Reviewing Chris Anson's “Talking About Writing: A Classroom-based Study of Student Reflections on Their Drafts.”

I will now examine in more detail Chris Anson’s investigation discussed in “Talking About Writing: A Classroom-based Study of Student Reflections on Their Drafts.” This study, along with Sharon Pianko’s, are the only two research studies within rhetoric/composition that use the terminology of reflection as they focus on in-task reflection.

In some ways, Anson’s research can be seen as an extension of Pianko’s work. Both researchers are trying to learn more about the novice writers in composition classrooms by comparing them to expert writers. Pianko’s experimental study concluded that a key difference between the writing processes of these two groups was the reflective pauses and rescanning that occurred while these writers wrote. In her study, she had students compose an essay within one classroom period and observed them as they wrote. She also questioned them right after they wrote. From this research, she noticed not only a difference in the number of pauses, but a difference in their quality as well. She describes the pauses of the remedial writers as “unfilled” because they looked outside their writing as they paused. For the more experienced, traditional group of freshman writers, she noticed a pattern in their pauses:

When I observed these students writing, I noticed a pattern: they paused, rescanned, then paused again. These behaviors were indicative of certain mental processes: a pause was to plan or “rehearse” (to use Don Murray’s term) what to write next—what Janet Emig calls a “filled pause”—a rescanning to reorient oneself with the writing to see if the “rehearsal” was a fit, and again a pause to reformulate or revise the mental plan or “rehearsal.” (276)

Pianko describes these pauses and rescannings as the behavioral manifestation of reflection during composing and claims this behavior is the most significant finding about the composing process of her study. She concludes, “The ability to reflect on what is being written seems to be the essence of the difference between able and not so able writers” (277). The implication for teaching she advocates, then, is for teachers to incorporate teaching strategies into their curriculum that would promote proficiency in these behaviors of reflective pausing and rescanning.
--important echos with Bereiter and Scarmandalia, even Schon’s reflective conversation with the situation going from what is in the head to what is on the page, what is on the page is the situation of action

Anson’s focus of inquiry is a bit different. His interest is on how writers represent emerging texts through retrospective accounts of their writing, or what he calls reflective metacommentary. Whereas Pianko focused on what Anson calls “the ‘live’ or ‘concurrent’ processes of writing”(62)—similar to that performed by cognitive researchers like Emig and Flower and Hayes when they examined composing-aloud protocols—Anson is interested in retrospective accounts of in-progress drafts. In contrast to composing-aloud protocols, Anson claims these retrospective accounts allow writers to reveal both tacit and focal decisions as they composed. The terms focal and tacit come from Polyani’s description of different aspects of thought. Focal refers to our conscious thought and what we are attending to, while tacit knowledge is predominantly unconscious and refers to those decisions and strategies we make and do without thinking about them. Anson states that our understanding about the thinking that goes on as writers compose and the relationship between focal and tacit thought “is at best murky” (62). He believes retrospective accounts offer a “representation, or model, of writing” (63) where the researcher can better see the thinking of a writer:

retrospective accounts allow writers opportunities to uncover tacit decisions as well as focal ones. The process of standing outside their writing, looking it over, recalling what they did when they composed it, and thinking about what else they need to do taps into both the conscious creation and manipulation of text and what may have been, at the time, decisions made in the background of their attention. (62-63)

These retrospective accounts are not without their critics and limitations. These critiques include the limitations of the subject’s memory, the influence from the prompt on what the writer recalls, and the tendency for writers to embellish what happened (63). Tomlinson, as Anson points out, has identified the real strengths of these retrospective accounts: “although these accounts may not be useful in trying to understand precisely what happens during the writing process, they show us the writer’s representation of the writing event and its context” (Anson 63). These representations show us a window into how the writer thinks about their own writing and act of writing. Citing the work of T.B. Finley, Anson elaborates on the what these narratives about the composing of a text offer: “retrospective accounts give us insight into the writer’s knowledge, modes of inquiry, relationship to the text, social construction of an audience, stance, role, and routines” (63). As data, then, these retrospective accounts of in progress drafts are a rich source for researching students’ perspectives on writing.

It is worth noting that Anson’s data source closely resembles the Writer’s Reviews that form the main data for this inquiry. Each is a reflective account performed between drafts. A few differences exist, however. Whereas Writer’s Reviews are done in writing and done in response to a prompt, the retrospective accounts Anson examines were done verbally (into a tape recorder) and were not guided by strict prompts. Also, Anson’s reflective metacommentaries occur between only the first and second draft; whereas, Writer’s Reviews are done between first and second as well as second and third drafts. Despite these differences, Anson’s subject of inquiry closely resembles the focus for this research study. His arguments for what these reflective accounts reveal, then, provide a strong confirmation for the richness of Writing Reviews as a focus for research. Anson’s stance toward researching these pieces of reflection, however, differs in one significant way. He looks at these reflective accounts in a similar way as researchers studied transcripts of compose-aloud protocols—as a way to tap into writers’ thinking. My inquiry certainly is interested in what these accounts reveal about writers’ thinking between drafts, but it is also interested in what having students reflect in this way does. If we return for a moment to Flower’s “open questions” about reflection, we can see her two questions within the different stances toward this data between Anson and this inquiry. Flower’s first question was what kind of knowledge reflection generates, and we can see that Anson’s inquiry explores this epistemological dimension of reflection. Flower’s second question asks if having students perform reflections as a pedagogical activity is worthwhile (is it just a luxury?). This second question addresses the value-added assumptions we have about the benefits of having students reflect, and it is a question that Anson does not address. This inquiry differs from Anson’s because it approaches these reflective accounts for what pedagogical influence asking students to perform them has upon their thinking and writing. It asks not just what these reflections show but also what they might do.

