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1996 66: 53REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHMelanie Sperling

Writing and Writing InstructionRevisiting the Writing-Speaking Connection: Challenges for Research on

  

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Review of Educational Research Spring 1996, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 53-86

Revisiting the Writing-Speaking Connection: Challenges for Research on Writing and

Writing Instruction

Melanie Sperling Stanford University

Both research in the field of writing and writing pedagogy have been built to a large extent on the premise that, as a fundamental discourse process, writing has critical connections to speaking. What those connections are has been debated by both researchers and teachers. This article reviews writing research that implicates writing-speaking relationships by constructing two contrasting positions for organizing the research and understanding the relationships: (a) that writing differs from speaking, and (b) that writing is similar to speaking. Research issues regarding integrating these positions are raised, and on the basis of the review a guideline is offered for future writing research, implicating the field of writing in concerns about teaching and learning in different academic and sociocultural contexts.

After nearly three decades of proliferating research on writing and writing instruction, along with sometimes dramatic reformations in writing instructional practice (see Allen, 1980; Berlin, 1987; M. Myers, 1994), we have seen a steady evolution in the beliefs of writing researchers and practitioners about what writing is and how it can best be taught (see Durst, 1990; Dyson & Freedman, 1991; Freedman, Dyson, Flower, & Chafe, 1987; Hairston, 1982; Nystrand, Greene, & Wiemelt, 1993). This evolution reflects a more general shift in education from essentialist to postmodern ideologies, with researchers and theorists approaching writing variously as text, cognitive process, and sociocultural construction. Yet, cutting across these changing perspectives in writing research has been an endur­ing and fundamental belief about writing and its teaching: We can understand how students learn and develop as writers by considering writing against the backdrop of speaking. That is, the two language modes, writing and speaking, are mutually informing, and writers and speakers have much to learn from each other.

Because virtually everyone learns to speak fluently while only some people learn to write well, writing's relationship to speaking is especially compelling for educators to ponder. Indeed, how teachers teach writing has long depended on two common though contradictory assumptions about writing-speaking relationships: (a) that students should write the way they speak, and (b) that students should not write the way they speak.

In this article, I aim to make sense of such assumptions by critically examining research on the teaching and learning of writing, focusing specifically on the

Grateful thanks to Lee Shulman, Sarah W. Freedman, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful responses to earlier drafts of this article.

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literature in which relating writing and speaking is implicated. I organize the review according to two significant positions about writing and speaking that generally emerge across this literature, each of which centers on the relative difficulty of learning to write.

The first position is that writing differs from speaking. Though it is easy to speak of the two processes in the same breath, the position that they are different gives researchers a handle on what in writing poses problems and generally implies that to write the way one speaks is not only not a good idea but perhaps not entirely possible. This position, that writing and speaking are different, leads inevitably to the consideration that speaking interferes with writing. Because individuals are adept at and familiar with using language orally, writing is a task often burdened by habits established in oral contexts, and learning to write means, in part, learning to shake such habits.

The second position, in effect countering the first, is that writing is similar to speaking. It rests largely on the metaphor that writing, like speaking, is a conver­sational act. Researchers who take this position help to shape the belief that readers are to writers what listeners are to speakers; research on writing and writing pedagogy can be based on principles of communication that recognize these similarities. Adhering to this position, researchers often emphasize ways that speaking supports writing, with particular focus on ways that conversation supports the process of learning to write.

This organization should not suggest a true dichotomy of positions, for it is not possible to consider one without referring at times to research that also suggests the other. Yet, if the positions are to lend one another richness and dimension, then part of the researcher's task is to explore the possibilities and problems of integrating them. I take up these issues in the conclusion of this review.

In reviewing research that suggests these particular positions, I recognize that researchers and practitioners on the threshold of the 21st century face the chal­lenge of one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time: the acquisition and development of written language skills by students at all grade levels and from a growing diversity of academic and sociocultural backgrounds. In contrast to research reviews written over the past several years on writing-speaking relation­ships, oral and written language, and orality and literacy (see, e.g., Chafe & Tannen, 1987; Horowitz & Samuels, 1987), this review addresses the issues and problems particular to the teaching and learning of writing and indicates a direc­tion for future writing research, with an eye toward pedagogy that recognizes our students' common bond of speaking—common in the sense that all students have a spoken language, and common in the sense that speaking is for students a rather ordinary occurrence.

To provide a foundation for the review, I begin with a brief discussion of socially influenced theories of language. With this theoretical base in view, I next review writing research under the two positions explained above and also suggest paths for future research. The aim in this section is not to present an exhaustive survey of research suggesting these positions, but to examine work that particu­larly contributes to issues important to writing pedagogy that future research must address. I end by suggesting broader implications of the reviewed research for teachers, teaching, and classrooms, and by offering guidelines for future research.

