Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.
Chapter 2: The Design of the Study
This chapter, as noted, is how the study on the writing processes of 12th graders was designed. Here are the nitpicky details on the students who participated:
- 8 students participated:
- 5 girls, 3 boys
- 6 white, 1 African-American, 1 Asian-American
- They came from 6 high schools around Chicago:
- 1 all-white, upper-class suburban school
- 1 ethnically and economically diverse school north of the city, well-known as one of the nation’s best
- 1 ethnically diverse, lower-middle-class suburban school
- 1 ethnically and economically diverse Chicago city school
- 1 “ghetto” Chicago city school that was almost exclusively black
- 1 private school affiliated with a local university
- All the students were considered to be average to above-average in intelligence
- 6 of the students were recognized for their above-average ability as writers; the other 2 were noticed for their interest in writing (not necessarily their aptitude for it.)
So, basically, a group of above-average students from a slew of different backgrounds in and around Chicago.
Here’s what the students did during the study:
- Session 1: had a 20-minute conversation with the researcher, then composed out loud and wrote down a small piece in whatever mode or form they wanted. This was tape-recorded and observed. Then, the students had to write for homework a composition about a person, event, or idea that interests them.
- Session 2: another out-loud composition. Then, the students was interviewed about their planning/prewriting techniques that they did to write the previous week’s homework.
- Session 3: the students gave a “writing autobiography” – they talked about all the writing and reading related to writing that they had done in their lives so far. 6 students brought in writing samples.
- Session 4: the students had to write an imaginative piece of writing between Session 3 and 4 (7-10 days) and keep track of the prewriting and composing strategies they used while writing the piece. This description was tape-recorded.
Why was the study conceived this way? So that students would write both “reflexive and extensive” modes. It didn’t work out that way. The first 2 “compose aloud” sessions and the first homework composition were supposed to elicit personal, reflexive writing, but the writing that was produced was not reflective or “engaged.”
And, only 6 of the 8 subjects did the last assignment (recording their composing process for writing the piece of poetry or fiction.)
Oh the design of the study…
Laurie and Tanya and I were just talking about how cited this work is in other scholarship (over fresh bread with roasted garlic cloves, fresh from the oven, smeared across it) and, yet, the “study” itself seems limited. I recognize the context of early 1970s composition scholarship, but I’m still troubled by the way in which this VERY limited sample assumes things – and comes to stand in for such a larger “12th grader” group.
Questions – What if there were more than 4 sessions? What if students weren’t pushed to be self-reflexive in the middle of the study (3rd meeting)? And, one of my favorites – What does oral commentary do to written processes and vice versa? (The question comes from my lingering miffiness about the use of the words “primal” and “primative” to, ironically, help both Burke and Langer talk about the value of non-discursive language/writing.) This study, simply in the way it is designed, seems to assume that composing is a written act to be described with either oral or written commentary.
Likewise, Emig talks about how the “stimuli” didn’t produce “expected” outcomes. How do these “expected” outcomes alter the results themselves? (I’m also thinking here about our class with Becky… about methodologies that distort research datat, etc.)
Comment by Trish — September 23, 2006 @ 11:40 pm |
Trish! I was supposed to respond to Laura’s! Kidding. You can respond too.
Anyway, yes I’m very curious as to know why this text is valued so much in our field. Perhaps it’s because the use of case studies hadn’t been used in an exploration of the composing process prior to that point. Perhaps in spearheading this kind of exploration, Emig jump-started a new trend in the field. (Hmmm….I wonder what other scholars used case studies up until this point and if their results were highly valued and/or created some big ephiphany in our field. Anyone know?) Her “subject” selection is definitely problematic and I wonder what made her decide to meet for a mere four sessions. If she wanted strong results that would benefit the field, I imagine she would have to conduct case studies that followed these students for an extended period of time. Rather than creating an artificial writing environment for the students to “perform”, I think it would be more beneficial if she observed the students in a natural writing environment specific to the student, whether it be their bedrooms, their classrooms, the lunch room, a coffee house. It is in their “natural habitat” (sorry for the animal reference) where the composing process can be studied best. These sessions seem to have been forcing these students to perform on the spot. What if they didn’t sleep the night prior? What if their apathy kicked in full force during the session? Also, as Trish mentioned, the reading aloud business is definitely problematic. I think Emig might have been on to something here, but as I mention in my blog, the ability to articulate one’s thought processes aloud is (I imagine) extremely difficult. Therefore, I think an extended study would have granted the students opportunities to demonstrate their thinking processess in other ways. Perhaps, Emig could have asked the students to simultanously write their thought processess and the assignment. This seems to me more in line with an in-depth exploration of the writing process.
