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Teaching and assessing academic writing via the portfolio: Benefits for learners of English as an additional language
Assessing Writing 16 (2011) 111–122
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Assessing Writing
Teaching and assessing academic writing via the portfolio: Benefits for learners of English as an additional language Zina Romova a, Martin Andrew b,∗ a b
Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand Lilydale Campus, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Keywords: Portfolio assessment Multi-drafting Reflection Feedback Discourse communities
a b s t r a c t This paper examines the use of portfolios as pedagogical tools for developing academic writing. In particular, it considers the value of multi-drafting, where learners reflect on the learning of a text type as well as focusing on micro and macro aspects. The paper outlines a situated pedagogical approach, where students come to understand their improvement across three portfolio drafts and evaluate their learning reflectively. A multicultural group of 41 learners enrolled in the degree-level course ‘Academic Writing’ at a tertiary institution in New Zealand participated in a study evaluating the portfolio approach to building awareness of their own writing. Focus group interviews provided qualitative data, analysed using a grounded theory approach. Triangulating data came from student reflective memoranda written in response to each drafting process. We conclude that a multi-draft portfolio is an effective assessment tool, not only because it provides a feedback loop but also because it enhances learners’ understanding of writing as a recursive process. This provides them with aspects of academic writing literacy such as self-editing and the insight to reorganise academic texts by applying target genre and discourse knowledge. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Recent studies into the academic writing (AW) of students of English as an additional language (EAL) have focused increasingly on how learners “actually learn to write” in a second language and ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Z. Romova), [email protected] (M. Andrew). 1075-2935/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.asw.2011.02.005
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how teaching contributes to learning (Cumming & Riazi, 2000, p. 57). Such studies respond to Ferris and Hedgcock’s (2005) call for a framework which analyses “strategies and other cognitive operations involved in . . . drafting a coherent, meaningful, piece of connected discourse” (pp. 4–5). This article contributes to the formation of such a framework by investigating the benefits of teaching, learning and assessing EAL AW using multi-draft portfolios. We believe these benefits need no longer be ‘by-products’ of AW instruction (Katznelson, Perpignan, & Rubin, 2001) but, rather, pedagogic interventions. In this article we unfurl the strategies and cognitive operations demonstrated by learners of a course called ‘Academic Writing’ in EAL at a tertiary institution in New Zealand, and use our findings to add to the debate. Our overriding research question is “in what ways are multi-draft portfolios useful for the teaching, learning and assessment of AW?” Within the generality of this guiding question we wanted to discover the type of learning about genre and discourse that occurs during learners’ participation in a programme built around multi-draft portfolios, and how learners apply new knowledge in the form of academic literacy factors. Three core issues we foreground emerge from recent research: the value of peer collaboration, the importance of reflexivity and portfolio assessment’s formative potential. Rollinson (2005) demonstrates that peer writers “can and do revise effectively on the basis of comments from peer readers” (p. 24), a finding supported among Chinese learners (Zhao, 2010). Kathpalia and Heah (2008) show how the reflective component of portfolios helps learners to understand the significance of their learning experiences, enhancing communicative competencies across linguistic, cognitive, social and affective dimensions. Also, Lam and Lee (2009) examine how the formative potential of portfolios can be exploited in EAL classrooms. In this article, we aim to pull these threads together, describing student learning in an AW programme applying these insights. Specifically, we examine the literacy factors that impact beneficially on the development of AW skills among participants in multi-draft portfolio learning. These academic literacy factors include such skills as planning, paraphrasing, summarising, referencing, self-editing and ability to reorganise academic texts by applying target genre and discourse knowledge (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). 2. Theoretical background: Portfolios for assessing writing 2.1. Focus on process Within a process-focused pedagogy, a multi-draft portfolio is an effective teaching, learning and assessment tool not only because it provides a formative feedback loop and data about learners’ cognitive operations, but also because it enhances learners’ understanding of writing as a socially-situated process participating in “language socialisation” (Duff & Hornberger, 2008). It develops understandings of generic text types as flexible goals from likely target discourse communities (Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000), not as ideologically bound models. Since they can be used for summative (holistic) assessment at the conclusion of a course, multi-draft portfolios can assess both micro (mechanical, formal, accuracy-focused) and macro (textural, thetic, discursive) aspects of progress related to course aims, objectives and outcomes. As our conception of delivering AW using portfolios as instruments of teaching, learning and assessing as participation in language socialisation demands, we emphasise their role in socialising learners to target discourse communities (Borg, 2003; Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000). We have been influenced by the literature conceptualising writing and academic discourse as connected to social practice, present and future identities and imagined communities (Clark, 2003; Gee, 1990, 1998, 2004; Ivanic, 1998; Kanno & Norton, 2003), and the work of Granville and Dison (2005) and Kathpalia and Heah (2008) on the integration of reflection to foreground meta-cognitive awareness into portfolios. As Ferris and Hedgcock (2005) summarise, process-oriented writing pedagogies focus on how learners solve problems, discover ideas, express thought in writing, and revise texts (pp. 5–6). Their pedagogy emphasises a cycle of planning, drafting, revising and editing, often enhanced by responding, evaluating and post-writing (Seow, 2002, p. 304). The responding stage requires tutor input as well as peer collaboration (Ferris, 2002). To contextualise the text type in terms of its discourse community and to maintain focus on micro and macro aspects of textual development, pre-writing, peer and
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teacher feedback, and revision are fundamental practices for process-based approaches (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000). For EAL learners, process-oriented approaches present frequent opportunities to write in many genres and for many purposes (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000, p. 37). Multi-draft portfolios allow learners to attempt texts characteristic of a range of discourse communities and to develop appropriate academic literacies. The notion of academic literacy has been central for AW as it has changed from meaning a set of learnable skills to a socialisation process. Through this process, we explain university culture to learners so they can learn its requirements through apprenticeship (Paltridge, 2004; Wenger, 1998). These notions are expanded by constructionists whose views accord with academic literacy perspectives. Teachers who use portfolios as teaching, learning and assessment tools draw from a long heritage of theory. Below we present a brief overview of a range of theoretical perspectives, because we believe that each is informative about key facets of portfolio assessment. A central moment for portfolio assessment was the move from product-oriented pedagogy, which focused on a disembodied written text requiring strict adherence to native speaker (NS) expectations, to process-oriented writing, with its instruction focus on learner discovery. Crucially, this reflected a movement from an earlier behaviourist orientation to a less pre-scriptivist, post-modern view of language (Silva & Leki, 2004).
2.2. Approaches impacting process Along with representatives of cognitivist approaches, we see L2 writing as a process that includes invention, or prewriting tasks, drafting multiple versions, text-level revision, collaborative writing, feedback sessions, and the postponement of editing until the final stages of the composing cycle (Atkinson, 2003a, 2003b; Clark, 2003; Murray, 1992). For a cognitivist, writing is learnt, not taught, and the teacher is non-directive, facilitating a cooperative environment (Hyland, 2003, p. 18). Cognitivists have also established grounding for a post-process framework recognising writing as literacy (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005, pp. 8–9). This has opened the way to view writing as social, a transactional process involving mediation between writer and audience (Flower, 1994; Gee, 1996, 1998). Another approach that has had major implications for teaching EAL writing is contrastive rhetoric, since this approach characterises divergent expectations and their effects on L2 literacy development, including L2 writing skills. The learners’ interlinguistic process is foregrounded, a progress requiring explicit corrective input (Brown, 2002, p. 13). Gass and Selinker (2001) believe that direct instruction focusing on major contrastive features can accelerate the language learning process. In teaching and learning by portfolio, this applies at both the micro level of mechanics and the macro levels of discourse. In assessing factors impacting on the role of process in assessing AW, it is important to notice that cross-linguistic approaches teach us that “the organisation of writing is influenced by culture-specific norms, which could give rise to negative evaluations in intercultural contexts” (Bowe & Martin, 2007, p. 137). Teaching via portfolio allows students to interrogate culturally bound aspects of discourse in AW, and to notice and make judgments about cultural norms in text types. Overviewing research on the context of AW, Paltridge (2004) stresses the additional difficulty non-native students face with their lack of familiarity with the conventions and expectations of AW in English-medium universities, and the mismatch of the AW context in English-speaking countries with that in their home countries (Casanave, 2004; Hyland, 2002; Paltridge, 2001). With Grabe and Kaplan (1996), we take a genre-oriented approach to literacy development, acknowledging that literacies are situated in communities. Socialisation into academic literacy, they maintain, presupposes that writing is not only a “communication technology” (p. 47), but also the social practice Gee (1998) emphasises. Socio-literacy views have implications for literacy instruction, particularly in EAL communities (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). Hinkel (2002) also acknowledges that to generate acceptable texts students must master “the mechanical aspects of composing sentences, paragraphs, and larger units of discourse that correspond to the dominant genres of the academy, a specific field, or both” (p. 57). At the same time, “learning to write is part of becoming socialised to the academic community – finding out what is expected and trying to approximate it” (Silva, 1990, p. 17).
