"Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers (Article 1)

*Since there was no articles in the book that summarized what my inquiry project is about I looked for my own. Also, I would just like to start off by saying thank you to Prof. O'Rourke for recommending Nancy Sommers to me because I found a really good article written by her that is EXACTLY what I am doing for my inquiry project.*

The article was called "Responding to Student Writing" and I found it off JSTOR. Sommers was interested in what comments teachers put on students papers and what the students feel about them. She had said that the main reason teachers comment on students' papers is to reinforce the idea of the reader to them. Teachers play the reader role and make it apparent to the students. Also she goes on to say that there are two types of comments: "Comments create the motive for doing something different in the next draft; thoughtful comments create the motive for revising" (Sommers 149). To figure out what most teachers use she conducted a study with 35 teachers and students, and the teachers all "commented on the same set of three student essays"(Sommers 149). She then analyzed the types of responses given to the students and noticed the commonalities among them and how the students react to them.

The first affect she found that comments have on the students was that "teachers comments can take the students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting" (Sommers 149). This type of reaction occurs when teachers comment on usage and diction (Sommers 150). These comments leave the students unsure of what the teacher wanted them to change or do better. Most times this results from "contradictory messages"(Sommers 150) given by the teacher. This happens to me all the time where the teacher says to shorten a sentence within the paragraph but then on the margin says to expand the paragraph. In-text comments and marginalized ones often confuse the student on what the teacher wants them to do. "These different signals given to students, to edit and develop, to condense and elaborate, represent also the failure of teachers' comments to direct genuine revision of the text as a whole" (151). This leaves the student unsure of what is important to change with the way the comment is worded.

Most times teacher comments are on parts of the paper and not the paper as a whole. This leaves students to only edit the certain words or phrases mentioned and not anything else. "Misunderstanding of he revision process as a rewording activity is reinforced by their teachers comments" (151). Students then focus "on what the teachers commanded them to do than on what they are trying to say" (Sommers 151). Another issue that occurs most times is that teachers misread the students paper and comment on things that are not relevant. in the study she found that "teaches commanded students to reduce and condense what was written, when in fact what the text really needed at this stage was to be expanded in conception and scope" (Sommers 152). Her conclusion to this was one that was mentioned before about how students only revise what the teacher said to change. A phrase she used to describe this was a "balancing act" (Sommers 152) which I think summarizes it perfectly!

Sommers found her next commonality to be that "most teachers comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text" (Sommers 152). This is when teachers comments are too vague and could be applied to any paper. These make no sense to the student and they have no idea of how to go about changing them. Her suggestion to fix this problem would be to apply tips on HOW to change things not just letting them know that their is something wrong. This is the one suggestion or comment that is lacked on student papers. Teachers never "offered any strategies for carrying out these commands" (Sommers 153). These are needed because telling a student "'to be more specific' or 'to elaborate', does not show our students what questions the reader has about the meaning of the text, or what breaks in logic exist, that could be resolved if the writer supplied specific information; nor is the student shown how to achieve the desired specificity" (Sommers 153). Teachers offer the rules of the things that need to be changed not the strategies to do so and this makes the student think then that writing is all about rules.

The one way to put an end to all of this Sommers says, is to have a different set of guidelines and commentary for drafts of papers and the finished products. The feedback "needs to be suited for the draft we are reading" (Sommers 155). Students may be confused on which set of commentary you are giving them. So it is important to let them know which one is being used. However to defend teachers, they said they were never taught how to respond to students papers in school. That is true, in all of my English courses we are not taught how to access students papers. We look at theorists articles and summarize them or write papers on them but we never do exercises commenting on "students" work. So teachers have the tendency to look for errors in student writing and not go past that which produces a bad revision process of the student. Sommers suggests that teachers should "offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning" (Sommers 159).

Possible Interview Questions?!

For the students:
-How do you feel when teachers write vague comments on your paper?
-What comments do you normally take in consideration for the next paper you write for them?
-Which methods of feedback do you find the most helpful to you and why? (rubrics, one-on-one conference, comments)


For Professors/Teachers:
- What method of feedback do you use with your students papers and why?
- Have you ever had students come to you with questions due tonot understanding your feedback?
-Does the method of feedback change for the various courses you are teaching? If so, why?


****Doing interviews with people is something I am not good at beacause most of the time I do not know what to ask. So any help on this would be greatly appreciated!!!****

Developing New Knowledge: "Factness" Excercise with Inquiry Topic

Whom could I talk to who could provide me with information that has factness about this question?

