The Challenges of Writing in School: Conceptualizing Writing Development Within a Sociocognitive Framework

Abstract

This article argues for a conceptualization of school writing that emphasizes how cognitive and sociocultural factors interact. In academic, professional, and affinity-based communities, an emphasis on standards of quality drives the adoption of such practices as revision and peer and expert review. In school, everyday writing practices center around demonstrations of knowledge (taking notes, writing summaries, providing personal responses to readings, completing worksheets, etc.) where the teacher is often the sole or primary audience. This context tends to privilege knowledge-telling strategies and prioritize fluency and efficiency of expression. When these sociocultural factors interact with cognition, group differences tend to emerge, as knowledge telling provides few opportunities for disadvantaged groups to overcome barriers linked to differences in prior knowledge, fluency, attention management, or motivation. It also affects the efficacy of instructional practices, because cognitive ability and social identity affect how students internalize the metacognitive concepts and strategies characteristic of expert writers.

Measuring Autistic Writing Skills: Combining Perspectives from Neurodiversity Advocates, Autism Researchers, and Writing Theories

“…Although these issues are not specific to studies of autistic individuals, they impact our ability to interpret grouplevel differences accurately given that the remote context further emphasizes that the purpose of writing is to produce a text in response to an assigned task (e.g., Schuster, 2004). These concerns align with highlights offered by Deane (2018) that suggested writing activities used in school settings are often more straightforward than teachers realize, which adds yet another layer to needing to account for how the purposes may influence text production across study-specific writing communities.…”

Readability and Comprehensibility Analysis of the English Language Comprehension Passages of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination in Ghana

“…The absence of sentence complexity in the prescribed texts read by students may also have a negative impact on students" the capability to bring out the complexities in their writing (Deane, 2018;Jagaiah, Olinghouse, & Kearns, 2020). Heilke, Joslyn, & Aguado, (2003) suggested that readability has to be one of the prime measures for the selection of a textbook.…”

Error Analysis of English Sentence Structure in Students’ Written Paragraphs

“…Thus, students can express themselves through writing. In the learning process of writing skills, students describe their knowledge to teachers, and teachers use students' writing products to know the extent of their comprehension and to gain some points as to provide learning reflection for them (Deane, 2018;Graham et al, 2017). In such a way, teachers view students' writing works by drawing upon a formative assessment-informed principle to find better ways to improve students' further learning of English writing in a better way (Burner, 2015;Han & Fan, 2019).…”