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In line with both socio-literacy and genre-based approaches, we maintain that through understanding readers and their expectations, writers shape texts to meet these expectations in targeted discourse communities (Flowerdew, 2000; Hinds, 1987; Hyland, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007; Reppen, 2002). For these reasons, writers, including those working with portfolios, gain control over the language and written genres of target discourse communities (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005, p. 9). While the focus in the process approach is on the writer, the genre approach in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has shifted the focus more to the read text with the goal of having learners enter their own academic discourse community (Hyland, 2003). Particularly influential to our conception is Flowerdew’s (1993) argument for drawing together genre and process. He proposes a pedagogy focussing on the process of learning about and acquiring genres. He argues for an “educational” rather than “training” approach to teaching and learning genres. Badger and White (2000) developed the notion that product, process and genre approaches to writing are complementary, while Hyland (2003) argues that the genre approach complements process views by adding focus on text/context, and emphasising the role of language in written communication. Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000) argue portfolio-based writing assessment can be used with any, but fits best with the genre-process nexus approach. Empirical studies are starting to bear this out. For instance, Kim and Kim (2005) found that a balance of process and genre approaches maximises learning gains among Korean learners of AW and Kathpalia and Heah (2008) demonstrate the value of embedded reflection in an AW course in Singapore to bring together process and product teaching approaches (p. 303). The situating of L2 writing – in the postmodern world (Atkinson, 2003a, 2003b), a view shared by poststructuralists and social constructionists, impacts on this study since it respects the identities negotiated in text formation. In this approach, language originates from and is constituted in situated context and community. The notions of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983), “discourse community” (Borg, 2003; Flowerdew, 2000) and “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) have been crucial to foregrounding the affective roles of investment and belongingness in generating writing characteristic of discourse communities. Swales (1988) and Johns (1995, 1997) argued that acceptance of a learner into such communities depends on collaborations of participants in the process. Speech and writing are social constructs, the users of which are members of discourse communities with shared repertoires in which form and function are understood and valued. Newcomers to the community need to be apprenticed into the particular discourse prevailing within it (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Woodward-Kron (2004) asserts the concepts of “discourse community” and “apprenticeship” provide rich contextual frameworks for investigating the social practices that shape students’ writing and provide a methodological framework for exploring the extent to which marker feedback attempts to socialise students’ writing to the discursive practices of the discipline. Since all writing, AW included, is deeply embedded in the world rather than existing solely as a result of classroom practice, social constructionism offers rich insights. It emphasises the notion of culture as a norm-referenced concept and takes into account the social and cultural contexts impacting L2 writing. It rejects a narrow focus on skills and the processes of writing in themselves. Social constructionism advocates collaborative learning, meaning students negotiate and achieve consensus at every stage in the writing process, and the product, which could be one student’s final draft of one portfolio item, for instance, represents the group’s best shared effort. Along with Atkinson (2003b, p. 49), we investigate “continuity, universality, and hybridity, whereas the culture concept has traditionally been used to investigate difference, localisation, and cultural purity”, responding to his call for teachers of AW to understand what they are teaching more critically. Flowerdew’s (2000) suggestion that programmes such as AW require a focus on engaging students in the types of activities they are likely to carry out in their academic studies is a post-structural critical perspective aligned closely to the perspective employed in this study. Such a perspective draws together themes from many of these approaches, most notably social-literacy, social constructionism and cross-linguistic approaches. At the same time, the critical perspective invites students to question, interrogate, even transform these activities (see Canagarajah, 2002; Casanave, 2004). Similarly, Canagarajah’s (2002) seeing “some of the hidden components of text construction and the subtler ramifications of writing . . . as a social act, a mediated construct shaped by the interplay between writer, reader and the community” (p. 1) is crucial to our consideration of portfolio assess-
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ment as allowing learner identities to be seen as flexible and sites of struggle. Usefully, he suggests a “difference-as-resource” perspective in order to deconstruct any ideological freight used in teaching materials and implicit in the act of teaching written discourses belonging to a powerful discourse community. Such pedagogy is compatible with teaching AW via portfolio as there is space in the reflective process for students to identify their participation in writing practices that affect their cultures and identities. Framed within a multi-cultural model of literacy acquisition, this perspective values writers’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and encourages them to explore issues such as gender, ethnicity, cultural difference and ideology, and to reflect on how these are reflected in particular texts, relating them to their own experiences and beliefs. 3. Portfolios in the ‘Academic Writing’ course The 14-week AW course in which our study took place is part of a BA (EAL) programme in an Auckland tertiary institution. The AW course aims to prepare students to join the multiple activities of their future academic community. It is made up of six contact hours per week and follows Brown’s (2002) prescription for curricular development. The assessment includes regular weekly multi-draft formative written tasks presented as a portfolio, which is graded summatively at the end of the semester. The portfolio tasks vary in text types, from academic description and evaluation to the argumentative essay, incorporating micro- and macro-level writing and learning. The structure of the course is such that the portfolio and the regular work on its tasks provide the development of a range of strategies for a summative timed classroom essay assessment. The portfolio procedure adopted in the study comprised collection, reflection and peer and ongoing teacher feedback (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000), with formative learning with input from peers, groups and the tutor occurring across three drafts for each item. With each first draft, students are required to submit a reflective commentary responding to prompts about (a) the purpose of the task, the requirement in terms of content, text organisation, discourse and language features for each of the text types, and (b) what they had learnt from writing the text, what their difficulties had been and how they would work to improve the areas of difficulties themselves. With the second draft, the students submit another piece of reflective writing, answering the question of whether the teacher’s feedback to the first draft and their own assessment of the writing and learning correlated. They identify areas of weaknesses and select those to work on urgently. The reflective component of learning, teaching and assessing by portfolio is formative (Andrew, 2005; Lam & Lee, 2009). Such formative strategies, together with the pedagogical interventions of teacher conferencing, peer review and collaborative group work, give the course cohesion and balance the high-stakes summative focus. The criteria for assessing the portfolio are performance-based and achievement-focussed, but allow for the measure of progress, response to feedback and self-reflexivity (Lucas, 2008). The AW portfolios comprise all drafts of work described in the curriculum plus reflections, ensuring that all AW portfolios are comparable. 4. Methodology 4.1. Participants 41 participants included first-year BA (EAL) major students and institute-wide degree-level students, taking the course to develop their ability to write and succeed in their major subjects. The participants were diverse: there were 14 male and 27 female, aged 17–39, who came from a variety of countries: China, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Iran, Russia, Mexico, Germany, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kuwait. 4.2. Instruments 4.2.1. Focus group interviews Our primary data come from transcriptions of open-ended focus group interviews (of 4 or 5 participants), recorded in week 13 and conducted by a researcher external to the teaching team. Interviewing
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was repeated over three student cohorts, with data collected from 41 students. This method adopts the rationale of open-ended interviewing: “the only person who understands the social reality in which they live is the person themselves” (Burns, 2000, p. 425). The interviews were semi-structured and lasted 30 min. Students were given the opportunity to check the transcripts for accuracy. Two researchers, the interviewer–researcher and the teacher–researcher, used open-coding to analyse the transcripts. Then they located lexical and thematic patterns within the data (Brice, 2005; Glaser, 1998; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) ensuring that themes emerged plausibly (Burns, 2000, p. 434). This approach involves locating recurrent themes and organising data around them to provide a basis for content analysis (Brice, 2005, p. 162; Burns, 2000, p. 435). Students were asked how the various aspects of the course had impacted on their understanding of AW and were encouraged to respond freely. All participants gave their permission for their words to be quoted, and all quotations reported here are attributed to pseudonyms. 4.2.2. Reflections on portfolio tasks The learners regularly wrote reflections of 250 words accompanying their first and second text drafts. These reflective writings contain answers to the question on the purpose of the written task, the learning that has occurred in the course of fulfilling the task, students’ self-reports about areas of progress or lack of progress, and projections about what actions they need to take to ensure progress after they finish AW. We recognise that self-reporting in written reflections as part of an assessment has its limitation, since learners may only disclose what they want the teacher–researcher to hear. For this reason, the primary data were, as has already been stated, the focus group interviews, preserving observational insight. The reflective writings within the portfolios were used for triangulation. 5. Findings and discussion Our study identified a number of themes from the focus group data triangulated with student reflections. Here, we describe and discuss four themes: (1) the challenge of referencing; (2) the development of understandings of discursive forms; (3) the range of learning capital inherent in the draft-focussed portfolio-based writing process; and (4) the impact of teacher feedback. 5.1. Theme 1: The challenge of referencing The first theme, the acquisition of referencing techniques and conventions, points to the crucial issue of “unacceptable intertextuality” in academic literacy (Abasi, Akbary & Graves, 2006), and was the most prominent theme (34 responses). Respondents referred to the role of paraphrasing and summarising within it. Wan’s observation is representative: “Here we focus on references. In China, we didn’t work on this”. “Here”, writes Selina (China), “we must take care to list where everything [we quote] comes from, every other people’s writing.” Erma (Korea) writes that her key learning consists in “how to put in other people’s ideas to connect my ideas, how to link and support my ideas with those of other people.” Clearly, discourse appropriation is an issue here, and teaching summarising and paraphrasing in the context of referencing skills may address the issue. Erica (Korea) speaks of report-writing: “Lots of people have the custom to copy and even in the report at University, when they write a long report, they just copy this part or that part.” Helena (Korea) made a similar observation: “I didn’t know how to write an academic essay before. When I went to University, I just copied some sources summarised, I did not put in my own words.” Jung (Korea) states that referencing is his greatest challenge: “I can’t accept the concept of referencing. I know how to do it in my mind but I really hate doing it.” Four other students said focussing on referencing prevented them from being able to attend to wider discourse structure: referencing became an obsessive diversion. Yuka (Japan) said that APA gave him “headache” (focus group laughter of agreement can be heard). Learners’ consciousness of their battle with referencing is due to two factors: the academic literacy imperative in operation throughout our institution and the fact that the second focus group interviews occurred at a time when referencing had recently been taught. Referencing is nonetheless a significant academic literacy skill acquired during AW.
