachers) to make use of the five thinking prompts in certain classes as they saw fit. Our research aimed to be naturalistic, in Guba and Lincoln’s (1981) sense of observing educational practices as they spontaneously occurred in natural contexts. But our study also followed Newman, Grifftn, and Cole’s (1989) Vygotsky-inspired principle that the complexities of educational practices can best be understood by introducing a simple pedagogical change into an educational context and then observing its ongoing effects. This pedagogical change was, however, more of a minor innovation in teaching and learning techniques than a largescale curriculum change, such as described by Pritchard and Marshall (1994). Instructors volunteered to participate in the research in response to a solicitation letter circulated through their program administrator, in which we called for instructors with extensive experience teaching ESL writing, informing people generally about the purposes of the study. Table 1 outlines the backgrounds of the instructors who volunteered, as well as the periods of time when we collected interview data in their 6-week ESL courses. Pseudonyms beginning with A refer to two instructors-identified as Anne and Angel-who participated only in the pilot phases of the research. Pseudonyms beginning with E refer to three instructors-identified as Elizabeth, Esther, and Elaine-who implemented the “experimental” innovation of thinking prompts in their classes. Pseudonyms beginning with C refer to two instructors-identified as Cathy and

1993

Charles Elizabeth Esther

Cathy

(Data III)

July-August

Cathy

Charles Elizabeth Esther

1993

(Data II)

March-April

Cathy Charles Elizabeth Elaine

1992

October-December (Data I)

Angel

Elizabeth Esther

1992

(Pilot study)

January-April

Anne Angel Elizabeth

October-December (Pilot study)

1991

Teacher

Time

12 7 5

6

7

4 13

Years Teaching Writing

25 7

10

20 18

Years Teaching ESL/EFL

TABLE 1 Outline of Interview

TESOL

M.A. M.A.

M.A.

FESL M.A. M.A.

Teacher Education

Data

4 4 4 4

4 4 4 4

4 4 4 4

5 9 4

9 9 5

No. of Interviews

Control Control Experimental Experimental

Control Control Experimental Experimental

Control Control Experimental Experimental

After prompts were introduced

Before prompts were introduced

Investigation Variable

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Charles-who acted as “control” teachers, teaching their ESL writing courses as they normally would, without any uses of the thinking prompts. This article focuses on data collected with five instructors in the 2nd and 3rd years of the study (i.e., only Elizabeth, Esther, Elaine, Cathy, and Charles) after preliminary development of our procedures and pilot trials in the 1st year of the research (documented in Cumming, 1993). Although we had planned to work with just four instructors over the 2-year period, Esther did not teach one term when we were collecting data, during which time she was replaced by Elaine. These five instructors all had extensive experience teaching ESL writing, had worked in the same university program for much of their careers, and either possessed or were completing a relevant master’s degree from the same institution (except for Elaine, whose highest teacher education was a TESL certificate). An initial set of interviews was held with Elizabeth and Esther during the period in which they were oriented to the five thinking prompts, prior to our interviews with Cathy and Charles, allowing us to document their progressive adoption and use of the pedagogical innovation. The orientation involved each teacher receiving a written rationale for the innovation (the full text of Cumming, 1995) to read, a demonstration by the second author of the use of the thinking prompts in each of their ESL writing classes (composing a full text in front of the students while thinking aloud), and several follow-up discussions in person. The classes they taught all consisted of young to middle-aged adult students from various parts of the world with diverse language, cultural, and educational backgrounds (but included a majority of students from Japan, Taiwan, and South America). METHODOLOGY We interviewed each instructor individually for durations of 15 to 40 minutes at weekly intervals, in each instance shortly (on the same day) after observing one of their classes. The interviews used nondirective, open-ended questioning, encouraging the instructors to reconstruct their classroom experiences as well as to express their thoughts and beliefs freely, following a standard schedule of questions (and specific probes on key topics) developed and refined during our pilot research in the 1st year of the project. For the present analysis, a total of 48 interviews were audiotaped, held in sequences of 4 consecutive weeks in the middle of 6-week teaching terms. Our interviews neglected the first and final weeks of each course because our pilot study showed the instructors focused, at these times, on various logistical issues (e.g., diagnostic tasks, orientation sessions, final examinations) that differed substantively from their usual teaching practices. We expected the interviews to reveal the instructors’ thinking in terms of their descriptions of their practices, articulated beliefs, justifications of their pedagogical actions, and self-evaluations of their success. The first part of the interview schedule asked each instructor to describe the aspects of writing on which they had focused in the class observed earlier (with probes in regard to language use, content, ideas, rhetorical organization, and