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Theoretical Backdrop: Language From a Social Perspective

Despite romantic visions of lonely and solitary writers creating oeuvres in the company of cats and coffee, current research and theory have helped us to see that writing, like speaking, is a profoundly social act. That is, while writers may often work in relative isolation, they are seen to exercise voices constructed out of interactions in the social world and, in doing so, to further interact in that world, shaping and defining it in unending reciprocity. The review of writing research that follows reflects this social principle. It is grounded in a social cognitive theory of writing and literacy that sees writing, like language in general, as a meaning-making activity that is socially and culturally shaped and individually and socially purposeful (Brandt, 1990; Dyson, 1995; Flower, 1994; Freedman, 1994; Heath, 1983; Nystrand, 1986; Sperling, 1993). As such, writing cannot be spoken of without reference to the broader social contexts in which it is situated. Relatedly, in learning to write, learners are assumed to be constructing contextually situated theories of discourse, that is, theories of the ways writing functions and how it is used and interpreted by different people in different social-cultural contexts (see Nystrand et al., 1993). Not incidentally, students' theories about writers, texts, and readers are constructed in large part through the kinds of writing they are asked to do, the ways in which their writing tasks are structured, and the ways in which their writing functions in the classroom community.

Central to a social cognitive view of writing, then, is the relationship between writers, texts, and readers. Learning to write means, to a large degree, learning to anticipate that (and how) one's words will be read—that (and how) one's assump­tions about language and meaning relate to the understandings of those reading one's work (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982; Brandt, 1990; Nystrand, 1986; Rosenblatt, 1989). Specifically, a social cognitive perspective assumes that tex­tual meaning does not "reside" in the text or in the writer's intentions, but arises in the interaction and assumptions shared between writers and readers (Nystrand, 1989). Flower's (1994; Flower et al., 1990) social cognitive view of composing enlightens this notion. According to Flower, writers and readers construct mean­ing as they bring to text the overlapping influences of their social and cultural contexts, language and discourse conventions, and the more immediate influences of their specific purposes and goals. Flower suggests that writing and reading are processes of negotiating these multiple and sometimes conflicting influences.

Inspiring this view of writing and literacy to a great extent are the language theories of Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and Bakhtin (1981), for both of whom lan­guage represents a process rooted in the social world. Vygotsky linked language acquisition to cognitive development; he asserted that what begins in the social context as actively constructed verbal and nonverbal interactions between a child and others is internalized by the child as the raw material of thought. The process of using language to communicate with others, whether in speaking or in writing, may be said to be the re-externalization of this process. Bakhtin linked language and text to the ongoing dialogue between individuals and social context, discourse itself reflecting such social interaction in being "entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents" (1981, p. 276). "The utterance," said Bakhtin, "proves to be a very complex and multiplanar phenomenon if considered not in isolation and with respect to its author only, but

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as a link in the chain of speech communication and with respect to other, related utterances" (1986, pp. 92-93).

Building on this work, recent theorists emphasize the connection between learning to write and, in Dyson's words, "learning to interpret—and potentially, to reinteφret—the social world and one's place in it" (1995, pp. 5-6). From this perspective on language, perceiving how one's language reflects and makes sense in a larger social context is believed to lie at the heart of learning. With what stance research and pedagogy address this process is the concern of this review.

Writing Differs From Speaking Distinguishing Written Discourse From Spoken Discourse

At least as early as the 1920s, researchers in a number of fields, including education, linguistics, and speech, undertook systematic comparisons of speaking and writing, shaping the viewpoint that the two modes are appreciably different from one another (see Chafe & Tannen, 1987; Schafer, 1981). Focusing especially on written syntax, a number of studies have suggested that writing is more complex than speaking, being comprised, for example, of more subordinate clauses, elaborations, abstractions, sentence-combining transformations, embeddings, and passive verb forms. Measures of students' writing ability—and maturity—have been sought by examining their texts for such written-like forms (Cayer & Sacks, 1979; Hunt, 1965; Loban, 1976; Mellon, 1969; O'Hare, 1973).

While such studies equate a certain kind of syntactic complexity with writing maturity, many make the implicit assumption that there is an identifiable written language that developing writers must learn, apparently no matter the writing circumstances. Yet differences both between and within written and spoken syntax have been shown to reflect a range of complex and differing accommoda­tions by both writers and speakers to the various cognitive and social contexts of language production and use (Chafe, 1982, 1986, 1994; Halliday, 1987; Ochs, 1979; Tannen, 1989). To talk of written and spoken language differences is to consider the range of communicative puφoses to which either writing or speaking is put. In this sense, broader characteristics—such as what gets said and what remains implicit, what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded, and what is stated by whom and under what circumstances—implicate the norms and expec­tations of the range of contexts in which both writing and speaking are produced. Much writing research has been concerned with whether and how students acquire such discourse-level understanding.