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5.2. Theme 2: Understanding discursive forms Twenty-one students reported increased awareness of the discourse features of texts. Most comments referred to the essay, the ultimate task within the portfolio. With this we observed an increased awareness of appropriate tone, register, syntactic selection and reader-centredness. Ella (China) observes: “conventions can help us to create a form and improve the writing overall in terms of reader understandability.” Jing, after describing her writing habits in “the Chinese way”, resolves that now she is “trying to use other types of introduction: ‘funnel’, statistics, funny stories, to start my essay to interest the reader.” Managing the content of paragraphs and developing support sentences from a topical base constitutes Anna’s main learning: “Every paragraph has one idea, but in China, we can have one main idea and you can give another main idea at the end of the paragraph to lead to the next paragraph.” Grace (China) is also acutely aware of the reader-centredness of her target text: “My main problem is how to stay focused on a topic. I think if I overcome this, my writing will be logical to the reader.” With regard to understanding discursive forms, several sub-themes emerged, which are presented below. 5.2.1. Recognising thetic structures The data contained a range of comments on organisational thetic conventions, showing emergent understandings of discursive forms and their impact on written confidence: “Thesis is the basis of text organisation. It’s a leader of thought” (Selina, China). “I didn’t know how to write a paragraph, didn’t write structured essays”, writes Tara (Iran), “so it’s given you more academic skills and you feel more confident about using them now.” Ella observes that “conventions help us to improve ‘CC’ [coherence and cohesion] . . . seeing the whole piece of writing is important instead of throwing ideas into a structure.” Miwa (Korea) observes that understanding conventions of structure affects the coherence of an essay and gives it its overall quality; Anna (Korea) concurs: “conventions of ‘CC’ are fundamental to a good essay as business students focus on structure and apply the AW skills to business.” Next, Farat (Iran) notes that the convention of starting with the thesis and then writing topic-based sentences is useful for those who wish to write academically in other subjects. “Learning these conventions”, writes Jung, “aids us in getting a formal tone, writing logically and understandably in ‘the right way’.” 5.2.2. Reacting to western conventions Another emerging sub-theme was the contrast between the discourse conventions of the students’ culture and that of Western AW. Yuka argues that AW in English is “straight, linear, focuses on the idea; but in Japan it is not straight, it is more tangential, with the main points at the end”. Farat also states that paragraphing poses a challenge: “it is opposite to English. In English, we state the topic sentence and then support it, but in my language we support at the end of the paragraph. It is a major difference.” Wan is similarly cross-cultural: “AW is hard for me in both Chinese and English because of the vocabulary and ideas. As for the writing style, Chinese AW is not that straightforward and to-thepoint, so it’s less direct than the Western academic style. We always put our thesis at the beginning, but they don’t do that in Chinese.” This theme is also described by Helena (Korea): “When we start an academic article, we don’t point out the topic straight away, we need to write a lot of background to support the topic. In English, we need to set the main idea in the first sentence, so the structure’s different.” Erica (Korea) adds that “in general writing, we prefer to put the important sentence at the end.” Esther states that “English style requires evidence to follow the thesis, but Korean allows us to write in a more dramatic way.” These are all summarised by Miwa: “Learning is culture as in Korean the layout and form are totally different.” These citations are representative of a large number within our data which suggest that academic literacy factors can be enhanced by increasing learner awareness of cross-cultural contrasts. There also seems to be some resistance to the primacy of the thesis-first-topic sentence-first convention: “the idea of genre comes from Western culture” (Sue, Korea). Farat (Iran) disparages the convention of conclusions: “Structure is completely different and topic sentences are a western idea. In Iran, conclusions are not merely summaries”. Mohammed (Iran) was vehement too: “only if you have the vocabulary first is the structure with the thesis and the structured paragraphs possible”.
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Either perversely or subversively, Yuka (Japan) said that he had acquired a consciousness of ‘Western’ AW strategies, but those he used were “from the Japanese way”. As cross-linguistic and critical perspectives indicate, discursive forms should allow for less imperialistic teaching texts and more cross-cultural expression and creativity. 5.2.3. Learning from generic text types Seven students (four Korean, three Chinese) commented that a genre-focussed approach with an emphasis on normative conventions can enhance their awareness of target discourse communities. It can also draw attention to lexical, syntactical and discursive levels of writing. They comment that this pedagogy is more creative than that of Korea, where students look for discursively locked ways of writing, formula and models. Focussing on discursive features within the genre approach provides learners with a scaffold that did not exist in their home cultures. Farina remarks that Kuwaiti students “have to write, but they don’t have to be very serious about that, students, they copy”, a comment supported by Mabel (Iran): “students just choose a book and copy from the book. They don’t have to worry about discourse.” 5.3. Theme 3: The learning capital of portfolios 5.3.1. Editing Discovering the importance of editing and proofreading emerges as a key subtheme. A typical description comes from Miwa (Korea) who focuses on the meta-cognitive aspects of self-editing. Miwa explains that she used to “write from start to end in one draft, but now take[s] more time, self-correcting and editing as [she goes]. She now writes “thesis and topic sentences, drafting with consciousness of cohesion and coherence.” Yuka (Japan) agrees: “Halfway through the portfolio I started editing. I’ve become comfortable with this. I think it’s good – the process to follow.” This is connected with students’ discovery of the importance of proofreading: “I got a chance of proofreading. Now I might find my mistakes before I hand in my paper. There’s always something new to find in your work that you can improve” (Jing, China). Teaching editing also helps learners to dispense with a rigid obsession with form: as Jane (Germany) observes, “editing means looking at the whole structure, not just the grammar.” 5.3.2. Planning Planning and organisational skills, such as outlining and brainstorming, emerge as learning gains notably among 24 learners from Asian backgrounds, who specifically comment on them. Vinna (China) emphasises the value of prewriting and outlining: “they control my ideas when I write my essay – very central.” For Jenny (China), a chance to apply outlining also made an impact: “I have learnt many things through [AW] class. Above all, outlining is the best thing for me. This is the first time for writing an outline to be a task, but I have practised through the whole process of these tasks. Through these tasks I realise that outlining is most important for writing an essay . . . now, I have learnt how to write an outline, and I feel that if I prepare the outline well and in detail, then the time of writing an essay gets shorter.” For Emma (Korea) time-saving is capital too, but so is adapting the literacy of planning: “I used to do the writing directly; it means I only thought about the topic for a few minutes and started to write. It was not practical because it took me a long time to do it. The process of AW (pre-writing, outlining) helped me to organise ideas simply and start to write easily.” Kirma (Kuwait) views the process as assisting textual organisation: “the process – pre-writing, outlining and so on – controls my ideas when I write my essay.” For Ella (China), “brainstorming. . . is the cornerstone that makes your whole essay link well.” 5.3.3. Reflectivity The value of reflection is not only evident in the students’ reflective writings on their perceived learning gains; it is also explicitly mentioned as capital. “For me [Jenny, China] the reflection stage was special as it was new. . . You need to think about why you repeat a mistake.” Reflection, elicited in relation to particular and situated learning tasks (Granville & Dison, 2005), brings into consciousness the possibilities of autonomy identified by Lucas (2008, p. 32) and meta-cognition described by Tishman,