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writing processes-if the teacher did not mention these topics spontaneously). The second part of the interview asked each instructor to explain how the class had been organized (with probes in regard to the configurations of people, relations of writing to other language skills, processes of writing emphasized, types of writing tasks, student evaluation, and pedagogical materials used). The third part of the interview asked each instructor to evaluate their students’ performance in the class, particularly any notable achievements or problems. The fourth part of the interview asked each instructor to judge whether the class had been successful and why. Although Esther and Elizabeth were questioned about their uses of the thinking prompts during the pilot phase of the study, no explicit mention was made of this topic during the interviews analyzed here (so as to produce data in this phase comparable to that of the other two instructors, Charles and Cathy). We developed a coding scheme (see Appendix B) to analyze the interview data, preparing and refining coding categories initially during the pilot phase of the research. This procedure followed the manner described by Richardson et al. (1991) as well as other examples of grounded, constant-comparative analyses (see Erickson, 1986), identifying and confirming qualitative factors that the instructors said they were concerned with as they reflected on their teaching practices. Once we were satisfied that the coding scheme accounted satisfactorily for the type of data we were obtaining, we randomly selected transcripts from 16 different pilot interviews, segmented them according to Crookes’ (1990) definition of utterance, then established intercoder reliability of 82% agreement among two independent coders using the coding scheme in Appendix B. A single researcher (the first author) then abstracted and coded the remaining data directly from audiotapes. We tallied the coded results on the full set of interviews for the major category levels in our coding scheme and inspected data on each instructor qualitatively to establish predominant themes appearing in their individual interviews. To verify our interpretations of the data, we later asked each of the participating instructors to read and comment on a copy of this article, incorporating refinements they proposed. Appendix C provides examples from our pilot study for each category of utterance coded according to the scheme displayed in Appendix B. At the broadest level, the coding scheme distinguishes the instructors’ utterances that are primarily descriptive (i.e., objective accounts of previous classroom events) from those that are mainly perceptive (i.e., personal statements of belief or interpretation). The topical content of these perception and description statements was further distinguished according to six other categories and additional subcategories: (a) textbook-utterances commenting on the use of textbooks; (b) focus-utterances describing the intended focus of classroom activities on either language use, rhetorical organization, ideas and content, or composing processes; (c) activity--utterances describing the social organization of classroom participants in terms of individual work, pair work, group work, or whole class work; (d) writing tusks--utterances describing writing tasks or other com-

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posing activities in terms of analytic tasks, summary tasks, argumentative tasks, and so forth; (e) evaluation-utterances commenting on student assessment practices, such as marks, correction of errors, peer feedback, or teacher-student conferences; (f) and comments on other related skills-utterances expressing the relations of writing to other skills such as speaking, reading, or listening.

FINDINGS Perceptions Versus Descriptions The instructors’ statements tended, as shown in Table 2, to divide almost evenly between utterances related to their perceptions about teaching and learning ESL writing as compared to descriptions of activities that had occurred previously in their ESL writing classes. For each of the three sets of data collected, about half of the utterances coded from the interviews fell into either of these two categories, with slightly more (55% on average) being statements of perception. This finding confirms Lowych’s (1986) conclusion that during postinteractive reflection, teachers usually provide descriptive reports on their teaching practices as well as statements on their explicit thinking about their pedagogical beliefs. Focus on Aspects of Second Language Writing The instructors’ interviews emphasized certain topics more than others. Specifically, as Table 3 shows, all the teachers tended to comment mostly on the focus category, nearly half (M = 47%) of their utterances dealing with either language use, rhetorical organization, ideas and content, or composing processes. This finding appears to support Shulman’s (1986) proposal that pedagogical knowledge about specific subject matter is a key concern of practicing teachers, suggesting moreover that these topics may form the core conceptual substance of such pedagogical knowledge in the domain of second language writing. The other categories of our coding scheme accounted, on average, for only small proportions of the interview data overall, with some variation from instructor to instructor: about 15% for comments on textbooks, about 8% for comments on classroom activities, just 2% for discussion of writing tasks, about 9% for comments on student evaluation, and about 7% for comments relating writing to other language skills.