Novice Writers Some investigators examining emergent literacy have found that young chil­

dren learn early to distinguish the demands of specific oral and written contexts. For example, young children have been seen to orally create written-like syntactic features as well as cohesive devices associated with extended written discourse (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) before they have learned to read and write themselves (Purcell-Gates, 1988; Svaib, 1993). Focusing on well-read-to children, Purcell-Gates compared 40 kindergarten and second-grade children's oral language pro­ductions under differing social and rhetorical circumstances—constructing narra­tives for wordless picture books (written condition) and recounting real-life events

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conversationally (oral condition)—and drew the conclusion that exposure to books not only makes young children conversant with the features of written narrative discourse (see also Applebee, 1978) but also socializes them into the times and places when such written-like discourse is appropriate.1 This conclusion is important to our thinking of the social and cultural contexts in which such language is produced.

Since early literacy success is a central educational concern, much other re­search investigating students' discerning written-like from spoken-like discourse has been conducted with primary-age children (e.g., Hidi & Hildyard, 1983; Hildyard & Hidi, 1985; Horowitz & Davis, 1984). Results are mixed, however, as to children's competence in producing distinctively different discourses in oral and written circumstances. One problem is that different researchers have tended to focus on different discourse features when studying students' written language production. Unfortunately, little if any work in this area has been conducted with older students (for example, in middle or high school).

Academic Discourse

A number of investigators concerned with students' discerning written from spoken language, however, have focused their investigations on college-age basic writers, that is, college students deemed unable to read and write well enough to meet the demands of academic literacy. Acquiring a written academic discourse is strongly equated with such students' academic success (Bartholomae, 1985; Bizzell, 1982, 1986).

The focus of early research in this area was often on the errors these students produced when writing academic essays. Notable for its scope is Shaughnessy's (1977) examination of the errors in 4,000 placement essays written by incoming freshmen at City University of New York from 1970 to 1974, who were admitted under a then-new open admissions policy. Systematically categorizing the thou­sands of errors produced in these essays, Shaughnessy found evidence that these writers had perceptions of written academic discourse that distinguished it from anything they would have produced orally (it was, for example, characterized by much nominalization and passive construction) but that for a variety of reasons ranging from short-term memory load to use of differing cultural rule systems, they were unable to carry out an academic style when set to the task themselves. Smaller-scale studies of essays written by college freshmen have generally cor­roborated these findings (e.g., Bartholomae, 1980; Daiute, 1981; Hull, 1987).

Underlying these studies is the indication that students' difficulties in produc­ing a written academic style or "register" can be attributed in large part to their attempting to participate in a discourse practice that they only imperfectly discern and in which they have had little experience. These studies suggest that writing in the academy is part and parcel of engaging in a new social and cultural pursuit. Learning to write in this context, then, entails being socialized into—and gaining familiarity with—language as it functions in the academic community. This viewpoint has been embraced and developed especially by social theorists con­cerned with the initiation of "nontraditional"—that is, non-White, non-middle-class—students into colleges and universities, and with the clear challenge pre­sented to these students by an academic culture that is both reflected and shaped by a remote academic discourse (see especially Bartholomae, 1985; Bizzell, 1982,

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1986; Harris, 1989; Rose, 1989; and Walters, 1984, making the same argument about "traditional" students). Delpit (1986) passionately voiced similar concerns about young African American students and emphasized the need for such stu­dents to be taught the forms and conventions of the written English valued by and reflected in schools. These researchers generally conclude that to serve students who for cultural, social, or linguistic reasons are not "naturally" conversant with such discourse, the academy must explicitly teach its characteristics.

Questions of Instruction

Questions about how best to focus such instruction, however, are still unan­swered. It has become a commonplace of writing research that to focus teaching on the formal features of written grammar and usage does not improve writing (see meta-analysis by Hillocks, 1986), except when both teachers and students are already at home at some implicit level with the social and cultural contexts in which such rules make sense (Fulkerson, 1990; Hartwell, 1985; Weaver, 1979). In fact, there is evidence that such teaching may be hurtful for some students. A number of studies of basic writers suggest that these students carry with them the baggage of overgeneralized and underassimilated writing rules (Bartholomae, 1985; Hull & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1989; Shaughnessy, 1977) and that this burden not only constrains their ability to write but also misleads students about the underlying goals and exigencies of academic writing.