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Perkins and Jay (1995, p. 67). As Jane (Germany) writes: “Now I might find the mistakes before I hand in my paper.” The students’ reflective work (and we also regard the week 13 focus group interviews as serving a retrospectively and holistically reflective function) evidenced the four areas of improvement that were the focus of Kathpalia and Heah’s (2008) study of reflection within AW portfolios: linguistic, cognitive, affective (the enjoyment experienced in the production of their written texts) and social. “Because of reflection”, wrote Miwa (Korea), “I come to know myself” (sic). 5.4. Theme 4: The impact of teacher feedback Teaching using a multi-drafting portfolio involves not only formative feedback from peers, but also tutor input during the monitoring phase of a writing lesson, the workshopping of group and individual work or as a result of formal marking of a draft. Such an approach benefits perceptions of their lexical capabilities: “AW changed my style because I listened to feedback from teachers and peers and could change my language and improve my vocabulary” (Ihman, Somalia). It also caters both to the individual and the group: “the process shows about me, not only about typical students’ errors and mistakes” (Mohammad, Ethiopia). What emerges most of all is the usefulness of tutor feedback, usually about form, in the context of multi-drafting. Erma (China) states: “regular practice-feedback-self-correction leads to improvement”. Esther (Taiwan) stresses that as long as she can get diagnostic help (about lexical appropriacy and grammatical forms), she can use a range of resources “to find the right way by myself.” Learners’ reflections offer extensive examples of specific impacts of teacher feedback. We supply examples of successful tutor intervention at word, sentence and discourse levels. Firstly, Una (Korea) writes, “the teacher’s feedback about the expression in the second sentence was really helpful. When I compared it with the sentence which she recommended, I could recognise which sentence was more smooth and natural.” Then she diagnoses formal features for her to notice and practise (articles and use of “besides”) and sets a strategy for further practice. Secondly, tutor feedback on subordination in syntax impacted on Emma (Korea): “it gave me a chance to think about the length of my sentence. Even though I do not use long sentences, I always challenge myself to try a long sentence. However, I realised that I need to be more careful; otherwise, I might fail to convey the meaning successfully. Sue (Korea) insists on tutor input on particular areas of anxiety: “with articles and plurals, I cannot catch the errors before someone tells me.” Thirdly, teacher input at the discourse level is valuable too, as in this reflection from Grace (China) that ties together other threads of our findings: In Chinese you focus on personal feelings. An essay written in English talks about the author’s opinion or discusses a specific phenomenon. For example, in my first essay on pollution I put emphasis on how angry people are, and seldom mentioned about why, how and solutions. My tutor’s feedback helped me understand my problem. Although most students’ insights relate to impact on form, the most interesting impact of teacher feedback is its potential to motivate learners to enjoy the practice and process of AW: My writing is not great yet, but I can say one thing: I am actually enjoying it. I struggle to explain why, but I always look forward to getting the teacher’s feedback to see if it is the same with what I thought about my text. It gives me confidence when I am able to find flaws myself and I quite like redrafting (Jane, Germany). 6. Conclusions Our findings suggest instructors and researchers can gain insights into learning AW within a multidraft, process-based portfolio pedagogy by seeking convergences in the thinking of writing theorists, most recently those advocating the process/genre nexus, informed by insights from constructivism, socio-literacy and critical perspectives. Our study supports the claim that the generative aspect of portfolios helps learners assume more responsibility for their advancement in written proficiency, providing a valuable, authentic, learner-controlled experience of learning (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000).
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A pedagogical focus on process in managing portfolio assessment provides reflective space for the negotiation of identities as well as bringing particular literacies into learners’ consciousnesses. For instance, our study suggests that learners report developments in understanding the strategic if not yet the ethical importance of referencing. They also report learning gains in developing academic discourse features such as structuring through thetically and authentically utilising genre conventions corresponding to text types within the portfolio, most notably the essay. We note the beginning of critical resistance to the imperialism of genre, and advise the use of Canagarajah’s (2002) strategies and a pedagogy analysing the cultural and ideological contexts of generic texts and forms (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). Throughout the findings, we see learners become aware of their progress in both academic literacies (referencing, paragraph and text structuring, paraphrasing, summarising) and process-writing strategies for AW (pre-writing, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, self-editing, proofreading, responding to peer and tutor feedback). The data reveal learners’ new understanding of editing as examining the whole text structure rather than only grammar and vocabulary and a deeper appreciation of the processive stages of writing in AW: pre-writing, outlining, drafting and several redrafts. Learners report changes in their perceptions of AW, such as their movement from writing one draft only to developing a piece of writing via the re-drafting process and their advanced awareness of cohesion and coherence. They gain a sense of progress and hence report increased confidence, which is empowering. Our study emphasises that when students are actively engaged in reflecting on the difficulties and challenges involved in their learning, they gain a deeper appreciation of key academic literacies and AW strategies. The meta-level questions students addressed in their reflections may in themselves have helped to promote thinking, learning and the acquisition of academic language. We indicated evidence of analytic thinking – of students making connections and starting to see the “big picture”, although most expressed gains at the syntax level of learning only in relation to the purposes and outcomes of each writing task. These responses reveal awareness of the need to make analysed choices between their prior understandings and perceptions and the newly acquired knowledge in the process of writing. The reflective process generated a level of awareness and evaluative thinking concomitant with the learners’ language learning histories, investments and current first-year undergraduate level. Emerging from the study, too, is the notion that sharing their reflections helped the students discover what they knew or thought about a subject. This captures the essence of the write-to-learn philosophy in education, and when we write-to-learn what we think, we are practising critical thinking in its basic form at the levels of application, analysis, evaluation and synthesis. Through reflection, students were able to draw meaning from the process of writing academic texts in various genres, becoming conscious of their new and changed understandings, and learners and teachers participated in a conversation about those changed understandings. Self-assessment via reflective practice proves crucial as it changes the student as an emergent writer and an agent in control of both literacy factors and presentation of ideas. Our findings support the pedagogical intervention of providing learners with multiple options for drafting and redrafting within genre. Along with exponents of the process-oriented writing approach and socio-literacy theorists, we concur that such an intervention can impact positively on learners’ written academic literacy. At the same time, they can negotiate their cross-cultural and individual ‘voices’ within the conventions of the discourse. As researchers and instructors, we have become aware of the ongoing comparisons students resort to in order to acquire AW literacy, in particular, of the culture-fraught nature of the conventions of AW. There is space within a genre-based, portfolio-led, process-approach pedagogy to accommodate the discursive understandings of the full multicultural range of our learners. This study of teaching and assessing using multi-draft portfolios emphasises the importance of seeing learning not only as a cognitive/meta-cognitive process, but also as a social one where learners view teaching texts and their own versions of them in the contexts of the discourse communities of which they are artefacts. Discourse communities are inextricably connected to student investments in AW and multi-draft portfolios represent a union of assessment and learning. Finally, we conclude that student enjoyment of learning by multi-drafting, although a matter of affect, is, together with the other learning gains described in our findings, encouraging news for teachers who wish to use portfolios in teaching and assessing AW.