Percentage

TABLE 2 of Perception Utterances in Three Data Sets

of Five Teachers

Data Set

Cathv

Charles

Elizabeth

Esther

Elaine

M

I II Ill

42.86 67.48 53.23

45.85 67.86 33.33

66.52 71.06 14.30

44.69 39.10

53.99 -

55.02

95

Teachers’ Conceptions

Percentage

TABLE 3 of Six Categories for Five Teachers Over Three Periods of Data Collection

Category Textbook

Focus

Activity

Writing Tasks

Evaluation

Other Related Skills

Data Set I II Ill I II Ill I II Ill I II Ill I II Ill I II Ill

Cathy 4.08 9.44 34.68 41.84 49.30 37.90 8.93 6.64 10.48 1.53 0.70 0.00 5.10 0.35 10.48 1.02 11.89 2.42

Charles

Elizabeth

10.11 28.57 19.70 49.82 33.93 43.94 9.39 0.00 11.11 3.61 0.00 7.07 8.30 8.93 13.64 9.03 10.71 9.09

7.04 5.39 13.75 40.09 44.96 35.35 4.31 6.67 9.82 0.72 0.85 0.16 10.92 9.65 0.98 3.59 3.40 3.76

Esther

8.75 25.00 68.75 60.90 9.69 12.82 2.19 0.64 14.38 14.10 7.81 11.54

Elaine

M

8.85 -

14.61

51.04 -

46.49

9.03 -

8.25

7.12 -

2.05

7.47 -

8.69

4.86 -

6.59

-

Individual Profiles Given these results, the category of focus appeared to be the only category of utterance to which the instructors gave sufficient attention in their interviews. to warrant quantitative, comparative analyses between individuals. Figure 1 shows tallies, averaged across the full set of interviews, for each instructor’s statements concerning the focus subcategories of language use, organization, content and ideas, and composing processes. On the one hand, each of the instructors mentioned these topics frequently, suggesting that they may form a key basis of pedagogical knowledge in this curriculum domain. On the other hand, these results show a markedly different profile for each instructor, indicating a tendency for each person to have emphasized different, unique aspects of second language writing in their reflective statements about their teaching. Cathy focused her comments primarily on rhetorical organization and secondarily on language use. Charles focused his comments primarily on language use and secondarily on rhetorical organization. Elizabeth focused most of her comments almost equally on language use and rhetorical organization. Esther focused her comments largely on composing processes but also on rhetorical organization. Elaine focused her comments largely on language use but also on composing processes. Accommodation of Innovation The results in Figure 1 also indicate that the three instructors vation of thinking prompts tended to emphasize composing

using the innoprocesses more

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70 *language

60

+

50

organ

iration

-+-composing

40

*content

30 20 10 0

Figure 1. Interview

Averuge

Percentage

of Utterances

Related to Four

Aspects

of Writing

in All

Data

extensively in their interviews than did the instructors who were not using the innovation. To inspect the nature of this tendency (and to verify preliminary findings from pilot studies, reported in Cumming, 1993), Figure 2 shows the extent to which Elizabeth, Esther, and Elaine mentioned the topic of composing processes during their successive interviews over the period of data collection. Each of these three teachers discussed composing processes extensively over an initial period of several weeks, shortly after they began using the thinking prompts in their classes. Then, this interest gradually declined, particularly after about 7 weeks (except for Elaine, whose participation in the research was not long enough for this pattern to occur). No such trends appeared in the data for Charles or Cathy. Although more rigorous experimentation is required to assess the nature of this tendency, we speculate that the introduction of the thinking prompts may have led the three experimental teachers to focus more extensively on composing processes in their classes and in their beliefs about second language writing for a period of several weeks. After this period of initially considering the innovation and its relations to their existing beliefs and pedagogical activities, each teacher appears to have stopped attending to its unique qualities (or other aspects of composing processes), incorporating these concerns into their usual teaching routines and beliefs about teaching and learning second language writing. In terms of curriculum change, we might infer that the instructors made efforts to accommodate this curriculum innovation initially, then incorporated these conceptualizations into their own teaching beliefs and routine practices as their initial enthusiasm exhausted its usefulness or dissipated amid other concerns. However, as the data suggest, the extent to which the instructors did or did not attend to composing processes in their interviews may relate more distinctly to their existing pedagogical beliefs than to the nature of our experimental intervention.

Teachers’

97

Conceptions

!%I40 -30.. 20.10 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

6

9

101112

Elain%

aa 26 20 16 ta S a

Figure 2.

Number

in 12 Interviews

of Utterances

of Three

on Composing

Experiment01

Teachers

Process

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98

Individual Conceptions Impressionistic reviews of the interview data for the individual instructors suggested that each person displayed a unique, distinct set of personal conceptions about second language writing pedagogy. Table 4 outlines these conceptions in terms of (a) a core, guiding belief reiterated by each instructor throughout the interviews, (b) a typical pedagogical practice that each instructor tended to reflect upon during the interviews, and (c) the criteria instructors stated they used to evaluate their students and effectiveness of their teaching. Elizabeth: “My Goal Is to Make the Class Communicative” Elizabeth’s predominant conceptualization centered on a commitment to classroom communication. Elizabeth described most of her classes as workshops in which students worked constantly in pairs or groups, observing that “students cannot sit and write for two hours without communicating with somebody else.” Stressing the need for students to convey their ideas effectively to others, Elizabeth said she read her students’ work looking primarily for problems in communicating ideas, judged her selection of textbooks on the basis of whether they facilitated classroom discussion, and viewed herself in terms of a TABLE 4 Personal Profiles of Five Teachers

_ Teacher

Belief

Reflection

on Practice

Self-Evaluation

Elizabeth

Communication

Communicative peer work on writing.

