Gesture and Collaborative Planning

Abstract

When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they manipulated, wrote on, and pointed at. These gestures suggested a group pretext that helped group members translate abstract goals into concrete plans. However, the close proximity of gesture to the physical act of writing may mislead students into thinking that the tricky work of translating abstract ideas into final written form had already been completed. Gestures and adaptor movements (such as fidgeting with a pen) also seemed to conspire to help individuals control the conversational space and call attention to themselves as writers. Implications for future research on gesture and collaborative writing, gender, and writing technologies are discussed.

Multimodal Resemiotization and Authorial Agency in an L2 Writing Classroom

“…Multimodal representation and communication have long been part of writing studies, beginning with the basic visual and spatial elements of traditional paper-based texts, and expanding more recently to audio and video elements in multimedia texts (Lotherington & Jenson, 2011; Palmeri, 2012). Although multimodality long predates the digital era in human communication, with the expansion of digital multimedia over the past two decades, multimodality has come to increasingly dominate students’ textual landscapes and writing processes (Adami & Kress, 2014; Anderson, 2013; Fraiberg & You, 2012; Kress, 2003; Selfe, 2009; Wolfe, 2005). Writers often strategically weave modes and discourses from different times and places into their texts when they engage in writing that integrates semiotic resources into a multimodal ensemble (e.g., Jewitt, 2006; Jewitt & Kress, 2003).…”

Writing(s) at the Crossroads

“…Researchers who are interested in both, the writers' views and their activities, tend to combine verbal and observational methods and data for multi-perspective insights (e.g. Tashakkori & Teddlie 2003;Woolley 2009;Wolfe 2005). As could be shown with Progression Analysis in projects similar to Idée suisse, journalistic practices of inventing quotes could only be identified by confronting the journalists under investigation with recordings of their material writing activities on screen.…”

Ideological tensions, pedagogical gaps : multilingual engineering scholars' response to language variation in academic writing.

“…Haas and Witte (200 I) found that gestures made in oral conversations helped engineers visualize the physical realities they were discussing, which in turn facilitated them in revising their written documents. Wolfe (2005) likewise found that a group of students in a technical writing classroom "used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they manipulated, wrote on, and pointed at" (298). This interaction space not only facilitated the students' in collaboratively generating ideas, but it also possibly demotivated students from engaging in the actual process of writing up the findings because "they see the written document as secondary to the primary text of the conversational space" (326).…”

“…There is also another body of scholarship on academic writing in the disciplines (WID) that has addressed the problematic perceptions and treatment of language and writing in academic disciplines like the natural sciences, technology, and engineering (Herrington, 1985;Jenkins et aI., 1993;Winsor, 1996;Haas & Witte, 200 I;Reave, 2004;Zhu, 2004;Wolfe, 2005;Jordan & Kedrowicz, 2011). In spirit, this body of work follows the tradition of scholarship by Rose (1985) and Russell (1989Russell ( , 1991Russell ( ,2007, who have historicized and demonstrated what they call the "myth of transparency" of language 6 and the "myth of transience" Dfwriting in the academic disciplines.…”