The Transaction between Teachers' Comments and Students' Revisions: Catalysts and Obstacles.

The Transaction between Teachers' Comments and Students' Revisions: Catalysts and Obstacles A case study of three college writers enrolled in a required expository writing class was conducted in order to explore the effects of teachers' comments on students' revision processes and the text drafts they produced. The data incluae the drafts of two completed essays for each writer, reporting-verbal reports, and retrospective interviews. Blind scoring by three raters of the drafts in each text series revealed that three essays generally improved over successive drafts. Further analysis revealed that improvement was characteristic of the two participants who confined their revisions to micro-level, meaning-preserving changes. It was discovered that the participant whose texts consistently suffered losses in effectiveness over successive drafts was the writer who engaged in macro-level, meaning-changing revisions. Ker case is summarized in this report. Close textual analysis coupled with analysis of the verbal reports and interviews suggested that this writer had engaged in substantive revision, that she had used revision to discover new meanings and that the teacher's comment had acted as a catalyst. Obstacles to improving this text emerged as a result of attempting to delve more deeply into the issues in the text and to transform a narrative into an argument. Thus, the writer grew while the text suffered losses in control. As a result, the researcher concluded that improvement in writing is not linear, and that growth of writers must be valued as well as the growth of their writing. Teachers' Comments and Students' Revisions 1 The Transaction Between Teachers' Comments and Students' Revisions: Catalysts and Obstacles The major thrust of the research on composing over the past twenty years has been the recognition that there is a marked disparity between the composing processes of real writers in real writing situations and the precepts of composition pedagogy in ordinary classrooms. Such research has defined these distinctions and has called into que.tion the utility of what has been termed the current-traditional model (Young, 1978). It is natural ng-standing tradition and researching alternatives result in an urgency to develop practices more compatible with burgeoning theories. In composition studies, progress has taken just this course. Though a unified theory of composing is still emerging, pedagogies have proliferated under the "new paradigm" (Hairston, 1982). One area of research to receive considerable attention in the new paradigm is revision. There are now whole collections of research on revision (Sudol, 1982) as well as separate pedagogies of revision (Mohr, 1984). One way to account for this emerging attention is that research within the new paradigm has quickly changed our view of revision as a one-time, after completion of a draft activity (Rohman, 1965) to an on-going mental activity informing composing at any and all points (Berthoff, 1984; Flower & Hayes, 1981a, 1981b; Gebhardt, 1984; Perl, 1980; Formers, 1980). Another reason for such a change may rest upon the fact that a significant difference between the processes of novice and experienced writers is their revising habits (Sommers, 1980; Faigley & Witte, 1981). With increasing sophistication, researchers have been able to specify the sorts of revisions which are characteristic of student and expert iiI.ters. As a result, attention has been able to focus on Teachers' Comments and Students' Revisions 2 ways to encourage student writers to use the power of revision in a manner more characteristic of sophisticated performances. Since teachers have traditionally opent countless hours commenting on students' text, explorations of commenting practices and their effects have been forthcoming. Particular attention has been paid to the kinds of revisions students engage in when they receive written feedback (Beach, 1979; Ziv, 1984). But the overall effects on the quality of students' texts when they employ expert-like strategies has been largely overlooked. Let me summarize, then, what research within the new paradigm has thus far yielded in the form of operational definitions and predictions about the revision process generally, the nature of novice, as opposed to experienced writers' revising practices, and the role of teacher written commentary. About a normative theory of revision: 1. Revision is an on going mental process informing composing and not a stage (Berthoff, 1984; Flower & Hayes, 1980, 1981a; Murray, 1978; Perl, 1979, 1980; Sommers, 1980). 2. Writers revise in order to discover their meanings and shape them for a reader (Perl, 1980; "A Revisionist View," 1982;