“I think they are starting to see and try to understand. The sentences I saw express the right thoughts.”

Esther

Composing processes

Modeling, peer practice, and conferencing on planning, editing, and sentence clauses.

“They seem to get an idea of how an essay works. . . The prompts are just a different terminology.”

Error analysis

Class and group work in error correction on language and organization.

Elaine

“They make fewer

.

mistakes.

. . They don’t know how to use the prompts.”

Cathy

Organization

Lectures and practice of outline, thesis statement, topic sentence, and paragraph development.

“They really understood organization.”

Charles

Techniques

Lectures and conferencing on organization and grammar.

“I notice progress in grammar and organization.”

leachers’

Conceptions

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sort of coach “helping them express their thoughts. They know what they think. And all I want to do is to get them to the language area.” Elizabeth reconstructed a typical lesson in the following way: We worked on adjective clauses. I asked them to write adjective sentences based on the people in the room. They didn’t write the students’ names. Then I put them in new groups, and they had to figure out who the students were. They only do individual work when they write on their own. They always check their work with their neighbors because the one who doesn’t agree has to defend it. They always collaborate. They actually used the written grammar form as talking practice. When they were correcting, I was going around the room verifying the answers. Unlike Cathy and Charles, Elizabeth said she rarely lectured, observing that, “When I try to teach them, they don’t seem to get much from it. I find they get more from actually producing and analyzing the product.” Instead, Elizabeth strived to use “real” tasks for students to generate ideas to communicate, such as sending a fax, writing resumes and business letters, and describing a job or a piece of artwork. In evaluating her students’ achievements, Elizabeth sought experiential evidence of students’ engagement in writing. For example, commenting on one classroom activity, Elizabeth was especially pleased to see, “They were assessing each other’s real problems and trying to find solutions. I consider it a very real and valid experience.” Elizabeth tried to accommodate the innovation of thinking prompts by integrating them into her communicative teaching approach. For this purpose, the goal prompt matched neatly with Elizabeth’s beliefs that people need a communicative purpose to write: I talked about the prompt goal because I want them to know why we are doing the writing exercise. Students need a real functional purpose to write. The thing that teachers take for granted is that we assume why they are writing something. If you ask them, a lot of them will say I’m writing because the teacher told me to. We assume a very informed learner, and in many cases that isn’t so. The leamers are there, and they don’t think about leaming. They think about the language. However, Elizabeth’s beliefs about second language writing instruction did not accommodate the other thinking prompts very readily. When discussing her efforts to integrate the word choice prompt into one class, for example, Elizabeth observed she did not find it very helpful for error correction: “Generally I could refer to the prompts for error correction, but sometimes it could be too messy. Sometimes it would be faster to say this doesn’t work because every error does not dovetail neatly into the five prompts.” Indeed, Elizabeth’s interviews indicated that she usually found herself running out of time in classes to address the innovation she was being paid to adopt: “We haven’t had a lot of time to work on it.” Otherwise, she hoped the students would use the thinking prompts on their own: “I hope they start to look at the prompts.” Overall, Eliz-

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abeth appeared to resist implementing the innovation-to the point where the thinking prompts were scarcely mentioned in her final set of interviews.

Esther: “I Just Want Them to Think About What They Do When They Write” Esther’s guiding conceptualization was a concern for the cognitive organizing coherent discourse. Like Cathy, Esther’s interviews rhetorical organization. However, Esther conceptualized rhetorical more as a thinking process than as a text structure:

processes of focused on organization

I focused on aspects that I have been focusing on throughout. That is, looking at the main purpose, the thesis statement, how the support contributes to the goal, and how ideas are organized. Does the introduction give an indication of the organization of the essay? If you can do that in an introduction, it means you think a lot about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it.

Correspondingly, ter of arranging

Esther viewed her students’ learning needs primarily substantive ideas rather than grammatical accuracy:

as a mat-

They are quite fluent. They use a variety of sentences. They are quite correct. Yet they have problems in getting a focus for their writing. They have problems developing a specific thesis statement and dealing with it in the essay in an organized way.