The interrelationship of such students and their instructional emphases needs much exploration. There are strong indications, however, that students character­ized by sociocultural diversity—and basic writers often fall into this category— are seriously constrained from learning critical written discourses because the writing instruction they tend to receive focuses on the linguistic trees rather than the forest. Some evidence to this effect comes from the latest NAEP Writing Report Card (Applebee, Langer, Mullis, Latham, & Gentile, 1994), which found that spelling, punctuation, and grammar exercises are emphasized more by bot­tom-performing schools, which tend to be located in urban areas with primarily African American students, than by top-performing schools, which tend to be suburban with primarily White students. Making a similar point about English-as -a-second-language (ESL) programs, Valdes (1992) surmised that bilingual stu­dents are likely to receive little instruction in extended writing since they are frequently placed in skills classes that are "heavily grammar oriented" (p. 115). Successfully implemented alternatives to such teaching need to be explored. (This topic is taken up again in this review in the section on similarities between writing and speaking.)

There is some evidence, however, that a focus on the rules and patterns of broader discourse characteristics is effective under some circumstances. For example, in a series of experimental studies with heterogeneous fifth and sixth graders from mixed socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds (Raphael, Englert, & Kirschner, 1986; Raphael, Kirschner, & Englert, 1986), investigators con­cluded on the basis of interview data and writing samples that students who gained most were those who were taught to recognize and create different expository text structures while also learning about the broader contexts of writing audiences and purposes. Such students showed significant gains in metacognitive knowledge about the social, communicative, and interactive nature of writing, as well as an

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increased sense about how to present information in text forms. In contrast, students whose instruction stressed only text structure were seen to approach the writing process mechanically and with little reflection.

More recently, however, Flower (1994) has complicated this picture. Taking an in-depth case-study approach, Flower examined pairs of college freshmen in the process of collaboratively planning class-assigned essays. Drawing on taped protocols of students' planning sessions and examinations of their writing, Flower concluded that it is possible to teach about written text structures in the context of their broader academic functions, yet ultimately what students learn about writing is also strongly shaped by their own prior knowledge and goals, immediate competing social realities, and, not least, the context of doing writing for a teacher.

Disciplinary Focus

Complicating the above studies, a fast-growing sociocultural perspective on writing and learning reminds researchers that the discourse of the academy that educators want students to learn is not, in fact, a single definable discourse (see Faigley, 1986). While generally limited to studies of graduate students or disci­plinary professionals, case studies of individual writers from differing disciplines (e.g., Anson & Forsberg, 1990; Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1988; Doheny-Farina, 1989; Herrington, 1992; McCarthy, 1987; G. Myers, 1985; Walvoord & McCarthy, 1990) lead to the similar suggestion that written discourse is shaped by and reflects the social and cultural exigencies, the "subtexts," of the many disci­plines in which it is used. Basing their work on this assumption, Anderson et al. (1990) examined 16 undergraduate college classrooms across the curriculum and concluded that little was done in these settings to help students clarify the social subtexts of the different disciplines' written discourses.

We need studies that allow us to see how different teaching methods might foster students' learning of written discourse in different disciplinary contexts. Research in teaching and learning outside the field of writing has produced convincing evidence of the distinctive complexities associated with teaching and learning in different domains. Stodolsky (1988), for example, studying fifth-grade math and social studies lessons, found that the way a subject was taught was strongly associated with what the subject was. Writing researchers, however, know little about how teachers arrange writing instruction in different disciplinary contexts; likewise, researchers have little to say to teachers of a specific discipline about how students may best learn that discipline's written discourse.

Furthermore, if written discourse is characterized in large part by social "subtexts," as a social cognitive theory of language would support, how do teachers in the context of writing in the disciplines—for instance, history, biology, literary criticism, mathematics—represent these social subtexts to themselves, and how can they best represent them to their students? Recent research compar­ing professionals' and high school students' readings of historical texts (Wineburg, 1991) shows that the two groups' representations of written historical discourse differed considerably (the historians seeing political, social, and cultural construc­tions where the students saw facts). One might assume that such differences also exist between similar types of readers in other disciplines. Indeed, a number of scholars of teaching and learning have observed that students' epistemological assumptions differ considerably from those of disciplinary members (see, e.g.,

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Romberg, 1992, on the teaching and learning of mathematics, and Gregg & Leinhardt, 1994, on the teaching and learning of geography), and that, in large part, the students are constrained by their limited participation and inexperience in unpacking disciplinary discourse (Lampert, 1990).

How might the process of writing help deconstruct a discipline's assumptions, and how might teachers in the disciplines best teach discursive forms with this end in view? We have little if any research that can answer such questions.

Speaking Interferes With Writing

Overlapping and extending the thesis developed thus far, that speaking and writing are different discourses, writing research that attempts to understand the effects of these differences has often asserted that speaking interferes with writ­ing, especially the written narrative and exposition that reflects the analytic thinking valued in U.S. schools.2 Some researchers claim that writers, in effect, compose "under the influence" of their oral language habits. According to Danielewicz and Chafe (1985), many college students are "speaking experts and writing novices . . . [who] carry over into their writing various practices which are less at home there, even though as spoken practices they may be quite normal and unremarkable" (p. 213).

