Literary Discipline in the Margins

Abstract

When literature instructors respond to student writing in introductory courses -the courses that set expectations of our discipline -what might our written comments suggest about the values of literary study? Written comments can be used in a variety of ways. They give us an opportunity to provide individualized instruction on the sentence-level problems that vary from student to student, and they can let us communicate how we understand students' logic or ideas. They give us a space to reinforce concepts introduced in the classroom, as well as an opportunity to correct misreadings. Comments might inspire a student's imagination or encourage a student's own process of discovery. With this wide range of possible purposes, our marginalia send messages beyond a simple assessment; what we choose to focus our comments on conveys information about the values of the course, as well as about the value of writing and the nature of our discipline.This article explores what students in introductory literature courses pick up from written comments regarding the concepts that teacher-scholars in the field identify as foundational for writing in the field of literature. Much recent scholarship on teaching and learning has focused on the importance of identifying and making explicit the ways of thinking and communicating that are specific to particular academic disciplines. Yet, most of the work on response to student writing has focused on writing for composition courses. And while attention has been turning more recently to writing assessment in the disciplines or in so-called content courses, very little scholarship has Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

Dialogic feedback and literary disciplinary knowledge in L2 writing instruction: how attitude to feedback influences academic achievement

“…As previously noted, the role that fostering an awareness of disciplinary knowledge plays in L2 writing instruction is becoming increasingly recognised (Hyland 2013) despite the fact that the field is still in its infancy. Likewise, there has been a growing appreciation of the importance of making the demands of the discipline more explicit in writing instruction within literary studies (Wilder and Wolfe 2009;Schreibersdorf 2014). One reason that there might have been a link between attitude to disciplinary knowledge and improvement between the two essays, was that the assessment criteria for the essays heavily weighted literary knowledge and understanding and teachers assessing work would have primarily focused on this criterion in both their feedback and scoring.…”