Similarly, Esther viewed writing in relation to the perspective of a reader, emphasizing how she asked her students questions like “Who is the reader?” “How are you going to convince the reader?” “What is it that you are trying to say.7” “How much information do you have to give?” Moreover, Esther’s course curriculum stressed the principle of using “reading for getting started in writing,” prompting students to “analyze” what they “have read in order to demonstrate what they understand from the reading.” This pedagogical conceptualization allowed Esther to accommodate the innovation of thinking prompts quite readily-her beliefs about teaching writing echoing many of the beliefs that had informed our conceptualization of the research. For example, Esther explained how two of the prompts fell easily into her lessons: “I focused on getting started. I used the prompts. I focused on goal and fit. To me, getting a focus and determining the goal are the most important aspects of writing, especially determining the goal.” Likewise, Esther saw her classroom activities of group editing and peer modeling accommodating the pedagogical innovation in a straightforward manner: We looked at one essay in class. We looked at the writer’s goal and the fit of the essay. There were problems with that. We had the student who wrote it read it. The reason I did that was to give them a sense of the whole essay.

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101

Similarly, Esther reported how she frequently incorporated the thinking prompts as a focus for peer editing tasks: They got a chance to read other people’s work and give each other feedback. It’s valuable for them to learn to give feedback to others and to tackle their own work. So they get a sense of audience other than the teacher. And they were able to make revisions without the teacher looking at it first.

Although Esther found the thinking prompts to accord neatly with her process orientation to writing instruction, like Elizabeth, Esther also had certain reservations about the pedagogical innovation, finding herself relying primarily on beliefs that she had developed over years of teaching experience to guide her pedagogical thinking rather than the parameters of the innovation she had been asked to try out. Indeed, as a skilled, experienced writing instructor, Esther seemed to consider, in many respects, the thinking prompts as just a different, alternative terminology for conceptualizations that she was already confident about: I was using the prompts. I am finding that when I use the prompts, they are not enough. I need a kind of backup, like looking for the thesis statement, not just the goal and the purpose. Sometimes I confuse them by using the prompts. It might be easier just to say what is the thesis, and what ideas are used to support the thesis, and how are the ideas organized. It’s still using the prompts. It’s just using a different terminology. I don’t know if that terminology matters. I find I have to use other te~inoIogy so that they know what it is I want them to focus on.

Elaine: “Every Time There Is an Error, I Pick It Up”

Although Elaine only participated in four interviews, her conceptualizations stood out uniquely as focused on error correction: “I do error analysis everyday in the class.” This con~p~alization guided her criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of her teaching: “I think my teaching is successful because they were much better in choices of linking words and connectors. Students have fewer mistakes in sentence structure, using adverb clauses, adverb conjunctions, and things like that.” Error analysis provided a consistent focus for her classes: We focused on errors. We did error analysis. I chose sentences from their writing and gave them a handout. We did it in pairs. Then I put it on an overhead. I told them we were looking for errors of verb tense, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, meaning, and spelling.

This concern for error identification extended to analyses of rhetorical organization as well: We did an introduction to an essay. They were given two paragraphs; they had to choose which one was the best one. It was funny because over half chose the wrong one. If somebody offered a wrong answer, we looked at why.

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However, unlike the other four instructors who used a variety of pedagogical materials, Elaine organized and rationalized her teaching in reference to lessons in a specific textbook: “We use the textbook all the time.” “Since we have a book, .we go through the book. ” “They followed the model in the book.” Nonetheless, Elaine found her lessons a challenge, involving considerable advance preparation: “Every night, I prepare for classes. It is a pain.” Moreover, she was perplexed by her students being overly “concerned with getting the right answer,” and she said she “felt shaky” after classes where students were asking “why” an error existed after she had analyzed it thoroughly. Unlike Elizabeth and Esther, who essentially integrated the innovation of thinking prompts into their personal beliefs and classroom practices, Elaine treated the innovation distinctly as one kind of subject matter to be taught. Rather than using the prompts to facilitate her error analyses, as Elizabeth did on occasion, Elaine set aside a certain time in one class to implement the innovation: I used the thinking prompts only once. I gave them the handout. . . . I found that it was hard for them. I did an example. I wrote about my brother, using the prompts. A lot of them turned the paper over and were doing their notes. I said, maybe that’s not such a good idea because you want the prompts so that you can keep looking at them. I think some of them don’t know how to use it correctly.