A number of researchers have focused closely on just what those practices mean to students writing in particular academic contexts. Shaughnessy (1977), for example, explained some of the errors she saw in basic writers' texts as resulting from an inability to "overcome the redundancy, fragmentation, and loose sequenc­ing that are natural in speech" (p. 27). Similarly, Cayer and Sacks (1979) blamed basic writers' immature prose on interference from their spoken syntax.

Flower's (1979) early work on college freshman writing exemplifies an ap­proach to this problem that blends cognitive process theory with rhetorical per­spectives. Studying the writing of college students in an organizational psychol­ogy class, Flower examined multiple drafts of group-written reports and con­cluded that the more poorly written of these reports exhibited "writer-based prose," that is, prose whose structure, function, and style resembled the "inner and egocentric speech described by Vygotsky and Piaget" (p. 20). Flower depicted such speech—and writer-based prose—as elliptical, dependent on context to carry meaning; comprised of individual words that cue a web of public and personal associations; and marked by the absence of logical and causal relationships. She concluded that writer-based prose indicates students' failure to take the perspec­tive of a reader. Sociolinguists would recognize in these descriptions features that, in fact, characterize much overt, face-to-face conversation, in which, for example, interlocutors help supply one another with context and connection during commu­nication. Hence, Flower's study ultimately implicates the question of whether poorer writers carry to the writing context other, more highly contextualized language environments, no less mature than written environments but clearly entailing different communicative strategies. In any case, one approach to teach­ing writing to novices has been to help them anticipate and account for in writing the implicit contributions of their "absent interlocutors" (see, e.g., Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982).

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Diverse Writers

Extending and complicating the cognitive-rhetorical position, however, are cultural studies that point to a wide and diverse range of oral communicative strategies and question how and whether different oral strategies can be easily transformed for students learning to write in academic contexts. These studies suggest that the spoken language "ways" of some cultures are more compatible than others with learning and developing the writing that schools value.

One of the earlier, and subsequently more controversial, interpretations of this assumption was Bernstein's (1971) theory of sociolinguistic codes, which posited that individuals from lower or working class families speak in a "restricted" as opposed to "elaborated" code; that is, when communicating they depend less on verbal explicitness than on context-implicit and paralinguistic means. Bernstein felt that children from such families were likely to be judged linguistically insufficient in school and to struggle with literacy (Cook-Gumperz, 1986).

Other researchers questioned this position, extricating from it the judgment that communicative difference means deficiency and demonstrating the complexity and subtlety of discourse that Bernstein would have called "restricted" (see especially Labov, 1972). Others (e.g., Greenfield, 1972; Olson, 1977) reasoned that "restricted" speech indicated lack of exposure to written texts, a position consistent with some of the emergent literacy studies discussed earlier. In any case, a number of sociolinguistic studies have concluded that certain spoken discourse strategies, especially the strategy of utilizing intonation rather than lexicon to convey cohesion, do not easily accommodate to written forms and that the mostly working-class students who come to school with such strategies have a more difficult time than their middle-class peers in learning to write (Gumperz, Kaltman, & O'Connor, 1984; Michaels, 1986; Michaels & Cazden, 1986; Michaels & Collins, 1984). These studies have generally included the corollary conclusion that certain ways of speaking better prepare students for the writing that schools value.

Based often on case-study examinations, these studies have made strong and compelling arguments about the possibilities and limitations of transfer from spoken to written discourse for different students, yet we do not know how such observations about speaking and writing styles hold across large numbers of students. For example, do students with speaking styles that would predict cohe­sive writing manage, in fact, to write cohesively significantly more than other students? Conversely, do students whose speaking styles would predict noncohesive writing actually write noncohesively significantly often? Larger-scale studies could help answer these kinds of questions.

Critically, however, another question also needs to be asked: Under what (and whose) criteria is noncohesive writing being defined? Compelling research has uncovered differences between Black and White language users' interpretations of cohesiveness and well-formedness. Cazden (1988) reports on an experiment in which "mimicked versions" of children's oral stories, standardized for grammar but composed to follow either Black or White cohesion strategies, were played for five Black and seven White graduate students at Harvard University. The Black adults were more likely than the White adults to evaluate positively stories following both types of cohesion strategies. White adults were more likely to find

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the stories based on Black cohesion strategies hard to follow and to believe they were produced by low-achieving students. Making the connection to writing, Gee (1989), in case-study research, closely examined an oral story told by an African American 7-year-old that by expository measures for explicitness was not consid­ered cohesive and found the story to be logical and subtle in ways found in literary fiction.