I was thinking about talking to my peers in my other composition courses and finding out their opinions on teacher comments they receive. Also, to tackle the subject of what teachers should be putting on papers I could see what professors have been putting on them. I can analyze the feedback they give students and get their reasoning on why they chose that method of response to their students’ work. Then, I could take that and compare it to what students feel about those methods.

What could I read that would provide me with information that has factness about this question?

I could read articles written by composition theorists. Also, I could look for articles or blogs written by classroom teachers to see what they have been using in their classrooms and e-mailing them to find out how the students respond to it. I have already found some articles on JSTOR that seem to correspond well with my topic and they are written by scholars so I know they are valid.

What else could I do besides talk to people and read to acquire information or factness about this question? (Jolliffe 75)

I could observe in classes when students get papers back and see their reactions when they are reading it over. I could conduct surveys with my peers to get their opinions on what type of feedback is beneficial to them and what methods they dislike. Also if time allowed and it was possible, I would like to see what comments they take in consideration when editing their papers and which ones they disregard. I do not know if this answers the question but I am unsure right now how I would go about this.

Revisiting the Inquiry Contract (revised)

When the general public considers the subject I’m working with, what are the issues, questions or concerns that they think are important to discuss? Do these questions and concerns differ from those of the scholarly discourse community?

The general public I would be aiming at is parents because they are going to want what is best for their child’s understanding. They may ask their child’s teachers what methods of feedback they use and how students respond to it. The scholarly discourse community will already be familiar with the topic and may produce arguments on better feedback methods.

In discussions of my subject, what are some of the status quo assumptions that appear to go unsaid but nonetheless seem almost universally believed?

The most common form of response to students writing is comments on the students’ paper. Most educators believe that is the best way to give feedback to the students. This may be true but it depends on what type of comments they write.

In texts that people produce about my subject, what kinds of outcomes or results do they expect the texts to have with readers? Do writers about my subject usually expect a reader simply to consider their ideas, to believe in them strongly, to take some specific action? What?

It is hard for me to answer this question because I have not read over the articles I have found yet. I would think the scholarly writers want readers to take their argument in consideration and practice their modes of thinking. They persuade the reader with their experiment outcomes what methods should be used to get the best response out of students. Educators are the main audience for those articles and it may be beneficial to them to think about it and test them out for themselves.

Initial Thoughts on my Inquiry Project (revised)

Part I: Exploration1. Identify the issue or problem that you plan to focus on in your Inquiry Project.

My hope is to work on something that focuses around students attitudes towards teacher comments on their papers.

2. What is your personal connection to and interest in this topic?

I have had certain reactions to my teachers’ comments on my paper. At times I am left confused on what I did wrong to receive the grade I got. Other times, I thought I fulfilled the assignment but got comments on areas that were not part of the initial assignment.

3. What opinions do you already hold about this topic?

I feel that most students can relate to the topic. I also am aware that teachers look for different things when grading and it can be hard to please them all. I think that teachers should provide the students with what they are going to be looking for in the final project before the students start. This way they know what is expected of them and will understand their feedback better.

4. What knowledge do you already have about this topic. What are your main questions about this topic? What are you most curious about?

The knowledge I already have about this topic is personal experience and observations that I have had throughout my school years. My main questions about the topic are:
-What are students’ reactions to teachers’ feedback?
-What methods of feedback do students respond the best to?
- What types of comments should teachers be putting on their students’ papers?
I am most curious about how teacher comments change the perception the student has on their work. Also, what they would want to see instead. I am really interested in researching that because I plan to be an English school teacher and would want to be helpful to my students in any way I could. I would like to see what they prefer with feedback.

5. How might composition theorists and researchers approach or study this topic? Does this approach differ from those of other related disciplines (such as communication studies)?

For education studies: I believe that education theorists will hold the most knowledge about this topic. They could have studies that they performed with students and teachers. Also, they could use information gathered by their years of teaching and provide their scholarly argument on what teachers should be doing with feedback and learn from their mistakes.

For communication studies: They may be more concerned with how feedback that is not understood by the student may change the teacher-student relationship.

For research studies: They can correlate the results of different forms of feedback to see which promote better student attitudes and which they disregard.

6. How could you research this topic outside the library (for example, through interviews and/or observations)?

I could perform a survey with my peers. I could produce a questionnaire for my English professors to see what form of feedback they use and why they do it.

Part II: Focusing Write an initial claim, or an open-ended question, to guide your research on this topic. Make it specific but exploratory. Remember that a good claim opens up an area of inquiry about a topic; a claim should invite evidence, support, and debate.

What type of feedback methods do students appreciate and respond to the most?