Cathy: “Organization Is What They Need” For Cathy, the conceptual essence of English writing was rhetorical organization. As she explained in one interview, this belief was founded on her views on the overall purpose of the course she taught (i.e., academic preparation) and the students’ future needs in the university: “We did this entirely on organization because this is an academic class. It is the focus of the course to look at how to organize essays and paragraphs.” Moreover, the notion of rhetorical organization defined the material of Cathy’s lessons, prescribing specific elements for instruction like “outline,” “thesis statement,” “topic sentence,” or “paragraph development.” Cathy described her supplementary emphasis on language use largely in reference to rhetorical organization as well, for example, explaining that she lectured on parallel sentence structures so that the students could “write beautiful thesis statements. It’s part of language, but it’s also part of organization.” In a typical account of her classes, Cathy observed: I focused on essay organization. Fist I gave them an example of how to move from a paragraph to an essay. Then we together did a possible outline for a proper essay. It gives a format of what an essay looks like. And then they worked in groups on some exercises on outlining. Finally we looked at different kinds of thesis statements. They fiit worked alone to choose the thesis statement, then they worked in groups to write thesis statements for a particular topic.

Cathy’s belief in the specific structures of English composition guided her delivery of most classes in the format of presentational lectures followed by practice exercises. Cathy saw her role as leading students toward explicit organiza-

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tional objectives: “By forcing them to do something the way I want them to do it, they are forced into using some kind of language. You have to give a general statement with specific examples, general vocabulary and specific ones.” Given this slightly doctrinaire approach, Cathy occasionally found herself emotionally frustrated by ~~vidual students: “I was really angry that they hadn’t done any homework. I felt I was talking to the wall.” Her primary way of accommodating students with lower levels of proficiency in English was to repeat her instructions. Nonetheless, Cathy was very confident about her teaching, evaluating its effectiveness in terms of whether students had reached the objectives she had set. “My teaching is successful,” she proclaimed in one interview, “I marked their essays last week, and 90% of them had done exactly what I wanted them to do. They had really developed proper thesis statements and paragraphs.” Charles:

“Good Writing Techniques”

Charles’ key conceptualization was teaching “techniques of writing.” He viewed his role as instructor “in terms of setting up some basic ways to think in writing,” p~icul~ly elements of rhetorical org~ization and specific grammatical patterns in spelling, punctuation, and clause structures. Compared to Cathy, Charles emphasized grammatical uses of language over rhetorical organization. Following this belief, Charles organized each lesson around one element of grammar and one element of rhetorical organization: “The idea is I just do one item each week” to help students “get rid of problems one by one.” In explaining his lesson plans, Charles observed: Last week we started something on clauses. tion in a general way, to focus on supporting and effect, and so on.

the grammar part of writing. Then I did in each session Today was the adjective clause. We talked about organizafocusing on introductions and conclusions. I plan to go on materials and then to different supporting things like cause

Like Cathy, Charles said he spent a considerable amount of time lecturing in his classes, but he also devoted attention to particular students: “I like to have some time to talk to them individually.” The major area in which Charles found himself acco~odating change was through env~onmen~l pressures, particularly a sense that he lacked time to cover all of the writing techniques he wished to cover. Likewise, Charles was frustrated by one group of students who were “not a serious academic class,” but he resigned himself readily to the situation: “It doesn’t worry me so much.” In evaluating his teaching, Charles looked for students’ acquisition of effective writing techniques: “I notice the progress in terms of organization and the ability to use grammar. I’m happy.” IMPLICATIONS The findings of this research raise three general issues for future consideration,

The first issue concerns the nature of experienced instructors’ knowledge and

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beliefs about second language writing. Might there be a common basis of pedagogical or content knowledge unique to second language writing instruction? Could it consist, for example, in practical knowledge about topics like rhetorical organization, language use, composing processes, and the expression of ideas-which experienced instructors address consistently in their thinking about their teaching but in variable ways? The commonality of focus comments reported during the teacher interviews suggests this might be the case, although systematic comparisons with novice teachers would be necessary to determine the nature of such knowledge and its development. One might speculate, moreover, that such a common foundation of knowledge might hypothetically form the basis for teacher competency or initial teacher preparation in the area of second language writing. That, however, is the substance of future inquiry. Conversely, are the personal beliefs held by individual instructors fundamental sources of difference that inevitably mean second language writing instruction is conceptualized and conducted in a unique manner by every teacher? The dramatically distinct belief structures documented earlier, and their prevailing consistency for individuals over a period of 2 years in our interview data, would suggest that the knowledge guiding second language writing instruction needs to be considered largely in personal, practical terms, as suggested by theorists of teacher knowledge like Clandinin and Connelly (1987) or Ben-Peretz (1984). The personal qualities of teachers’ conceptualizations of their work are particularly vital in considering initiatives for curriculum change in the domain of second language writing. That is, a second implication arising from the present research is that curriculum change in second language writing--even if only considered as the introduction of a simple, minor pedagogical innovation-is not a uniform process but rather is construed uniquely by individual instructors, who may accommodate or resist it in terms of their personal beliefs, founded on years of previous experience, reflection, and information. Each of the five experienced instructors we studied displayed a unique conceptualization of teaching second language writing. Where an instructor like Esther readily accommodated the orientation to composing processes in the pedagogical innovation we introduced, her process of accommodation appeared to be largely because the innovation coincided neatly with her existing beliefs about second language writing curricula. Where an instructor like Elaine resisted the innovation, this resistance appears to have arisen because the innovation was difficult to place within her existing conceptualization of pedagogical action. In the third instance, Elizabeth accommodated those aspects of the innovation that fit with her beliefs while ignoring those aspects that did not. Moreover, a longitudinal perspective on these processes of accommodation showed that, after a period of about 2 months, even where the innovation was accommodated, the instructors seldom attended to its unique characteristics, incorporating it into their usual belief systems and teaching routines. Alternatively, it may be that once the teachers were relatively satisfied with students’ capacities to produce texts with the thinking prompts, they had little more to say about this aspect of their classes.

