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A socio-cultural view of writing

development

The development of writing abilities, therefore,
may be investigated on at least four levels
– the phylogenetic—the emergence and practice of
writing at the species level
– the socio-cultural—evolving writing practices at
level of human systems of interaction
– the ontogenetic—writing development which
impacts the individual and their identity,
knowledge, and social relations
– the microgenetic—small incremental changes in
individual writing abilities

What do people learn when they learn
to write?

Towards what developmental
outcomes are you aiming your
students?

What are the most effective means of
fostering student writing
development?

What are the mechanisms of change in
writing development?

The problem
 From the socio-cultural perspective individual
human psychological processes emerge
through culturally mediated, historically
developing, practical activity (Cole, 1996, p.
108), rather than a natural progression through
fixed stages or steps.

• After children learn to read?
• When they begin to write words
conventionally?

A Different Perspective
• Literacy development begins long before
formal schooling
• Children learn about reading and writing
simultaneously in their everyday experiences

Learning to write is about cognitive
development and social participation

Children engage in writing to
explore the characteristics of
writing materials
the cognitive development

Children write to engage
in positive interactions
with adults and to form
relationships with peers
the social participation

What motivates children to learn
to walk and talk? To learn
anything?

Socioculturaltheoryofwritingdevelopment

By what mechanisms
do children learn to
walk and talk? Do
children learn
anything?

What are the Basic Skills of
Writing?

• Spelling and punctuation?
• Thinking, memory, and language
a(speaking), plus fine motor skills.

Children’s handwriting develops
sequentially “through stages of
drawing, scribbling, the making of
letterlike forms, moving to well-
learned units, invented spelling,
and conventional orthography”
(Boscolo, 2008)

It gets complicated from here
Writing, as a higher order psychological process,
is always context specific and context dependent
i.e., writing activities are contingent, and stand
in direct relation to tools that are embedded in
particular historical, social, and cultural
circumstances.

• As Luria’s studies of twins showed, “culturally
determined forms of information processing
come to be relied on more and more, the
children’s environment will have a greater
effect on behavior than does their genotype”

Writing development also happens
one learner at a time.

Writing ability involves more than mastery of fixed sets
of practices, traits, or “abstract systems of linguistic
forms” (Volosinov, 1986) because “the organizing
center of any utterance of any experience is not within
[the individual] but outside in the social milieu
surrounding the individual being” where “signs,
language systems, and technologies of communication
emerge in the process of interaction between one
individual consciousness and another” (Volosinov, p.
93), i.e., the organizing principles of discourse originate
and are centered in ongoing dialogues (Burke, 1941,
pp. 110-111).

A Dialogic Model of Writing
Development

Three qualities of dialogic
interaction
• a change of speaking subjects, the finalization
of the utterance (the possibility of responding
to it ), and addressivity (pp. 76-78)

The Mechanism of Change:
Fine Tuning

The primary was to fine is to
“keep communicating with them [their
children], for by so doing one allows them to
learn how to extend the speech they have into
new contexts, how to meet the conditions on
speech acts, how to maintain topics across
turns, how to know what’s worth talking about
—how indeed to regulate language use”
Jerome Bruner

• Language acquisition takes place primarily
through ongoing chains of communication
that are coordinated and synchronized
towards appropriate social performance
through fine tuning .

Fine Tuning
• Additionally, mothers and teachers, as more
mature members of the social and culture
milieu, “restrict tasks to the degrees of
freedom that children [and students] can
handle, and once he shows signs of doing
better than that, she raises the level both of
her expectancies and of her demands of the
child” (Bruner, 1983, p.124).

The asymmetry of teaching and
learning
• In order to accomplish this “information has
to be given at the right moment, in the right
amount, and of the right kind”

Development consists in a large
measure of the synchronization of
activity between individuals and systems
of activity; this synchronization is the
essence of dialogic interactions, which
involves not only alternation, but also
reflection on preceding statements—
one’s own statements and that of the
other.

Foster a grand dialogic zone
• Social interaction and participation are both
the means and the end of writing
development.

Another kind of theory
 What and why?

Dialogic Curriculum (Stock, 1995): Pillar 1
 Invite and empower students to join me in a broadly
defined field of inquiry.

 Stock, P. The Dialogic Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 1995.

Many challenges require cross-,
inter-, and transdisciplinary solutions.

Dialogic Curriculum: Pillar 2
 Invite and empower students to join me in a
broadly defined field of inquiry.
 Engaging diverse groups of learners as whole
persons.

broadly defined field of inquiry.
persons.
 Fostering a highly interactive classroom
culture in which knowledge is truly co-
created from among a variety of rich inputs.

broadly defined field of inquiry. (co-
constructing knowledge)
persons. (not just cognitive but social)
 Fostering a highly interactive classroom
culture in which knowledge is truly co-
created from among a variety of rich inputs.
(the grand dialogic zone)
 Focus on what they can do right now and
what they want to do in the future.
(relevance)

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Socioculturaltheoryofwritingdevelopment

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