"Professing Multiculturalism"

This article discussed the ways in which multiculturalism could be used in teaching composition. I saw this as a way in which a writer may be heard, to connect with Royster's article. I believe this because it will give the teachers a better understanding of their students' writing and it will give people in general a better perception of works from writers that are from various backgrounds. The rhetoric everywhere would be better understood if one knows where the writer was coming from and how things work in the area they come from. In the article it shows how an "educated American" reacts to someone that comments on her work in a bad way and how another writer from a different area gets told his work is bad. It was just because the writer from another area, Dreiser, took on a different style and approach to writing then what one is normally used to in America so they automatically deemed it as a bad piece of work. Students have this issue in their classroom as well.

Students face the same issues at times that most writers face when they were brought up in a different area and present their work to an American. Lu decides that they need a model of what is considered real and compare the students work to that. Have the students perform exercises with "real' works and dissect what makes it a good appear so they can utilize it in their own. Lu termed the approach, "error analysis" they would imitate what they found. Provided to the students was an example of a paper with easy identifiable errors and asks the students how they would fix it. "I look for styles which are also more conducive to my attempt to help the writer to negotiate a new position in relation to the colliding voices active in the scenes of writing" (494). It shows the use of style and the writers own perception of what standard written English is supposed to look like. Also, by sharing the responses it gives the students a variety of ways to modify one error.

"When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own"

The article by Jacqueline Jones Royster was pretty confusing to me. I know her main emphasis was cross-boundary discourse and why it has failed and what can be done to make it possible. Subjectivity was her main tactic of making it possible, "subjectivity as defining value pays attention dynamically to context, ways of knowing, language abilities, and experience, and by doing so it has a consequent potential to deepen, broaden and enrich our interpretive views in dynamic ways as well" (611). One way to do that is by voicing our opinions and stories and being heard. "The call for action in cross-boundary exchange is to refine theory and practice so that they include voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also being a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed" (612).

The three scenes used in the article depict different forms of 'subject'. They work together to show how we need to change our communication style to be better understood in more areas then our own community. Then, Royster goes on to explain strategies of doing so. One of the scenes shows the importance of voice. Being heard but not understood but it is sill better to speak. Too often we rely on others to do the talking for us, normally people in authoritative roles and/or experts. We can speak at any time and it may be perceived but how do we listen to others? How do we show others that we are engaged in what they are saying? Most times when I am in a conversation I can tell by the person's body language whether they care about what I am saying or not. It is one thing to speak and another to be heard, we have to find a way to do both.

Bizzell tells us "What We Need to Know about Writing...

I really liked this article because it merged two methods into one to create a valid and better understanding of the writing process. She did not choose one or the other and then bad talk them or say one was better, like some other articles we've read. Bizzelll chose to integrate the inner-directed mode of thinking and outer-directed to come to a conclusion on composition studies. Inner directed people are concerned with the thought process while writing and having thoughts before being in a social setting. The outer directed people thinking that thoughts come from social settings, people can influence them or you can take a stand. It was made clear that everyone comes to a consensus that it takes language to develop thoughts. This corresponds with the idea that each discourse community has their own language, ways of doing things and rules to follow. This is what makes them a group, the common characteristics they share, there are many discourse communities and people can belong to more than one. They just need to know what makes them apart of one or how to be part of one.

The inner directed theorists have a 4 stage model of developing language. 1. Individual, 2. Experience, 3. Society and the last one being the Writing situation. With an isomorphic model as Bizzell puts it, we can connect these stages with the outer directed thoughts and get the importance of what we need to know about writing. Inner directed theorists think that organizing ones thought can be taught, with their stage models. "Once students are capable of cognitively sophisticated thinking and writing, they are ready to tackle the problems of a particular writing situation" (390). They think that altering info to fir the thoughts of its reader is not bad because it does not change the point of the paper, it is just worded differently.

In contrast, the outer directed theorists think that social context help shape and condition thoughts. This sis something that cannot be taught it should be an innate habit. They think that no one can teach the rules of a discourse community because one needs to be part of it in order to truly understand it. The students are already placed in a discourse community of the school and the one they were born in and when writing a paper they may be unaware they are entering another one.