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Lam, R., & Lee, I. (2009). Balancing the dual function of portfolio assessment. ELT Journal, 64 (10), 54–64. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lucas, R. (2008). A study of portfolio assessment as an effective student self-evaluation scheme. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 16 (1), 23–32. Murray, D. (1992). Collaborative writing as a literacy event: Implications for ESL instruction. In: D. Nunan (Ed.), Collaborative language learning and teaching (pp. 100–117). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Paltridge, B. (2001). Linguistic research and EAP pedagogy. In: J. Flowerdew & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research perspectives for English for academic purposes (pp. 55–70). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Paltridge, B. (2004). Academic writing. Language Teaching, 37 (2), 87–105. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Ramanathan, V., & Kaplan, R. (2000). Genre, authors, discourse communities: Theory and application for (L1 and) L2 writing instructors. Journal of Second Language Writing, 9 (2), 171–191. Reppen, R. (2002). A genre-based approach to content writing instruction. In: J. C. Richards & W. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 321–327). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rollinson, P. (2005). Using peer feedback in an ESL writing class. ELT Journal, 59 (1.), 23–30. Seow, A. (2002). The writing process and process writing. In: J. C. Richards & W. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 315–320). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Silva, T. (1990). Second language composition instruction: Developments, issues, and directions in ESL. In: B. Kroll (Ed.), Second language writing: Research insights for the classroom (pp. 11–23). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Silva, T., & Leki, I. (2004). Family matters: The influence of applied linguistics and composition studies on second language writing studies – Past, present and future. The Modern Language Journal, 88 (1), 1–13. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Swales, J. M. (1988). Discourse communities, genres and English as an international language. World Englishes, 7 (2), 211–220. Tishman, S., Perkins, D., & Jay, E. (1995). The thinking classroom: Learning and teaching in a culture of thinking. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Woodward-Kron, R. (2004). ‘Discourse communities’ and ‘writing apprenticeship’: An investigation of these concepts in undergraduate education students’ writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3 (2), 139–161. Zhao, H. (2010). Investigating learners’ use and understanding of peer and teacher feedback of writing: A comparative study in a Chinese writing classroom. Assessing Writing, 15 (1), 3–17. Zina Romova has been a lecturer and teacher in various areas of linguistics, applied linguistics and English as a Second Language (ESL) at universities and polytechnics in New Zealand and Europe for many years. Her research interests include language acquisition, approaches to teaching ESL writing and the impact of explicit knowledge and meta-cognition on language accuracy. Martin Andrew received his PhD in English from Otago University, New Zealand, in 1991 and worked and researched in language teaching and applied linguistics during his tenure at Unitec New Zealand from 2000 to 2008. His particular interests include learning through multi-media, learning in community, cultural identity and written identity. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Writing at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
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Assessing Writing
Teaching and assessing academic writing via the portfolio: Benefits for learners of English as an additional language Zina Romova a, Martin Andrew b,∗ a b
Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand Lilydale Campus, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Keywords: Portfolio assessment Multi-drafting Reflection Feedback Discourse communities
a b s t r a c t This paper examines the use of portfolios as pedagogical tools for developing academic writing. In particular, it considers the value of multi-drafting, where learners reflect on the learning of a text type as well as focusing on micro and macro aspects. The paper outlines a situated pedagogical approach, where students come to understand their improvement across three portfolio drafts and evaluate their learning reflectively. A multicultural group of 41 learners enrolled in the degree-level course ‘Academic Writing’ at a tertiary institution in New Zealand participated in a study evaluating the portfolio approach to building awareness of their own writing. Focus group interviews provided qualitative data, analysed using a grounded theory approach. Triangulating data came from student reflective memoranda written in response to each drafting process. We conclude that a multi-draft portfolio is an effective assessment tool, not only because it provides a feedback loop but also because it enhances learners’ understanding of writing as a recursive process. This provides them with aspects of academic writing literacy such as self-editing and the insight to reorganise academic texts by applying target genre and discourse knowledge. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Recent studies into the academic writing (AW) of students of English as an additional language (EAL) have focused increasingly on how learners “actually learn to write” in a second language and ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Z. Romova), [email protected] (M. Andrew). 1075-2935/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.asw.2011.02.005
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how teaching contributes to learning (Cumming & Riazi, 2000, p. 57). Such studies respond to Ferris and Hedgcock’s (2005) call for a framework which analyses “strategies and other cognitive operations involved in . . . drafting a coherent, meaningful, piece of connected discourse” (pp. 4–5). This article contributes to the formation of such a framework by investigating the benefits of teaching, learning and assessing EAL AW using multi-draft portfolios. We believe these benefits need no longer be ‘by-products’ of AW instruction (Katznelson, Perpignan, & Rubin, 2001) but, rather, pedagogic interventions. In this article we unfurl the strategies and cognitive operations demonstrated by learners of a course called ‘Academic Writing’ in EAL at a tertiary institution in New Zealand, and use our findings to add to the debate. Our overriding research question is “in what ways are multi-draft portfolios useful for the teaching, learning and assessment of AW?” Within the generality of this guiding question we wanted to discover the type of learning about genre and discourse that occurs during learners’ participation in a programme built around multi-draft portfolios, and how learners apply new knowledge in the form of academic literacy factors. Three core issues we foreground emerge from recent research: the value of peer collaboration, the importance of reflexivity and portfolio assessment’s formative potential. Rollinson (2005) demonstrates that peer writers “can and do revise effectively on the basis of comments from peer readers” (p. 24), a finding supported among Chinese learners (Zhao, 2010). Kathpalia and Heah (2008) show how the reflective component of portfolios helps learners to understand the significance of their learning experiences, enhancing communicative competencies across linguistic, cognitive, social and affective dimensions. Also, Lam and Lee (2009) examine how the formative potential of portfolios can be exploited in EAL classrooms. In this article, we aim to pull these threads together, describing student learning in an AW programme applying these insights. Specifically, we examine the literacy factors that impact beneficially on the development of AW skills among participants in multi-draft portfolio learning. These academic literacy factors include such skills as planning, paraphrasing, summarising, referencing, self-editing and ability to reorganise academic texts by applying target genre and discourse knowledge (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). 2. Theoretical background: Portfolios for assessing writing 2.1. Focus on process Within a process-focused pedagogy, a multi-draft portfolio is an effective teaching, learning and assessment tool not only because it provides a formative feedback loop and data about learners’ cognitive operations, but also because it enhances learners’ understanding of writing as a socially-situated process participating in “language socialisation” (Duff & Hornberger, 2008). It develops understandings of generic text types as flexible goals from likely target discourse communities (Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000), not as ideologically bound models. Since they can be used for summative (holistic) assessment at the conclusion of a course, multi-draft portfolios can assess both micro (mechanical, formal, accuracy-focused) and macro (textural, thetic, discursive) aspects of progress related to course aims, objectives and outcomes. As our conception of delivering AW using portfolios as instruments of teaching, learning and assessing as participation in language socialisation demands, we emphasise their role in socialising learners to target discourse communities (Borg, 2003; Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000). We have been influenced by the literature conceptualising writing and academic discourse as connected to social practice, present and future identities and imagined communities (Clark, 2003; Gee, 1990, 1998, 2004; Ivanic, 1998; Kanno & Norton, 2003), and the work of Granville and Dison (2005) and Kathpalia and Heah (2008) on the integration of reflection to foreground meta-cognitive awareness into portfolios. As Ferris and Hedgcock (2005) summarise, process-oriented writing pedagogies focus on how learners solve problems, discover ideas, express thought in writing, and revise texts (pp. 5–6). Their pedagogy emphasises a cycle of planning, drafting, revising and editing, often enhanced by responding, evaluating and post-writing (Seow, 2002, p. 304). The responding stage requires tutor input as well as peer collaboration (Ferris, 2002). To contextualise the text type in terms of its discourse community and to maintain focus on micro and macro aspects of textual development, pre-writing, peer and
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teacher feedback, and revision are fundamental practices for process-based approaches (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000). For EAL learners, process-oriented approaches present frequent opportunities to write in many genres and for many purposes (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000, p. 37). Multi-draft portfolios allow learners to attempt texts characteristic of a range of discourse communities and to develop appropriate academic literacies. The notion of academic literacy has been central for AW as it has changed from meaning a set of learnable skills to a socialisation process. Through this process, we explain university culture to learners so they can learn its requirements through apprenticeship (Paltridge, 2004; Wenger, 1998). These notions are expanded by constructionists whose views accord with academic literacy perspectives. Teachers who use portfolios as teaching, learning and assessment tools draw from a long heritage of theory. Below we present a brief overview of a range of theoretical perspectives, because we believe that each is informative about key facets of portfolio assessment. A central moment for portfolio assessment was the move from product-oriented pedagogy, which focused on a disembodied written text requiring strict adherence to native speaker (NS) expectations, to process-oriented writing, with its instruction focus on learner discovery. Crucially, this reflected a movement from an earlier behaviourist orientation to a less pre-scriptivist, post-modern view of language (Silva & Leki, 2004).