In a similar vein, a recent study by Ball (1992) found African American adolescents, asked to rank in order of preference an array of researcher-designed text patterns, expressed preference for texts organized in African American ver­nacular-based patterns over school-based expository patterns, whereas a group of teachers gave such patterns low ranks. We do not know, however, how students might draw on such patterns themselves when writing in school contexts. While there has been experimental work on ways in which African American students may draw on vernacular strategies for comprehending and interpreting literary texts (Lee, 1993), researchers have yet to experiment with such strategies to investigate students as they create texts of their own.

Community-School Connections

Relatively few studies have been conducted in the contexts of home and community to discover how the speaking patterns that are so strongly claimed to influence students' acquisition of written language in school are established; families with diverse social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds are especially unstudied in this respect (see Gundlach, Farr, & Cook-Gumperz, 1989; Taylor, 1983). A notable exception is Heath's (e.g., 1982a, 1982b, 1983) ethnography of Black and White working-class and middle-class communities in the Piedmont Carolinas, which, based on 10 years of observation, examined literacy practices in each community in numerous social contexts. Among the differences that Heath found in the communities she studied were differences in adult-to-child conversa­tional strategies. Only in middle-class families did adults tend to ask children known-answer questions, prod them to expand and elaborate their spoken utter­ances, or ask them to orally label objects in the environment, strategies that Heath pointed to as key influences on these students' facility with school-like expository discourse.

Other investigators have expressed corollaries to this finding in studying lan­guage practices in different ethnic and cultural communities. Fishman (1990), for example, in an ethnographic study of literacy among Old Order Amish, showed how parent-child and sibling-sibling spoken interaction promoted the characteris­tics of writing valued in the Amish community: encoding of text, copying, following format, listing, and selecting text content that is acceptable to the Amish way of life.

A number of investigators have described the oral discourse in different ethnic or cultural communities (e.g., Farr, 1993, on Mexicano and Mexican American oral discourse; Philips, 1983, on communication on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation; Scollon & Scollon, 1981, on interethnic communication among the Athabaskan) and have pointed out the differences between these discourses and what is referred to as "schooled discourse" (Scinto, 1986) or "essayist literacy" (Scollon & Scollon, 1981). A general consensus among these investigators is that a relatively narrow range of culturally or ethnically constrained language patterns

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is compatible with and can positively influence the writing that counts in Ameri­can mainstream schools. Farr (1993) submits that we know little about how best to make explicit the range of discourse styles that students bring to school and how best to utilize this knowledge in teaching writing, although research such as Lee's (1993) in reading are opening new paths in this direction.

Other researchers raise cautions about teaching writing from a base of broad generalities about what constitutes different cultural and ethnic discourse styles. Teale (1986), studying low-income Hispanic, Black, and White families, found many differences within each group in individual cases, pointing out that complex social factors shape the language and literacy practices of any ethnic or cultural community. Echoing this sentiment, Valdes (1992) cautions against attributing nonmainstream students' writing difficulties to culture or background without also examining the range of family backgrounds of mainstream students.

Summary Discussion

Research that shapes the position that speaking and writing are different dis­courses clearly indicates that what writing looks like—that is, its forms and features—is strongly connected to the cognitive and social-cultural contexts in which it is produced. While children may at an early age internalize some of the characteristics of written discourse, perhaps especially the characteristics associ­ated with familiar text genres such as stories, we still do not know how best to nurture and expand such understandings as students develop and produce different types of writing in school. As children develop beyond the points of initial written language acquisition, how does their knowledge about written discourse and context develop, and how can such knowledge be shaped by different instructional methods at different grade levels? Methods that seem valuable for sixth graders likely do not speak to the needs of college students.

We especially lack information on how best to teach academic discourse to students from diverse academic, social, or cultural backgrounds. Research and theory both point to the critical place of context, including disciplinary context, in shaping written discourse, yet we lack research on the ways in which different contexts shape such discourse and on how to make such processes explicit and helpful to students' writing.

The large body of research suggesting that speaking interferes with writing points up the complexities of producing the written discourse valued in schools. Researchers have attributed students' problems in this area to a number of causes, focusing, for example, on the cognitive influences of egocentric speech or the social influences of differing communicative contexts (such as conversation) on students' writing strategies. Not least, infelicitous influences on school writing may reflect differing cultural approaches to spoken communication.

We still do not know, however, whether or how different social or cultural spoken strategies show up systematically in students' school writing, because we lack broad-based studies that examine ways of communicating in students' com­munities and families and relate these ways to the writing that students do in school. Perhaps most importantly, we do not yet know how spoken-language influences for students considered mainstream—indeed, much cognitive process research has focused on such students—compare with the influences other stu­dents are said to experience when they write. Also, we know little about how

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different teaching methods could address such influences for mainstream and nonmainstream students. Finally, implicit in all this research is the assumption that writing means a particular kind of analytic writing. We have little information about how different speaking patterns might influence, either positively or nega­tively, the range of written discourses that students might be asked to practice in school.

