Research Motivation, Topic, and Question

My interests for this pedagogical study started with personal concerns that we weren’t doing much reading in our English 101 classes. I believe that reading can be the cornerstone to good writing practices—it certainly is for me. Knowing how to read as a writer can help you identify features and forms of new genres, to implement those features in your own writing, and to ultimately be a self-directed, adaptable, and successful writer of new genres. While we do some reading as part of the current curriculum, it is largely done outside of class and it is difficult to account for students having done it, which brings up two concerns: first, that students may not actually know how to read college-level texts and how to read them specifically as writers, and second, that they may just not do the readings at all.

Largely in an effort to research and reasonably justify integrating more reading in to my course next quarter, I chose to do my RAB readings in the area of reading-for-composition. I came across several interesting articles and research on ways to use reading as the jumping off point of writing activities. The two that I read for class very importantly define the specific ways to close read in order to prepare for writing.

Around the same time as this initial research, I had noticed that many of my students failed to focus very specifically in the course of their literacy narrative on a single moment. In order to revisit that project and practice specificity, we did an in-class reading and writing assignment. As a class, we did something of a “close reading” exercise where we all looked together at two different examples of screenplays and identified screenplay features based on comparing and contrasting those examples. Based on the features we identified as a class, I then asked them to do a fastwrite where they took the moment from their literacy narrative and began to re-write it as a screenplay while trying to use the features we had identified. While they did not produce particularly good screenplays, almost all of them were able to focus very specifically on the moment from their literacy narrative more directly than they had in their original literacy narrative. That got me thinking about the ways inter-genre close reading could impact writing.

With my teaching performance group, we developed a reading/composition workshop that began to experiment with related close reading and writing exercises. The purpose of our workshop was to explicitly demonstrate guided close reading (that is directed with writing in mind) and then to exercise writing in a way that was directly impacted by that reading. For my pedagogical research study, I want to investigate not only how these kinds of guided, linked reading-writing workshops could accelerate understanding of genre, but also whether repeatedly practicing structured, genre-centric reading and writing can prepare students to identify and write for specific genres under self-direction. My study would use both guided reading/writing workshops and self-directed evaluations and practices of new genres. My ultimate research question is whether inter-genre compositional studies (i.e. deliberate reading followed by same-genre writing) can have a positive impact on writing outcomes in new genres.

 

Possible Resources:

Andersen, Rebekka. “Teaching Visual Rhetoric as a Close Reading Strategy.” Composition Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 15–38.

Broad, Bob. “Strategies and Passions in Empirical Qualitative Research.” Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies. Nickoson, Lee, et al. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. pp. 187-209.

Dollins, Cynthia A. “Crafting Creative Nonfiction: From Close Reading to Close Writing.” Reading Teacher, vol. 70, no. 1, July 2016, pp. 49–58. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/trtr.1465.

Risko, Victoria J., et al. “Drawing on Text Features for Reading Comprehension and Composing.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 64, no. 5, 2011, pp. 376–78.

Salvatori, Mariolina. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition.” College English, vol. 58, no. 4, 1996, pp. 440–54. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/378854.

Tremmel, Michelle. “Forget Formulas: Teaching Form through Function in Slow Writing and Reading as a Writer.” Composition Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, Fall 2017, pp. 113–129. Web.

  

Possible Methodology

Fundamentally, my methodology would involve implementing two different kinds of genre reading/writing: guided close reading/writing workshops in different genres, and writing projects in undiscussed genres with reflections on genre features. Writing outcomes would be compared both between writing samples from the guided/unguided prompts, and against the “control” group of writing samples from this quarter (where every project was preceded by a “genre talk” wherein genre features were dictated to students). Exactly how to specify successful/unsuccessful “outcomes” is pending further research on evaluating qualitative, humanities data, and on determining the specifics of the workshops and reflection prompts—in hopes that those specific parameters could guide the definitions of the “outcomes.”

The guided close reading and writing workshops would happen approximately bi-weekly. They would look a lot like the workshop my group put together for our teaching performance. Students would, as homework, read an example of a given genre (likely, different students would be assigned different readings—but all in the same genre) and complete a worksheet directing them to reflect on the reading, find its structural features, and identify its rhetorical situation and choices. After in-class discussion to find some consensus on the structural and rhetorical features which are characteristic of their readings as a genre, they would do an in-class writing in that genre, utilizing as many of the features that we identified as a class as possible. Possible genres for these workshops include: short fiction, comic strips, poetry, screenwriting, email writing, field notes, author statements, and/or newspaper articles.

While a great deal of time would be spent in class discussing and identifying genres which the class would not be writing in for their big projects, students would be left more to their own devices for determining genre structures of their projects. For these assignments, varied but genre-specific examples would be supplied and read as homework. However—unlike the workshops—we would not explicitly spend time in class identifying the features of the genre of the project. Each project rubric for final grading would include the requirement that they submit, along with their project, a brief outline of the features of the genre (likely the same worksheet used each time to identify the genre’s structural features and rhetorical situation) and a reflection and self-assessment of how well their submission fulfilled those features. Rubrics, though they would have this ID and reflection on genre, would have little to no description or requirement related to genre.

As of right now, evaluation of results would be based on two things: first, by how clearly they are able to identify and meet genre parameters individually; second, by comparing from person to person (or group to group) trends in the structural and rhetorical features that are identified. Similarities would indicate that inter-genre close reading/writing was impacting their ability to read for, identify, and write towards new genres. Disparities between their answers would point to inter-genre studies as an unreliable means of teaching to identify and write for different genres. I also plan to “demote” projects 3, 5, and 7 from full projects to assignments and possibly to use them as the topics of a couple workshops. This would also create a kind of internal control for how guided vs. self-directed evaluation of genre features impacts writing outcomes.

I intend to do some further research on the ways composition and humanities research tends to interpret qualitative data in order to more clearly define the ways I would evaluate results.

A positive result (i.e. inter-genre studies positively impacts writing outcomes) would be expected to look like relatively consistent structural features across submissions for new genres. Reflections on their projects would be used to indicate the features they identified, which could then be compared to the “control” group of this quarter for the presence of distinctive features within project genres. This quarter, students were given the important features of the genres of their projects in the form of “genre talks” which, in my class, mainly consisted of discussion the rhetorical situation of each genre. Research quarter versus control quarter final submissions could then be compared for overall quality of submission for the genre, and for their demonstrated understanding of the genre.

A negative result (i.e. inter-genre studies negatively impacts writing outcomes) could come in several forms: reading/writing burnout, student frustration, inconsistent manifestations of genre structural features, qualitatively worse final project submissions compared to “control” quarter, lack of understanding of project genres upon student reflection, etc. Given how many factors are at play within this study, an entirely neutral outcome could potentially be more difficult to identify. Essentially if project outcomes were qualitatively the same as in the “control” quarter, it may indicate that inter-genre studies have no impact on writing outcomes.