2.2. Approaches impacting process Along with representatives of cognitivist approaches, we see L2 writing as a process that includes invention, or prewriting tasks, drafting multiple versions, text-level revision, collaborative writing, feedback sessions, and the postponement of editing until the final stages of the composing cycle (Atkinson, 2003a, 2003b; Clark, 2003; Murray, 1992). For a cognitivist, writing is learnt, not taught, and the teacher is non-directive, facilitating a cooperative environment (Hyland, 2003, p. 18). Cognitivists have also established grounding for a post-process framework recognising writing as literacy (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005, pp. 8–9). This has opened the way to view writing as social, a transactional process involving mediation between writer and audience (Flower, 1994; Gee, 1996, 1998). Another approach that has had major implications for teaching EAL writing is contrastive rhetoric, since this approach characterises divergent expectations and their effects on L2 literacy development, including L2 writing skills. The learners’ interlinguistic process is foregrounded, a progress requiring explicit corrective input (Brown, 2002, p. 13). Gass and Selinker (2001) believe that direct instruction focusing on major contrastive features can accelerate the language learning process. In teaching and learning by portfolio, this applies at both the micro level of mechanics and the macro levels of discourse. In assessing factors impacting on the role of process in assessing AW, it is important to notice that cross-linguistic approaches teach us that “the organisation of writing is influenced by culture-specific norms, which could give rise to negative evaluations in intercultural contexts” (Bowe & Martin, 2007, p. 137). Teaching via portfolio allows students to interrogate culturally bound aspects of discourse in AW, and to notice and make judgments about cultural norms in text types. Overviewing research on the context of AW, Paltridge (2004) stresses the additional difficulty non-native students face with their lack of familiarity with the conventions and expectations of AW in English-medium universities, and the mismatch of the AW context in English-speaking countries with that in their home countries (Casanave, 2004; Hyland, 2002; Paltridge, 2001). With Grabe and Kaplan (1996), we take a genre-oriented approach to literacy development, acknowledging that literacies are situated in communities. Socialisation into academic literacy, they maintain, presupposes that writing is not only a “communication technology” (p. 47), but also the social practice Gee (1998) emphasises. Socio-literacy views have implications for literacy instruction, particularly in EAL communities (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). Hinkel (2002) also acknowledges that to generate acceptable texts students must master “the mechanical aspects of composing sentences, paragraphs, and larger units of discourse that correspond to the dominant genres of the academy, a specific field, or both” (p. 57). At the same time, “learning to write is part of becoming socialised to the academic community – finding out what is expected and trying to approximate it” (Silva, 1990, p. 17).
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In line with both socio-literacy and genre-based approaches, we maintain that through understanding readers and their expectations, writers shape texts to meet these expectations in targeted discourse communities (Flowerdew, 2000; Hinds, 1987; Hyland, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007; Reppen, 2002). For these reasons, writers, including those working with portfolios, gain control over the language and written genres of target discourse communities (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005, p. 9). While the focus in the process approach is on the writer, the genre approach in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has shifted the focus more to the read text with the goal of having learners enter their own academic discourse community (Hyland, 2003). Particularly influential to our conception is Flowerdew’s (1993) argument for drawing together genre and process. He proposes a pedagogy focussing on the process of learning about and acquiring genres. He argues for an “educational” rather than “training” approach to teaching and learning genres. Badger and White (2000) developed the notion that product, process and genre approaches to writing are complementary, while Hyland (2003) argues that the genre approach complements process views by adding focus on text/context, and emphasising the role of language in written communication. Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000) argue portfolio-based writing assessment can be used with any, but fits best with the genre-process nexus approach. Empirical studies are starting to bear this out. For instance, Kim and Kim (2005) found that a balance of process and genre approaches maximises learning gains among Korean learners of AW and Kathpalia and Heah (2008) demonstrate the value of embedded reflection in an AW course in Singapore to bring together process and product teaching approaches (p. 303). The situating of L2 writing – in the postmodern world (Atkinson, 2003a, 2003b), a view shared by poststructuralists and social constructionists, impacts on this study since it respects the identities negotiated in text formation. In this approach, language originates from and is constituted in situated context and community. The notions of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983), “discourse community” (Borg, 2003; Flowerdew, 2000) and “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) have been crucial to foregrounding the affective roles of investment and belongingness in generating writing characteristic of discourse communities. Swales (1988) and Johns (1995, 1997) argued that acceptance of a learner into such communities depends on collaborations of participants in the process. Speech and writing are social constructs, the users of which are members of discourse communities with shared repertoires in which form and function are understood and valued. Newcomers to the community need to be apprenticed into the particular discourse prevailing within it (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Woodward-Kron (2004) asserts the concepts of “discourse community” and “apprenticeship” provide rich contextual frameworks for investigating the social practices that shape students’ writing and provide a methodological framework for exploring the extent to which marker feedback attempts to socialise students’ writing to the discursive practices of the discipline. Since all writing, AW included, is deeply embedded in the world rather than existing solely as a result of classroom practice, social constructionism offers rich insights. It emphasises the notion of culture as a norm-referenced concept and takes into account the social and cultural contexts impacting L2 writing. It rejects a narrow focus on skills and the processes of writing in themselves. Social constructionism advocates collaborative learning, meaning students negotiate and achieve consensus at every stage in the writing process, and the product, which could be one student’s final draft of one portfolio item, for instance, represents the group’s best shared effort. Along with Atkinson (2003b, p. 49), we investigate “continuity, universality, and hybridity, whereas the culture concept has traditionally been used to investigate difference, localisation, and cultural purity”, responding to his call for teachers of AW to understand what they are teaching more critically. Flowerdew’s (2000) suggestion that programmes such as AW require a focus on engaging students in the types of activities they are likely to carry out in their academic studies is a post-structural critical perspective aligned closely to the perspective employed in this study. Such a perspective draws together themes from many of these approaches, most notably social-literacy, social constructionism and cross-linguistic approaches. At the same time, the critical perspective invites students to question, interrogate, even transform these activities (see Canagarajah, 2002; Casanave, 2004). Similarly, Canagarajah’s (2002) seeing “some of the hidden components of text construction and the subtler ramifications of writing . . . as a social act, a mediated construct shaped by the interplay between writer, reader and the community” (p. 1) is crucial to our consideration of portfolio assess-
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ment as allowing learner identities to be seen as flexible and sites of struggle. Usefully, he suggests a “difference-as-resource” perspective in order to deconstruct any ideological freight used in teaching materials and implicit in the act of teaching written discourses belonging to a powerful discourse community. Such pedagogy is compatible with teaching AW via portfolio as there is space in the reflective process for students to identify their participation in writing practices that affect their cultures and identities. Framed within a multi-cultural model of literacy acquisition, this perspective values writers’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and encourages them to explore issues such as gender, ethnicity, cultural difference and ideology, and to reflect on how these are reflected in particular texts, relating them to their own experiences and beliefs. 3. Portfolios in the ‘Academic Writing’ course The 14-week AW course in which our study took place is part of a BA (EAL) programme in an Auckland tertiary institution. The AW course aims to prepare students to join the multiple activities of their future academic community. It is made up of six contact hours per week and follows Brown’s (2002) prescription for curricular development. The assessment includes regular weekly multi-draft formative written tasks presented as a portfolio, which is graded summatively at the end of the semester. The portfolio tasks vary in text types, from academic description and evaluation to the argumentative essay, incorporating micro- and macro-level writing and learning. The structure of the course is such that the portfolio and the regular work on its tasks provide the development of a range of strategies for a summative timed classroom essay assessment. The portfolio procedure adopted in the study comprised collection, reflection and peer and ongoing teacher feedback (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000), with formative learning with input from peers, groups and the tutor occurring across three drafts for each item. With each first draft, students are required to submit a reflective commentary responding to prompts about (a) the purpose of the task, the requirement in terms of content, text organisation, discourse and language features for each of the text types, and (b) what they had learnt from writing the text, what their difficulties had been and how they would work to improve the areas of difficulties themselves. With the second draft, the students submit another piece of reflective writing, answering the question of whether the teacher’s feedback to the first draft and their own assessment of the writing and learning correlated. They identify areas of weaknesses and select those to work on urgently. The reflective component of learning, teaching and assessing by portfolio is formative (Andrew, 2005; Lam & Lee, 2009). Such formative strategies, together with the pedagogical interventions of teacher conferencing, peer review and collaborative group work, give the course cohesion and balance the high-stakes summative focus. The criteria for assessing the portfolio are performance-based and achievement-focussed, but allow for the measure of progress, response to feedback and self-reflexivity (Lucas, 2008). The AW portfolios comprise all drafts of work described in the curriculum plus reflections, ensuring that all AW portfolios are comparable. 