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These insights into teacher knowledge raise a third issue concerning the nature of educational research on natural classroom environments. We started our studies with the idea of a conventional comparison-group experiment, where two instructors were to conduct an experimental innovation and two instructors were to act as controls, conducting their ESL writing classes as they usually would. Unlike most conventional, so-called process-product experiments of this kind, however, we wished to study how teachers’ knowledge figured in the classroom processes, not just to look at outcomes solely in terms of students’ achievements. Analyses currently in progress are now considering various measures of what students learned in these settings and what the instructors actually did in the processes of classroom instruction; these are of fundamental importance. But the present analyses of teachers’ beliefs and accommodations of the instructional innovation shed a unique perspective on this overall endeavor (and by extension, on other educational research designs like it). In particular, it is doubtful that experimental cbnditions in this context were realized in any pure, laboratory sense. Each of the five participating teachers attested to conceptualizing their second language writing instruction in reference to very different knowledge frameworks and intentions, despite the instructors being unusually homogeneous in terms of previous educational backgrounds and experiences (each had their final degrees from the same university and had taught in the same ESL program for many years). This finding brings into question whether anything like a common treatment could have been administered in this pedagogical context-and indeed whether such a thing could be in other natural classroom settings for second language writing as well. As various authors have recently suggested, alternative approaches to assessing pedagogical innovations and curriculum innovations, other than comparison-group experiments, may have to be adopted to produce research that is educationally relevant and valid for many curricular purposes, such as tracing changes in human behavior and microsocial systems through contextually grounded, qualitative, longitudinal research (cf. Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Erickson, 1986; Newman et al., 1989).

REFERENCES Ben-Peretz, M. (1984). Kelly’s theory of personal constructs as paradigm for investigating teacher thinking. In R. Halkes & J.K. Olson (Eds.), Teacher rtiinkingd new perspecrive on persisting problems in ea’ucarion (pp. 103-111). Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger. Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bratcher, S., & Stroble, E. (1994). Determining the progression from comfort to confidence: A longitudinal evaluation of a national writing project site based on multiple data sources. Research in rhe Teaching of English, 28, 66-88. Calderhead, J. (Ed.). (1987). Exploring reachers’ thinking. London: Cassell Education. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, EM. (1987). Teachers’ personal knowledge: What counts as “personal” in studies of the personal. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19, 487-500.