These concerns are significant because they implicate schools in promoting a narrow range of speaking and writing approaches while ignoring culturally and socially diverse ways of communicating and making meaning through language. Relatedly, they raise the issue of whether it is important for all students to learn the forms of academic writing that schools value. In teaching a particular form of academic writing, we are, arguably, perpetuating a particular mainstream culture and epistemology. Yet, we have little research that allows us to understand this process, to see its evolution or change over time, or to understand the circum­stances under which diverse discourse practices are expected, promoted, and valued.

This is not to say that research and pedagogy have not attempted to address students' discourses in the context of writing instruction. How they have done this is taken up in the following section, which focuses on ways in which speaking and writing may work together for students learning to write.

Writing Is Similar to Speaking

In contrast to much of the work thus far discussed, which tends to encourage a theoretical separation between written and spoken discourse, the position that writing is similar to speaking encourages the theoretical blurring of the two processes. This research stems largely from the belief that writing, like speaking, is inherently conversational (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982; Bruffee, 1984; Rubin, 1988). That is, like speakers with their interlocutors, writers first and foremost engage in dialogue with their readers (Nystrand, 1986; Rosenblatt, 1989). How­ever, whereas conversational dialogue is explicit—that is, interlocutors monitor messages, give one another cues as to whether or not they are being understood, supply portions of the messages themselves, and generally help to construct messages as they unfold (Gumperz, 1982)—writers are perceived as communicat­ing to persons who cannot, in this explicit conversational sense, pitch in. Thus, writers always confront the puzzle of an absent interlocutor. Learning to write means, in large part, learning to solve this puzzle.

The Writer's Reader

Writers and Their Audience

Researchers in both the rhetorical and cognitive traditions have addressed the writer-reader conversation by highlighting the writer's relationship to audience (see Gere, Fairbanks, Howes, Roop, & Schaafsma, 1992). Research in this tradi­tion has centered on the assumption that a writer's knowledge of his or her audience improves his or her writing (see Ede & Lunsford, 1984; Kirsch & Roen, 1990).

Using experimental designs, investigators have altered teaching strategies or manipulated writing assignments to address the writer's understanding of audi-

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ence in order to see how these manipulations affect students' writing (e.g., Beach & Liebman-Kleine, 1986; Black, 1989; Hays, Brandt, & Chantry, 1988; Kroll, 1984; Rafoth, 1985; Redd-Boyd & Slater, 1989; Rubin & Rafoth, 1986; Schriver, 1992). Generally, these studies have reached compatible conclusions: • Assignments specifying real audiences affect writers' composing more than assignments specifying imaginary audiences or no audiences at all. • The teacher as audience has less effect on writing than do audiences other than the teacher.3

• Students who are taught how to consider their audiences write better than those who are not. • Writing that reveals adaptation according to audience is generally perceived to be of higher quality than writing that does not adapt for audience. • Proficient writers include more adaptations than nonproficient writers.

Consistent with the above research, similar conclusions have been reached by investigators studying novice and expert composing strategies. Flower and Hayes's (e.g., 1981, 1984; Hayes & Flower, 1980) seminal studies, which focused particu­larly on novices' and experts' planning and revising, found that during the composing process expert writers consistently showed significantly greater con­cern about audience than did novice writers. In the process of composing, good writers reexamined their own evolving texts as well as their writing assignments in order that they might add to their image of audience, and they often built progressive representations of their audience, spending much time thinking about how they wanted to affect it. These studies were based on protocols taken of large numbers of college-age and professional writers thinking aloud while writing to researcher-designed writing prompts. Focusing on revision, Sommers (1980) conducted case studies of college freshmen and professional adult writers and came to similar conclusions.

A characteristic of these studies has been their tendency to focus on older writers; though some have compared better and poorer writers, other distinctions such as academic or sociocultural background have usually not been at the center of concern.

Researcher as Audience

Studies such as these, conducted on novices and experts, suggest that helping students to understand the critical composing issues related to considering their audience means teaching them experts' strategies for anticipating their audience's needs (see Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982). Yet, some critics argue that in many studies of composing which are conducted under laboratory conditions, the writer's real audience may be the researcher (see, e.g, Smagorinsky, 1994). Corroborating this observation, the NAEP 1992 Writing Report Card (Applebee et al, 1994) indicated that in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, in spite of writing prompts that attempted to specify a variety of specific audiences for students to consider as they engaged in different types of writing, many students were, in the final analysis, writing for the researchers.4

Teacher as Audience

Just as students may be unable to ignore the researcher as at least one audience for their writing under certain research conditions, many investigators have raised

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the compelling argument that in the naturalistic context of the classroom student writers are aware that the teacher is their ultimate audience. In this context, the writer-audience relationship is thus confounded with the institutionally rooted teacher-student relationship in which students as writers learn (or do not learn) to do what the teacher, as an authority, wants (Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Brooke, 1987; Emig, 1971; Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, 1991; Michaels, 1987; Perelman, 1986; Sperling & Freedman, 1987). This relationship is sometimes cast as problematic and the classroom seen as a constraining factor in learning to write. Ironically, these studies tend not to focus attention on the interesting implication that students can be exquisitely (sometimes painfully) sensitive to the issue of who is reading their work. However, the studies of basic writers discussed earlier suggest that these students' hypersensitivity to writing rules and mechanical correctness reflects in large part an acute awareness of the teacher as examiner or evaluator of their texts. We do not know whether different students reflect such sensitivities differently.