Anson’s research is interesting not only because of his different stance toward the data, but also for how he approached the analysis of this data. In order to “move beyond mere impressions” in his analysis of these retrospective accounts, he turns to Halliday’s theory’s of language. He leans on theory to help him make sense of this data: “I found Halliday’s (1973) functional approach in language best captured what I was observing informally in the taped accounts” (64). He interpolates Halliday’s theory so that in his analysis he coded the ideational function as referring to content matters, the interpersonal function as referring to discussions of audience and purpose, and the textual function as referring to discussions of the formal and linguistic features of the writing on the page. These categories proved useful to Anson, but interestingly he also noted the significance of the kairotic nature of these reflective accounts: “The more tapes I studied, the more compelling became this orientation of time in the students’ talk” (65). This observation about the importance of time leads him to generate three more categories for students’ discussions about their writing: retrospective comments focusing on the past, projective comments focused on what the writer intends or wants to do in the future, and temporal comments where the writer talks about the text as it is in the present tense. Anson then put these two sets of categories into a grid with Halliday’s theoretical concepts along one axis and the temporal aspects along the other axis:

Ideational

Interpersonal

Textual

Temporal Retrospective Projective


Figure NHY: Anson’s coding grid for analyzing between-draft reflections

This coding scheme, however elegant and sensible, differs also from this inquiry’s approach to analyzing similar reflective pieces of writing. By using theory to make sense of data, Anson has done what Glaser and Strauss say often leads to a bias or predisposition in our perception of the phenomena of study. These categories may account for much that is going on within student reflections, but they also may miss or ignore other features. As a grounded theory study, this research project seeks to generate a theory from the data rather than impose any theory upon the data.


As Anson analyzed his students’ reflective accounts of their writing, he particularly sought to find differences between strong, proficient writers and poor writers in his classes. Anson observed that the reflective accounts of weaker writers who lacked control in their writing talked almost exclusively in retrospective and textual terms. Stronger writers who displayed much more control in their writing process were observed to shift among functional and temporal categories. Weak writers spoke in dualistic terms where writing was seen to be either “correct” or “incorrect.” These writers also had little capacity for uncertainty and tended to defer to authority. Looking to Newman’s extension of Perry’s model of intellectual development, Anson fit these writers into Newman’s stage of Absolutism. In this stage of attitudes toward knowledge, individuals “[believe] in the absolute truth or falsity of knowledge” (70). Although not referring to the work of King and Kitchener’ Model of Reflective Judgment, these writers would fall within the stage of pre-reflective thinkers. More proficient writers, in contrast, fell within Newman’s third stage called Evaluativism where the individual “accepts various opinions and beliefs, but does so from a conviction that some ideas are more valid (better reasoned, more logical, etc.) than others” (70). These writers might entertain multiple suggestions for revising a problematic feature of their writing before deciding upon the best path for revision. In these writers he also noticed a relationship between tentativeness or the ability to accept and explore uncertainty and the writers’ ownership of their future decisions. These writers seemed more able to assess problems within their writing and work to solve them.

In contrast, the weaker writers were much more focused upon outside authority for making decisions about their writing and seemed incapable of acknowledging uncertainty. Particularly present within these writers’ minds was their image of this outside authority and standard of correctness: “Instead they measure their texts against what must be a very sketchy, nebulous image of the teachers ‘standards,’ an image they try to fill in and clarify from various sources (including direct appeal)” (70). This writerly superego dominates their model of writing and limits their activity of writing within its bounds. Not surprisingly, Anson finds that these writers don’t reach any level of reflective thinking: “Ironically, the tapes themselves, designed to create an opportunity for reflection, become for these students an extension of the process of teacherly judgment” (70). Placed in a position to reflect, these writers are unable to do so.

Anson ends his article stressing two points. The first point is his key finding from his informal study: “Although no informal analysis like this one can yield foolproof conclusions or razor-sharp patterns, it appears that there is a strong relationship between proficiency and the blending/shifting of functions in scheme I had developed” (72). Put in other terms, Anson finds a strong correlation between students’ ability to engage in reflective thinking and their competence in writing. His second concluding point has to do with the implications of his research for teaching writing. His research has indicated the significance of how students think about and represent their writing. He believes that as teachers we need to focus as much or even more on developing students’ models of writing as their success on any particular writing assignment: “I have come to value the development of their [students] models of writing even more than I value the improvement of their texts” (73). He shares his own methods for moving students toward more evaluatistic and reflective thinking through the kinds of assignments and feedback he gives to his students.

Anson’s research upon reflective writing that closely resembles the kind this inquiry is focused on has a number of important implications for this research. His observation that strong writers are also good reflectors raises a number of questions. What link exactly is there between these two capacities? Does good reflection cause good writing? Also, where does the capacity for strong reflection come from? Is it as King and Kitchener imply something determined by their developmental stage of epistemic cognition? Anson’s observations seem to provide strong confirmation that students’ developmental level of views of knowledge, in fact, does have a strong influence upon both their type of thinking and their writing. However, can we prompt a growth in students’ reflective thinking, and if prompted will students’ produce more proficient writing? Anson seems to believe we can at the least move students in that direction. He states, “By asking students to tell me more about their intentions, I can prompt them to go beyond a mere report of ‘having done something’ and towards a discussion of their struggles and possible directions” (73). This question surrounding the teacherly prompting and promoting of reflective thinking through the assigning of reflective writing tasks is what this inquiry is all about. If provided guidance and the opportunity, will students truly reflect? Can we say that development is possible through this prompting, and what influence does engaging students in this teacher-prompted reflection have upon their writing? As my inquiry seeks it own answers to these questions, the work of Anson will certainly offer important perspectives.