4. Methodology 4.1. Participants 41 participants included first-year BA (EAL) major students and institute-wide degree-level students, taking the course to develop their ability to write and succeed in their major subjects. The participants were diverse: there were 14 male and 27 female, aged 17–39, who came from a variety of countries: China, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Iran, Russia, Mexico, Germany, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kuwait. 4.2. Instruments 4.2.1. Focus group interviews Our primary data come from transcriptions of open-ended focus group interviews (of 4 or 5 participants), recorded in week 13 and conducted by a researcher external to the teaching team. Interviewing
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was repeated over three student cohorts, with data collected from 41 students. This method adopts the rationale of open-ended interviewing: “the only person who understands the social reality in which they live is the person themselves” (Burns, 2000, p. 425). The interviews were semi-structured and lasted 30 min. Students were given the opportunity to check the transcripts for accuracy. Two researchers, the interviewer–researcher and the teacher–researcher, used open-coding to analyse the transcripts. Then they located lexical and thematic patterns within the data (Brice, 2005; Glaser, 1998; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) ensuring that themes emerged plausibly (Burns, 2000, p. 434). This approach involves locating recurrent themes and organising data around them to provide a basis for content analysis (Brice, 2005, p. 162; Burns, 2000, p. 435). Students were asked how the various aspects of the course had impacted on their understanding of AW and were encouraged to respond freely. All participants gave their permission for their words to be quoted, and all quotations reported here are attributed to pseudonyms. 4.2.2. Reflections on portfolio tasks The learners regularly wrote reflections of 250 words accompanying their first and second text drafts. These reflective writings contain answers to the question on the purpose of the written task, the learning that has occurred in the course of fulfilling the task, students’ self-reports about areas of progress or lack of progress, and projections about what actions they need to take to ensure progress after they finish AW. We recognise that self-reporting in written reflections as part of an assessment has its limitation, since learners may only disclose what they want the teacher–researcher to hear. For this reason, the primary data were, as has already been stated, the focus group interviews, preserving observational insight. The reflective writings within the portfolios were used for triangulation. 5. Findings and discussion Our study identified a number of themes from the focus group data triangulated with student reflections. Here, we describe and discuss four themes: (1) the challenge of referencing; (2) the development of understandings of discursive forms; (3) the range of learning capital inherent in the draft-focussed portfolio-based writing process; and (4) the impact of teacher feedback. 5.1. Theme 1: The challenge of referencing The first theme, the acquisition of referencing techniques and conventions, points to the crucial issue of “unacceptable intertextuality” in academic literacy (Abasi, Akbary & Graves, 2006), and was the most prominent theme (34 responses). Respondents referred to the role of paraphrasing and summarising within it. Wan’s observation is representative: “Here we focus on references. In China, we didn’t work on this”. “Here”, writes Selina (China), “we must take care to list where everything [we quote] comes from, every other people’s writing.” Erma (Korea) writes that her key learning consists in “how to put in other people’s ideas to connect my ideas, how to link and support my ideas with those of other people.” Clearly, discourse appropriation is an issue here, and teaching summarising and paraphrasing in the context of referencing skills may address the issue. Erica (Korea) speaks of report-writing: “Lots of people have the custom to copy and even in the report at University, when they write a long report, they just copy this part or that part.” Helena (Korea) made a similar observation: “I didn’t know how to write an academic essay before. When I went to University, I just copied some sources summarised, I did not put in my own words.” Jung (Korea) states that referencing is his greatest challenge: “I can’t accept the concept of referencing. I know how to do it in my mind but I really hate doing it.” Four other students said focussing on referencing prevented them from being able to attend to wider discourse structure: referencing became an obsessive diversion. Yuka (Japan) said that APA gave him “headache” (focus group laughter of agreement can be heard). Learners’ consciousness of their battle with referencing is due to two factors: the academic literacy imperative in operation throughout our institution and the fact that the second focus group interviews occurred at a time when referencing had recently been taught. Referencing is nonetheless a significant academic literacy skill acquired during AW.
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5.2. Theme 2: Understanding discursive forms Twenty-one students reported increased awareness of the discourse features of texts. Most comments referred to the essay, the ultimate task within the portfolio. With this we observed an increased awareness of appropriate tone, register, syntactic selection and reader-centredness. Ella (China) observes: “conventions can help us to create a form and improve the writing overall in terms of reader understandability.” Jing, after describing her writing habits in “the Chinese way”, resolves that now she is “trying to use other types of introduction: ‘funnel’, statistics, funny stories, to start my essay to interest the reader.” Managing the content of paragraphs and developing support sentences from a topical base constitutes Anna’s main learning: “Every paragraph has one idea, but in China, we can have one main idea and you can give another main idea at the end of the paragraph to lead to the next paragraph.” Grace (China) is also acutely aware of the reader-centredness of her target text: “My main problem is how to stay focused on a topic. I think if I overcome this, my writing will be logical to the reader.” With regard to understanding discursive forms, several sub-themes emerged, which are presented below. 5.2.1. Recognising thetic structures The data contained a range of comments on organisational thetic conventions, showing emergent understandings of discursive forms and their impact on written confidence: “Thesis is the basis of text organisation. It’s a leader of thought” (Selina, China). “I didn’t know how to write a paragraph, didn’t write structured essays”, writes Tara (Iran), “so it’s given you more academic skills and you feel more confident about using them now.” Ella observes that “conventions help us to improve ‘CC’ [coherence and cohesion] . . . seeing the whole piece of writing is important instead of throwing ideas into a structure.” Miwa (Korea) observes that understanding conventions of structure affects the coherence of an essay and gives it its overall quality; Anna (Korea) concurs: “conventions of ‘CC’ are fundamental to a good essay as business students focus on structure and apply the AW skills to business.” Next, Farat (Iran) notes that the convention of starting with the thesis and then writing topic-based sentences is useful for those who wish to write academically in other subjects. “Learning these conventions”, writes Jung, “aids us in getting a formal tone, writing logically and understandably in ‘the right way’.” 5.2.2. Reacting to western conventions Another emerging sub-theme was the contrast between the discourse conventions of the students’ culture and that of Western AW. Yuka argues that AW in English is “straight, linear, focuses on the idea; but in Japan it is not straight, it is more tangential, with the main points at the end”. Farat also states that paragraphing poses a challenge: “it is opposite to English. In English, we state the topic sentence and then support it, but in my language we support at the end of the paragraph. It is a major difference.” Wan is similarly cross-cultural: “AW is hard for me in both Chinese and English because of the vocabulary and ideas. As for the writing style, Chinese AW is not that straightforward and to-thepoint, so it’s less direct than the Western academic style. We always put our thesis at the beginning, but they don’t do that in Chinese.” This theme is also described by Helena (Korea): “When we start an academic article, we don’t point out the topic straight away, we need to write a lot of background to support the topic. In English, we need to set the main idea in the first sentence, so the structure’s different.” Erica (Korea) adds that “in general writing, we prefer to put the important sentence at the end.” Esther states that “English style requires evidence to follow the thesis, but Korean allows us to write in a more dramatic way.” These are all summarised by Miwa: “Learning is culture as in Korean the layout and form are totally different.” These citations are representative of a large number within our data which suggest that academic literacy factors can be enhanced by increasing learner awareness of cross-cultural contrasts. There also seems to be some resistance to the primacy of the thesis-first-topic sentence-first convention: “the idea of genre comes from Western culture” (Sue, Korea). Farat (Iran) disparages the convention of conclusions: “Structure is completely different and topic sentences are a western idea. In Iran, conclusions are not merely summaries”. Mohammed (Iran) was vehement too: “only if you have the vocabulary first is the structure with the thesis and the structured paragraphs possible”.