The article continues to go on and use Flower and Hayes model of the cognitive processes to show what they mean. Flower and Hayes are inner direct theorists. The fact that they use Protocol analysis as their tool to search is a problem with in itself because it is not accurate because writing is something that is not scientific. Flower and Hayes model lacks credibility because it "does not tell us how to proceed through the composing process, but only that in proceeding, there are certain sub processes, we must include if we want to compose successfully" (394). They answer the 'why' but not 'how' part of the process. To make student writers and see how they go about doing something they need to be gaining it through social context and we need to put them in situations where they are tested. This is how the outer detected models come into play. "What's missing here is the connection to social context afforded by recognition of the dialectical relationship between Thought and language. We can have thoughts for which we have no words, I think, but learning language, though it doesn't exactly teach us to thinking, teaches us what thoughts matter" (395) I agree with this quote because it is true and I know that through experience. Vygotsky's notion of he mind and how it works also suggest that we need the inner and outer models to understand it. The translating and planning aspect of Flower and Hayes model should not be separated, as they have it but connected and influenced by society. When readers are reading a piece of work they connect to it on a social level, they look at the experiences to relate to the character etc. The students cannot fake to be part of the discourse community as Bartholomae states it, they need to understand the discourse community before writing for them.

Flower and Hayes spoke about goals and they stem from knowledge, but the bigger question is however does the knowledge come from?...Answer: experience, society, others. The problem then is that poor writer cannot create goals because they lack knowledge on the discourse community they are writing for. Poor writers need to be taught the conventions of discourse communities. "if language using isn't rule governed in this sense, however, it still may be regular-that is, we may be able to group situations likely to share a number of language-using features. But to do this is to describe the conventions of discourse communities" (405).

To do this we need a "hidden curriculum" as Bizzell put it. We need to open their eyes to other communities without denying their own they already have. Once students are not apart of the community they are automatically perceived as wrong. For example, "The result for students who don't share the school's preferred world views is either failure or deracination" (407). Teachers need to focus on the real world and teach students the conventions of it.

Synthesis Of Bartholomae and Flower & Hayes

I synthesised Flower and Hayes into Bartholomae's ideas in my Bartholomae response. I found that they all seem to agree that writing is a process and what matters is not the final text but how the author got to that final product. It was stated in both articles that "If writing is a process, it is also a product,; and it is a product, and not the plan for writing that locates a writer on the page, that locates him in text and a style and the codes or conventions that make both of them readable" (631). This sentence to me, summed up the main points of the article. It incorporates the audience and the writers intentions. It also discusses the points made by Flower and Hayes with writing as a cognitive process and the goals the writer creates. The writer creates goals independently and privately, when the paper is finished and others read it is when it becomes public.

However, I feel that the writers disagree on where the invention aspect comes in during the process. Bartholomae feels that Flower and Hayes take invention out of the active writing process and that is a problem. His argument is due to that we see the product in text from the author not from his mind. We have no ideas as readers what the author's original ideas were and the process he went through to transform them from thoughts to text. Flower and Hayes Cognitive process demonstrates that the plans of the paper happen before the actually composing of it, I agree with that. One always has an idea or thought in mind of what they want to say but how to say it is what involves research and thinking. They argue on where the invention stage lies, for Flower and Hayes it is in the Task enviroment, for Batholomae it is in the active writing process.

Inventing the University Response

This article was written by David Bartholomae and to me, it was difficult to understand. The main bulk of it focused on student writers and how their work can be influenced if they act as part of the discourse community of their audience. It was stated that it is hard for students to take on the authoritative role in the papers and that is due to the fact that they may not feel like an expert on the issue they are talking about. However, Bartholomae says that they do not have to, they just have to act as they do. And in doing so, it will provide them the opportunity to explore this new discourse community. If they turn away all the thoughts of the outside communities and focus on the discourse community they are writing for, their papers will be so much better. First and foremost they will be aimed towards the people interested in the topic and it will be written int heir language. Bartholomae said a good place to start for this would be to create a commonplace.

A commonplace is "a statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration" (pg. 626). This will give the audience something be be curious about and the writer will then have something to explain. "If writing is a process, it is also a product,; and it is a product, and not the plan for writing that locates a writer on the page, that locates him in text and a style and the codes or conventions that make both of them readable" (631). This sentence to me, summed up the main points of the article. It incorporates the audience and the writers intentions. It also discusses the points made by Flower and Hayes with writing as a cognitive process and the goals the writer creates. The writer creates goals independently and privately, when the paper is finished and others read it is when it becomes public.

One of the issues presented in the article was the problem of not feeling apart of the discourse community one is writing for. This happens a lot in school because of the assignments given. Teachers assign things that require students to be interested what those above them do but not actually be apart of it. So writing for the teacher requires them to be placed in an academic community and most times they just imitate what they see and know and don't really discover anything. By acting as a part of this discourse community they are taking in certain elements and this allows them to take o n the authoritative role that they need to make their paper memorable.