Isn’t it funny that Britton is from Britain? I looked specifically at Chapters 3, 11, and the appendici.
Britton, James N., et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: MacMillan, 1975.
In his study, Britton looked at 2122 pieces of writing by 500 pupils (ages 11-18) from 85 classes in 65 schools in England. He, along with his team of fellow researches and teachers, classified the writing through two categories: the sense of audience and the overall function of the piece. He found that 92% of the writing fell into two out of ten “sense of audience” categories: pupil-to-examiner and teacher-to-learner. Also, the majority of the writing fell to in the “reader-as-participant” category, as opposed to the “reader-as-spectator” category. From these two major findings, Britton claims that the emphasis of schools on testing inhibits students from developing expressive writing and writing for a larger public audience.
Quotes/Things of Interest:
Britton’s inquiry is aimed to “provide a map of the uses of the written language.” As he states, there has not been any exhaustive work on how writers develop. We know what adult, professional writers do, and we have studied the writing of small children. But what lies in the gulf? (53)
Britton points out that upon receiving a task, a student must either “make the task his own,” turn it into something else that he is involved and interested in, or “remain uninvolved” and just go through the motions, writing without engaging thinking. I wonder how many students slide by in school by doing that…how many WRT 105ers on that “Mind the Gap” essay? (54)
I think the binary scales that the team came up with while reading through the 2000+ scripts are useful beginning categories to looking at writing:
- generalizing upon experience/particularizing an experience
- presenting a view/exploring to arrive at a view
- writer’s persona close to self/persona remote from self
- interpreting experience shared by writer and reader/relating experience not shared by reader (55)
”Writing for public audience develops out of writing in a teaching rather than a testing situation” (192)
“In effect, development in spectator-role writing is from the earliest stages a move in the direction of a public audience” (193)
Can you tell I’m interested in public audiences?
Britton explains the difference between the two types of teacher/student relationship: open (learner-teacher) and closed (pupil-examiner): “the closed view sees teaching as instruction, while the open view sees learning as exploration and discovery.” (194)
“Curricular aims did not include the fostering of writing that reflects independent thinking; rather, attention was directed towards classificatory writing which reflects information in the form in which both teacher and textbook traditionally present it.” (197)
“What the sample as we find it suggests is the surprising degree to which learning situations in different subjects, with different syllabuses, and with the whole background of potentially different roads from experience into words and back to experience – the degree to which such learning situations (to judge by the writing) grow more and more like each other, more and more concentrated on one use of the written word.” (198)
A Couple of Thoughts
- How has the influx of APs and national exam distorted the tasks of writing to reflect on those “pupil to examiner” and non-expressive writings even more?
- How has technology affected the writing of students (Britton claims it might decrease the need for writing – I argue the opposite)
- Britton says he is going to linguistically analyze the different function categories of writing. Did he? What did he find?
Peace out!
Hi Laura. I long to be in the photo at the top of your blog rather than sitting at my computer, but at least the sun is shining in through my windows as I type.
Anyway, I suspect in regard to your third thought/question is that a summary of Briton and others’ findings on function categories can be found on the chart at the end of the PDF Eileen sent. Rather than simplify all writing by broad intentions, this chart categorizes writing into transactional, expressive, poetic and additional categories such as pseudo-informative, pseudo-conative, and dummy run.
What is especially interesting about this chart to me is the specific acts writers engage in, which are ommitted in the typical categories of exposition, narration, argument, and description. What I am trying to figure out is where analytical writing fits in. Analytical writing is clearly not conative, (even though it could be argued all writing is persuasive). Nor is it expressive. Obviously, analytical writing is created by the special contexts of education, but I don’t think Briton and others would categorize analytical writing here. That leaves informative, which makes sense, but doesn’t if you try to locate analytical writing within one of types of informative writing.
Am I just not understanding the chart then or is analytical writing really absent? If analytical writing is absent, is the reason analytical writing does not seem present because teachers are not asking students to engage in analytical writing at the secondary level? Perhaps, literay analysis is being assigned, which would fall under poetic, but what about other forms of analytical writing. I ask because my students seem blown away be the intellectual process of analysis. According to them, they have never written analytically before, and some seem to feel they have never had the opportunity to develop an analytical mind during their education. This concerns me. I wonder if Briton and others’ chart is evidence of the claims my students make about not being assigned analytical writing tasks……
Comment by legries — October 2, 2006 @ 6:15 pm |
Laura -
What really struck me as I read your entry was the commentary on instructor perspective… the open or closed instructor. How amazing that as we read all about writing process pedagogy and studies, this blog posting (I think) is the first of our community to attempt to place instructors within the student writing process?! There seems to be a mythology working that places all power, emphasis, and responsibility in figuring out the student writing process (or counterpart concerns in post-process) as it functions within a writer, between student writers, between student writers and their global “audience”, etc. But what about the immediate feedback of the always present guiding instructor? What about the student mythology that places the instructor-audience in the trumph card position? I’m reminded of Emig’s study that has the researcher, in step 3 (of 4) asking students to reflect upon their own processes. How do we account for this interaction? How is this made a transparent part of the student writing process? And how might this (un)willingness to acknowledge the instructor role here be important to the process/post-process discussion?
Comment by Trish — October 2, 2006 @ 10:05 pm |
You wrote:
“How has technology affected the writing of students (Britton claims it might decrease the need for writing – I argue the opposite).”
I’d love to hear more about that point–perhaps a digital process rhetoric and/or digital post-process rhetoric?
I, too, like that he is Britton from Britain. Now is the green coastline that of our beloved Britain or of Ireland? Or none of the above?
Comment by Eileen E. Schell — October 3, 2006 @ 3:42 am |
That photo is from Inverness, Nova Scotia. I took it on my honeymoon. We hiked the cliffs that overlooked the ocean and found beach after beach, some accessible, some not (like the ones in the photo.) But the ones that we did find were amazing – sandy with clear, warm water. We’re going back with the boys next summer. Can’t wait!
Comment by revolutionlullabye — October 3, 2006 @ 5:18 am |
As for the comment about technology decreasing the need for writing, I think that the technological boom has resulted in the increase in the numbers of students who are writing on a regular basis, through email, IM, blogging, etc. It might not be in the “traditional” mode of written discourse, but it still requires students to translates their thoughts into prose, and I believe students now are much more comfortable committing their thoughts to the screen (if not to the page) than they were twenty years ago…
…just a theory…
Comment by revolutionlullabye — October 3, 2006 @ 5:20 am |