Building Awareness of Language Structures with Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting

The recently adopted Common Core State Standards emphasize the importance of language forms and structure in learning to write. Yet most language arts teachers have either downplayed the linguistic structure of writing in favor of process approaches or emphasized the teaching of grammatical structures outside of the context of authentic writing. Technology-supported writing activities tend to mimic these two approaches, with teachers using technology for either process-based writing or for grammar drills. Most teachers are not well prepared to teach linguistic structures in context or to deploy technology for that purpose. This chapter introduces a new tool called Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF) that has powerful affordances for teaching linguistic and textual structures in the context of authentic written genres. Drawing on an empirical study and an action research project conducted by the authors, they share evidence for the value of using VSTF and point to ways that it can be used in the classroom to help students master language structures and employ them in their composition.

Adding the “Digital Layer”

Opportunities for teachers to engage in professional development that leads to substantive change in their instructional practice are few, yet the National Writing Project (NWP) provides one such “transformational” experience through their summer institutes (Whitney, 2008). Also, despite recent moves in the field of English education to integrate digital writing into teacher education and K-12 schools (NWP, et al., 2010), professional development models that support teachers’ “technological pedagogical content knowledge” (Mishra & Koehler, 2008) related to teaching digital writing are few. This case study documents the experience of one teacher who participated in an NWP summer institute with the author, himself a teacher educator and site director interested in technology and writing. Relying on evidence from her 2010 summer experience, subsequent work with the writing project, and an interview from the winter of 2013, the author argues that an integrative, immersive model of teaching and learning digital writing in the summer institute led to substantive changes in her classroom practice and work as a teacher leader. Implications for teacher educators, researchers, and educational policy are discussed.

The Writer in the Reader

Digital reading environments are redefining the relationship between reader, text, activity, and sociocultural context. This chapter explores the nature of engagement, collaboration, and reader/writer response, as sixth-grade students from Ireland and the United States read and responded to electronic books within the context of an online global literature circle. In response to the readings, students composed digital thinkmarks, which served as springboards for subsequent written asynchronous message board discussions. Findings from this qualitative case study suggest that peer collaboration in an online literature discussion forum enabled the construction of social identity, community building, and a sociocultural situated response and engendered immersion in, involvement with, and interpretation of texts.

Exploring Tools, Places, and Ways of Being

This chapter explores how writers respond to interactions with readers and audience members in two technology-mediated writing contexts: a Hunger Games fan’s use of FanFiction.net and a classroom using Scholar to write original narrative texts. The authors look across the two spaces to analyze similarities in how the technology is used to foster interaction with readers and develop writers’ craft through these interactions. In particular, they analyze how writing functions in each space as a tool, a place, and a way of being. By considering the affordances of these two contexts, the authors argue that technology is changing how we write and learn to write, in and out-of-school, by connecting writers with an audience that can significantly shape their goals, skills, and processes.

Error or Strength?

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has indicated that teens are writing more than ever and that much of this writing is done in digital spaces. However, digitalk, the informal language used, often breaks from Standard English, and adults are concerned about the effects of digitalk on literacy skills in general. This chapter reports research that focuses on what language teens use in their digitalk and why they make the choices they do. With analysis of digital writing from 81 adolescents, researchers identified 18 conventions of digitalk. In a second phase of research, teens were surveyed and interviewed about their linguistic choices. Findings indicate that adolescents attend to audience, and they consider personal voice in their digital writing. Teens develop these competencies in a community of writers – outside of school.

The Disappearing Trace and the Abstraction of Inscription in Digital Writing

Due to increasing digitization, more and more of our writing is done by tapping on keyboards rather than by putting pen to paper. As handwriting is increasingly marginalized both inside and outside of schools, and children learn to write by typing “ready-mades” on different kinds of keyboards rather than by shaping each letter from scratch, we ought to acknowledge the physical and sensorimotor aspect of writing, in addition to the more typically studied cognitive and linguistic aspects. The shaping of letters and words in handwriting involve distinct kinesthetic processes that differ markedly from the kinesthesia involved in tapping keys on a keyboard. The ways in which we use our fingers and hands play an important role in perceptual and cognitive processing; hence, the shift from handwriting to typewriting might entail far-reaching cognitive as well as educational implications. This chapter reflects on some largely neglected aspects of the ongoing shift from handwriting to typewriting, focusing in particular on potential cognitive and phenomenological implications of the increasing abstraction of inscription entailed in typing on a keyboard, and the intangibility of the resulting text on screen compared to that produced by handwriting with pen on a material substrate such as paper.

Game-Based Writing Strategy Practice with the Writing Pal

In this chapter, the authors consider the value of educational games to support students’ writing strategy acquisition and practice. Sixty-five high school students participated in a summer program using the Writing Pal, an intelligent tutoring system designed to support adolescents’ persuasive writing across multiple phases of the writing process. Overall, students who interacted with the full W-Pal intelligent tutoring system (i.e., animated strategy lessons, game-based practice, and essay-based practice with feedback) were better able to articulate new writing strategies than students who engaged in intensive essay-based practice by writing and revising twice as many essays with feedback. Importantly, performance within several educational games was found to be a significant predictor of strategy acquisition. The authors argue that these strategy benefits arise from the ways in which strategy-specific, game-based practice activities support the decomposition of task goals, clear operations for achieving those goals, compensation for individual differences, and motivation to practice.

Preparing Young Writers for Invoking and Addressing Today’s Interactive Digital Audiences

Twenty-first century technologies, in particular the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, have transformed the practice of writing and exposed it to interactivity. One interactive method that has received a lot of critical attention is blogging. The authors sought to understand more fully whom young bloggers both invoked in their blogging (their idealized, intentional audience) and whom they addressed (whom they actually blogged to, following interactive posts). They studied the complete, yearlong blog histories of fifteen fifth-graders, with an eye toward understanding how these students constructed audiences and modified them, according to feedback they received from teachers as well as peers and adults from around the world. The authors found that these students, who had rarely or never blogged before, were much more likely to respond to distant teachers, pre-service teachers, and graduate students than to their own classroom teachers or peers from their immediate classroom. The bloggers invoked/addressed their audiences differently too, depending on the roles that they had created for their audiences and themselves. The authors explore how and why this came to be the case with young writers.

Rebooting Revision

In the past decade, digital feedback tools to review and revise student writing have proliferated. Scholarship in rhetoric, composition, and professional writing has yet to consider how digital feedback systems might offer a promising alternative to traditional and arguably broken feedback practices. This chapter offers a review of the latest scholarship on the digital feedback and revision practices of students and professors, and demonstrates the use of a heuristic customized to college writing applications and programs, which can help professors review and assess new digital tools used to manage an electronic feedback and assessment protocol.

Situating Technology-Facilitated Feedback and Revision

In this chapter, the authors present a case study of one writer, Tom, to uncover how his writing was mediated by school-level and individual factors. The online writing environment had three major affordances for Tom in this 8th grade classroom: the online writing environment increased Tom’s access to peer response, motivated him write to a higher standard for an audience, and both scaffolded and increased his response repertoire. However, the larger policy context in which Tom’s writing was embedded placed constraints on the classroom and school. Other constraints included Tom’s lack of access to a computer at home, the teacher’s highly structured task, and the online tool’s assignment of random reviewers that forced Tom to continually write to a new audience of peers who lacked the previous context. In light of the situated nature of Tom’s writing and responses in this classroom, the authors make recommendations for policy, research, and instruction.