Comment by tanyakrod — September 24, 2006 @ 4:20 pm |
Whew. Just handed the baby off – typing with one hand takes ten times as long as typing with two!
I agree with the problematic nature of this study (8 students?!?) and the number of sessions. What I thought was very interesting was that 2 of the 8 didn’t even complete the tasks for the fourth section. Emig said one of them “refused.” Refused to do a writing study? What gives??
I think it would be very interesting to do a study like this now, but do it on a much larger scale. How do students compose? When I was at the University of New Hampshire, I took a composition pedagogy class. When we read about process pedagogy, a composition PhD student wrote a paper describing his actual composing process for that paper. (like – delete two sentences, cut and paste, etc.) It was so interesting and so telling of the non-linear nature many of us have while composing on computer (compared to pen and paper.)
That garlic smashed on bread sounds good. Yum.
Comment by revolutionlullabye — September 25, 2006 @ 12:54 am |
In response to Tanya’s question “I wonder what other scholars used case studies up until this point and if their results were highly valued and/or created some big ephiphany in our field” I did some (negligible) checking and came up with a comparison:
The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18): a report from the Schools Council Project on Written Language of 11-18 Year Olds, based at the University of London Institute of Education, 1966-71, published in 1975 by James Britton, Tony Burgess, Nancy Martin, Alex McLeod, and Harold Rosen, in which Britton’s included article utilizes his daughter as a case study and is one considered very influential to the field during the time.
I came up with this at: http://write.techsophist.net/?q=node/535&PHPSESSID=1c8719ba51b874a2da0eb88c812c5a67
which is not in itself highly important, except for the teacher’s response to the students’ responses, which I will repeat here. I should also say I do this because of Trish’s comment that she needed to remind herself this study was revolutionary in the 70’s. Looking at my blog, I think I need to be reminded. I am quite critical. I only move past the “criticize-stage” when I am commenting on Tanya’s blog about the piece, well after my own (so, should I need to say it: This is not directed at you, Laura. Nor at our other classmates).
Anyway, the teacher’s remarks:
“…I hope that in future readings responses, you all consider an alternative to the agonistic ‘this article wins, this article loses’ response. Truthfully, all the readings this semester should have something good to offer, some insight into the large field of Composition Studies. Looking for connections between your readings will benefit you far more than playing the tear-down-the-icon game, and will give you a better chance of constructing your own extension of that knowledge—-which would be a very good thing indeed.”
I think her (his?) remarks are quite apt, although, were I one of the students chastised, I might argue:
in order to assert ourselves as independent scholars and thinkers, it it often necc. to distance yourself enough to feel you have a right to comment on these published and accomplished authors, and one can often do that through criticism. Sad but true. ‘Nuff said.
Comment by Terri — September 25, 2006 @ 3:15 am |
just jumping into the mix here—Emig did us a great service by opening up these questions for us, but it is essential that we question and analyze what the research provides and does not provide. It’s also useful to discuss Emig’s own position as a researcher. In the late 1960s when she was doing this research, she was one of the few women out there working in this area. She was facing down the boys’ club in academia, and there were simply not many writing researchers out there–let alone women writing researchers. Heck, there weren’t Ph.D. programs in Rhet/Comp as we know them. She was, as Earl Buxton put it in the introduction to the book, “charting her own course” (v). Others have called her a “maverick.” She adapted the technique of case study suggested by the authors of _Research in Written Composition_ (1963), which opened the gates for people like Perl and others to follow. In other words, she was one of the first, and she opened a vein of research that proved quite rich. I’ve come at this text many, many times, and I’m always struck by its energy, its hopefulness, its concreteness.
Case studies in the 20th c. go back to Freud–remember his infamous study of Dora? Case study is all over his work, and the psychological tradition gets handed down to Emig and modified accordingly. Terri, you’re quite right to point to Britton et al (we’ll be reading some segments from that book) as another site of case study . Case study research has fallen on troubled times in our field for all the reasons that people have pointed to across the blog entries this week: difficulties with generalizability of such studies, problems with researcher perspective, the veneer of scientism compromised by psychologizing, etc. Case study research seems to have bled into different areas of research in our field now: classroom ethnographies, narrative research, analysis of student writing/interviews with students. So I don’t think case study research is completely gone from our field, by any means; it is presented in different ways and theorized differently. What are ways we are still engaged, consciously or unconsciously, in case study research in our field?
Comment by Eileen E. Schell — September 26, 2006 @ 1:57 am |