Performance Operating Units and Meaning: Fusion Theory and Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

Performance Operating Units and Meaning. Many investigations of writing pedagogy and students’ writing performance have focused on gaining a better understanding of language production, commonly based on handbook dicta relate to sentence-level concerns. The easy availability of computers in the 1980s offered a new way to examine student writing and sentence-level concerns by studying “performance units” characterized by various writing behaviors, such as starting, stopping, substitutions, deletions, and revision. Given that revision is central to effective writing, computer analyses allowed researchers to investigate not only the frequency and types of student revisions but also the duration of their performance units. Various studies, however, have reported that the insights drawn from performance units research has not resulted in either better pedagogy or better student writing. Drawing on sociolinguist theory as well as Fusion Theory, this paper examines the value of performance units in writing pedagogy from a linguistic perspective that emphasizes the interactional and transactional nature of writing.