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Either perversely or subversively, Yuka (Japan) said that he had acquired a consciousness of ‘Western’ AW strategies, but those he used were “from the Japanese way”. As cross-linguistic and critical perspectives indicate, discursive forms should allow for less imperialistic teaching texts and more cross-cultural expression and creativity. 5.2.3. Learning from generic text types Seven students (four Korean, three Chinese) commented that a genre-focussed approach with an emphasis on normative conventions can enhance their awareness of target discourse communities. It can also draw attention to lexical, syntactical and discursive levels of writing. They comment that this pedagogy is more creative than that of Korea, where students look for discursively locked ways of writing, formula and models. Focussing on discursive features within the genre approach provides learners with a scaffold that did not exist in their home cultures. Farina remarks that Kuwaiti students “have to write, but they don’t have to be very serious about that, students, they copy”, a comment supported by Mabel (Iran): “students just choose a book and copy from the book. They don’t have to worry about discourse.” 5.3. Theme 3: The learning capital of portfolios 5.3.1. Editing Discovering the importance of editing and proofreading emerges as a key subtheme. A typical description comes from Miwa (Korea) who focuses on the meta-cognitive aspects of self-editing. Miwa explains that she used to “write from start to end in one draft, but now take[s] more time, self-correcting and editing as [she goes]. She now writes “thesis and topic sentences, drafting with consciousness of cohesion and coherence.” Yuka (Japan) agrees: “Halfway through the portfolio I started editing. I’ve become comfortable with this. I think it’s good – the process to follow.” This is connected with students’ discovery of the importance of proofreading: “I got a chance of proofreading. Now I might find my mistakes before I hand in my paper. There’s always something new to find in your work that you can improve” (Jing, China). Teaching editing also helps learners to dispense with a rigid obsession with form: as Jane (Germany) observes, “editing means looking at the whole structure, not just the grammar.” 5.3.2. Planning Planning and organisational skills, such as outlining and brainstorming, emerge as learning gains notably among 24 learners from Asian backgrounds, who specifically comment on them. Vinna (China) emphasises the value of prewriting and outlining: “they control my ideas when I write my essay – very central.” For Jenny (China), a chance to apply outlining also made an impact: “I have learnt many things through [AW] class. Above all, outlining is the best thing for me. This is the first time for writing an outline to be a task, but I have practised through the whole process of these tasks. Through these tasks I realise that outlining is most important for writing an essay . . . now, I have learnt how to write an outline, and I feel that if I prepare the outline well and in detail, then the time of writing an essay gets shorter.” For Emma (Korea) time-saving is capital too, but so is adapting the literacy of planning: “I used to do the writing directly; it means I only thought about the topic for a few minutes and started to write. It was not practical because it took me a long time to do it. The process of AW (pre-writing, outlining) helped me to organise ideas simply and start to write easily.” Kirma (Kuwait) views the process as assisting textual organisation: “the process – pre-writing, outlining and so on – controls my ideas when I write my essay.” For Ella (China), “brainstorming. . . is the cornerstone that makes your whole essay link well.” 5.3.3. Reflectivity The value of reflection is not only evident in the students’ reflective writings on their perceived learning gains; it is also explicitly mentioned as capital. “For me [Jenny, China] the reflection stage was special as it was new. . . You need to think about why you repeat a mistake.” Reflection, elicited in relation to particular and situated learning tasks (Granville & Dison, 2005), brings into consciousness the possibilities of autonomy identified by Lucas (2008, p. 32) and meta-cognition described by Tishman,
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Perkins and Jay (1995, p. 67). As Jane (Germany) writes: “Now I might find the mistakes before I hand in my paper.” The students’ reflective work (and we also regard the week 13 focus group interviews as serving a retrospectively and holistically reflective function) evidenced the four areas of improvement that were the focus of Kathpalia and Heah’s (2008) study of reflection within AW portfolios: linguistic, cognitive, affective (the enjoyment experienced in the production of their written texts) and social. “Because of reflection”, wrote Miwa (Korea), “I come to know myself” (sic). 5.4. Theme 4: The impact of teacher feedback Teaching using a multi-drafting portfolio involves not only formative feedback from peers, but also tutor input during the monitoring phase of a writing lesson, the workshopping of group and individual work or as a result of formal marking of a draft. Such an approach benefits perceptions of their lexical capabilities: “AW changed my style because I listened to feedback from teachers and peers and could change my language and improve my vocabulary” (Ihman, Somalia). It also caters both to the individual and the group: “the process shows about me, not only about typical students’ errors and mistakes” (Mohammad, Ethiopia). What emerges most of all is the usefulness of tutor feedback, usually about form, in the context of multi-drafting. Erma (China) states: “regular practice-feedback-self-correction leads to improvement”. Esther (Taiwan) stresses that as long as she can get diagnostic help (about lexical appropriacy and grammatical forms), she can use a range of resources “to find the right way by myself.” Learners’ reflections offer extensive examples of specific impacts of teacher feedback. We supply examples of successful tutor intervention at word, sentence and discourse levels. Firstly, Una (Korea) writes, “the teacher’s feedback about the expression in the second sentence was really helpful. When I compared it with the sentence which she recommended, I could recognise which sentence was more smooth and natural.” Then she diagnoses formal features for her to notice and practise (articles and use of “besides”) and sets a strategy for further practice. Secondly, tutor feedback on subordination in syntax impacted on Emma (Korea): “it gave me a chance to think about the length of my sentence. Even though I do not use long sentences, I always challenge myself to try a long sentence. However, I realised that I need to be more careful; otherwise, I might fail to convey the meaning successfully. Sue (Korea) insists on tutor input on particular areas of anxiety: “with articles and plurals, I cannot catch the errors before someone tells me.” Thirdly, teacher input at the discourse level is valuable too, as in this reflection from Grace (China) that ties together other threads of our findings: In Chinese you focus on personal feelings. An essay written in English talks about the author’s opinion or discusses a specific phenomenon. For example, in my first essay on pollution I put emphasis on how angry people are, and seldom mentioned about why, how and solutions. My tutor’s feedback helped me understand my problem. Although most students’ insights relate to impact on form, the most interesting impact of teacher feedback is its potential to motivate learners to enjoy the practice and process of AW: My writing is not great yet, but I can say one thing: I am actually enjoying it. I struggle to explain why, but I always look forward to getting the teacher’s feedback to see if it is the same with what I thought about my text. It gives me confidence when I am able to find flaws myself and I quite like redrafting (Jane, Germany). 6. Conclusions Our findings suggest instructors and researchers can gain insights into learning AW within a multidraft, process-based portfolio pedagogy by seeking convergences in the thinking of writing theorists, most recently those advocating the process/genre nexus, informed by insights from constructivism, socio-literacy and critical perspectives. Our study supports the claim that the generative aspect of portfolios helps learners assume more responsibility for their advancement in written proficiency, providing a valuable, authentic, learner-controlled experience of learning (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000).
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A pedagogical focus on process in managing portfolio assessment provides reflective space for the negotiation of identities as well as bringing particular literacies into learners’ consciousnesses. For instance, our study suggests that learners report developments in understanding the strategic if not yet the ethical importance of referencing. They also report learning gains in developing academic discourse features such as structuring through thetically and authentically utilising genre conventions corresponding to text types within the portfolio, most notably the essay. We note the beginning of critical resistance to the imperialism of genre, and advise the use of Canagarajah’s (2002) strategies and a pedagogy analysing the cultural and ideological contexts of generic texts and forms (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). Throughout the findings, we see learners become aware of their progress in both academic literacies (referencing, paragraph and text structuring, paraphrasing, summarising) and process-writing strategies for AW (pre-writing, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, self-editing, proofreading, responding to peer and tutor feedback). The data reveal learners’ new understanding of editing as examining the whole text structure rather than only grammar and vocabulary and a deeper appreciation of the processive stages of writing in AW: pre-writing, outlining, drafting and several redrafts. Learners report changes in their perceptions of AW, such as their movement from writing one draft only to developing a piece of writing via the re-drafting process and their advanced awareness of cohesion and coherence. They gain a sense of progress and hence report increased confidence, which is empowering. Our study emphasises that when students are actively engaged in reflecting on the difficulties and challenges involved in their learning, they gain a deeper appreciation of key academic literacies and AW strategies. The meta-level questions students addressed in their reflections may in themselves have helped to promote thinking, learning and the acquisition of academic language. We indicated evidence of analytic thinking – of students making connections and starting to see the “big picture”, although most expressed gains at the syntax level of learning only in relation to the purposes and outcomes of each writing task. These responses reveal awareness of the need to make analysed choices between their prior understandings and perceptions and the newly acquired knowledge in the process of writing. The reflective process generated a level of awareness and evaluative thinking concomitant with the learners’ language learning histories, investments and current first-year undergraduate level. Emerging from the study, too, is the notion that sharing their reflections helped the students discover what they knew or thought about a subject. This captures the essence of the write-to-learn philosophy in education, and when we write-to-learn what we think, we are practising critical thinking in its basic form at the levels of application, analysis, evaluation and synthesis. Through reflection, students were able to draw meaning from the process of writing academic texts in various genres, becoming conscious of their new and changed understandings, and learners and teachers participated in a conversation about those changed understandings. Self-assessment via reflective practice proves crucial as it changes the student as an emergent writer and an agent in control of both literacy factors and presentation of ideas. Our findings support the pedagogical intervention of providing learners with multiple options for drafting and redrafting within genre. Along with exponents of the process-oriented writing approach and socio-literacy theorists, we concur that such an intervention can impact positively on learners’ written academic literacy. At the same time, they can negotiate their cross-cultural and individual ‘voices’ within the conventions of the discourse. As researchers and instructors, we have become aware of the ongoing comparisons students resort to in order to acquire AW literacy, in particular, of the culture-fraught nature of the conventions of AW. There is space within a genre-based, portfolio-led, process-approach pedagogy to accommodate the discursive understandings of the full multicultural range of our learners. This study of teaching and assessing using multi-draft portfolios emphasises the importance of seeing learning not only as a cognitive/meta-cognitive process, but also as a social one where learners view teaching texts and their own versions of them in the contexts of the discourse communities of which they are artefacts. Discourse communities are inextricably connected to student investments in AW and multi-draft portfolios represent a union of assessment and learning. Finally, we conclude that student enjoyment of learning by multi-drafting, although a matter of affect, is, together with the other learning gains described in our findings, encouraging news for teachers who wish to use portfolios in teaching and assessing AW.
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