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Clark, C. (1986). Ten years of conceptual development in research on teacher thinking. In M. BenPeretz, R. Bromme, & R. Halkes (Eds.), Advances of research on teacher thinking (pp. 7-20). Berwyn, PA: Swets. Clark, C., & Peterson, P. (1986). Teachers’ thought processes. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed., pp. 255-296). New York: Macmillan. Clark, C., & Yinger, R.J. (1977). Research on teacher thinking. Curriculum Inquiry, 7, 279-304. Crookes, C. (1990). The utterance, and other basic units for second language discourse analysis. Applied Linguistics, II, 183-199. Cumming, A. (1988). Change, organization, and achievement: Teachers’ concerns in implementing a computer learning environment. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 17, 141-163. Cumming, A. (1989). Writing expertise and second language proficiency. Language Learning, 39, 81-141. Cumming, A. (1990). Metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. Written Communication, 7, 482-5 11. Gumming, A. (1993). Language teachers’ curriculum planning and accommodations of innovation: Three case studies. TESL Cunada Journal, II, 30-52. Cumming, A. (1995). Fostering writing expertise in ESL composition instruction: Modeling and evaluation. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy (pp. 375-397). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Boston: D.C. Heath. Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of researchon teaching (3rd. ed., pp. 119-161). New York: Macmillan. Freedman, S. (1987). Response to student writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Freeman, D., & Richards, J. (1993). Conceptions of teaching and the education of second language teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 193-216. Fullan, M. (1982). The meaning of educational change. Toronto: OISE Press. Grimmett, I’.. & MacKimton, A. (1992). Craft knowledge and the education of teachers. Review of Research in Education, 18, 385-456. Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1981). Effective evaluation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hunsaker, L., & Johnson, M. (1992). Teacher under construction: A collaborative case study of teacher change. American Educational Research Journal, 29, 350-372. Langer, J., & Applebee, A. (1987). How writing shapes thinking: A study of teaching and learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Lowych, J. (1986). Post-interactive reflections of teachers: A critical appraisal. In M. Ben-Peretz, R. Bromme, & R. Halkes (Eds.), Advances of research on teacher thinking (pp. 172-185). Berwyn, PA: Swets. Newman, D., Grifftn, P., & Cole, M. (1989). The construction zone: Working for cognitive change in schools. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pritchard, R., & Marshall, J. (1994). Evaluation of a tiered model for staff development in writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 259-285. Richards, J., & Nunan, D. (Eds.) (1990). Second language teacher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, V., Anders, P., Tidwell, D., & Lloyd, C. (1991). The relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices in reading comprehension instruction. American Educational Research Journal, 28. 559-586. Roemer, M. (1991). What we talk about when we talk about school reform. Harvard Educational Review, 61, 434-448. Shavelson, R.J., & Stem, P. (1981). Research on teachers’ pedagogical thoughts, judgments, decisions and behavior. Review of Educational Research, 51, 455498. Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, IS. 4-14.

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Swanson-Owens, D. (1986). Identifying natural sources of resistance: A case study of implementing writing across the curriculum. Research in the Teaching of English, 20, 69-97. Winer, L. (1992). “Spinach to chocolate”: Changing awareness and attitudes in ESL writing teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 26, 57-79. Woods, D. (1993). Processes of ESL teaching: A study of the role of planning and interpretive processes in the practice of reaching English as a second language (Carleton Papers in Applied Language Studies Occasional Paper 3). Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Carleton University. Zancanella, D. (1991). Teachers reading/readers teaching: Five teachers’ personal approaches to literature and their teaching of literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 25, 5-32.

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APPENDIX A Thinking Prompts for ESL Writing Students l

l

l l

l

Word: Ll/L2: Goals: Fit: Rules:

Is this the right word or expression? Possible words are . . . How do I say it in my language? Does it make sense in English? Will people understand this? What do I want to tell my reader? Does this part fit with the other parts? Do I know a grammar or spelling rule for this? The rule is . . .

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APPENDIX

B

Coding System for Teacher Interviews Textbook

language OlpliZdiOU content

composing individual pair f

%Ysp

Perception

EllldytiC

De~ption

F

other skills

f

=-arY

argumentative

speaking r-b3 listening

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APPENDIX C Definitions and Examples of the Coding System of Teacher Interviews 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

Perception: Utterances that illustrate teachers’ perceptions of teaching to write or learning to write. I really make sure that I’ve looked at every possible way of what they can do. Description: Utterances that express objective accounts of classroom events. I gave them five handouts. Textbook: Utterances that comment on the use of textbooks. I like to have a textbook with really good exercises. Focus: Utterances that describe the focus of writing instructions on 4.1. Language use. I collected a grammar sheet they did to find out how weak or strong they are at rules. 4.2. Rhetorical organization. We looked at paragraph development. 4.3. Ideas and content. I asked them to discuss the content. 4.4. Composing process. As I was writing, they were able to see the writing on the overhead. Activity: Utterances that describe the organization of the class in terms of 5.1. Individual work. A lot of them did it on their own. 5.2. Pair work. With a little bit of pair work. 5.3. Group work. I started with groups of three. 5.4. Class work. Today it was me lecturing. Writing tasks: Utterances that describe the styles or kinds of writing tasks such as 6.1. Analytic. The essay was an analysis of what they had read. 6.2. Summary. They must also use summary skills. 6.3. Argumentative. I think argumentation is something important to discuss. Evaluation: Utterances that comment on the evaluation of students’ writing in terms of 7.1. Marks. But it’s not a mark-based class.

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Correction of errors. I edited their sentences. 7.3. Peer feedback. They were editing each other’s work. 7.4. Conference. That gives me something to talk to them about individually. Other related skills: Utterances that express how writing is or can be related to other skills such as 8.1. Speaking. We talked about writing arguments in relation to speaking. 8.2. Reading. Each week we try to relate to the reading they do. 8.3. Listening. The Korean students had trouble listening.