Much of students' understanding of the teacher as reader, however, is seen to be developed through teachers' responses to their written texts.

Reader as Responder

Drawing on psycholinguistic assumptions about language acquisition and de­velopment, a number of studies are grounded in the premise that writers, like speakers, learn to communicate effectively by testing hypotheses about language function and structure against responsive others in natural settings. (On evidence for and against this language acquisition approach, see H. Clark & E. Clark, 1977.) Hence, as in speaking, others' responses to students' writing are key in the learning process.

The emphasis on response has motivated much research on the comments written by teachers on students' papers. A large number of investigators examin­ing the effects of such comments on students' writing, however, have concluded that comments alone do not affect students' work (see review by Hillocks, 1986). One study of college teachers' comments showed them to be so facile and vague as to be mere "rubber stamps," interchangeable from text to text (Sommers, 1982). Other studies have shown comments to carry meaning for the teacher but not for the student, to be ignored by students and thrown away, and to be discounted by students who see in such comments their teachers' "confused readings" of their papers rather than their own writing weaknesses (e.g., Butler, 1980; Hahn, 1981). Yet, studies of teachers' comments have been commonly based on interviews with small numbers of students or on analyzing comments apart from instruction. Exceptions include Beach's (1979) experimental study of 103 secondary students, which found that under conditions in which comments were given during drafting rather than on final drafts, they could be helpful in improving students' writing. And Hillocks (1982), studying various commenting conditions for 278 seventh and eighth graders, found that students given a pre writing activity of participating in student-motivated class discussions, coupled with receiving extensive written comments on their papers, showed significant improvement in revising their texts. These studies suggest that comments function best when they are embedded in process-oriented teaching strategies. While this research considered the teaching practice of response within larger teaching contexts, its aim was not to scrutinize

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teaching contexts themselves to see how teacher comments fit into a broader instructional picture.

In contrast to this work, as part of a larger observational study of ninth-grade English classes, Sperling and Freedman (1987) took a best-case approach to examine how, in the context of a process-based classroom, one very able writer comprehended her teacher's comments on her papers. They found that the student read comments by drawing on the store of factual information about writing presented in this classroom and on her already well-developed writing skills; however, she also drew on her underlying values regarding writing and the purposes of writing in school, which were sometimes at odds with the teacher's. Hence, even in the context of a process-rich classroom, this otherwise successful student frequently misinterpreted the comments written on her papers and revised according to these misinterpretations. The study focused on only one student's readings of comments, yet it suggested that student writers and teacher readers abide by complex and context-bound assumptions about one another that com­ments may not help to mediate. Further elucidating such assumptions, Sperling (1994a, 1996) studied nearly 700 comments written by an llth-grade teacher on a range of student writing and found that the teacher reader's perspective, as expressed through her comments, reflected multilayered orientations both condi­tioning and responsive to students of differing writing abilities and different types of texts. When students read teachers' responses to their writing, they may face, in part, the task of unpacking this complex of orientations.

How might classroom processes help students to understand readers' assump­tions? A growing body of research attempting to answer that question addresses methods by which writers and readers interact more directly.

Writers and Readers Interacting: Conversation in Support of Writing

Following Vygotsky and others, much research emphasizes writers and readers in dynamic interaction. Just as speakers communicate by coconstructing meaning in interaction with interlocutors, so students may learn to write effectively through real-time, contingent conversations with readers. In this sense, not only are speaking and writing seen as comparable dialogic processes, but, because they are comparable, speaking with teachers and peers is seen to be critical to the writing process. Furthermore, it is believed that students who engage orally with readers about their work before and during the drafting process gain ways to negotiate the writer-reader conversation that theoretically undergirds writing.

Conversation With the Teacher

A growing body of this research has focused on examining teacher-student writing conferences (one-on-one oral conversations about writing between teach­ers and students). Following Bruner (1978), teacher-student writing conferences have been characterized as prototypically scaffolded events (Applebee & Langer, 1983; Fair, 1985; Graves, 1983), and, in a Vygotskian vein, such oral conversa­tions have been compared to writers' internal deliberative processes during com­posing (Sperling, 1991). In a national survey of secondary National Writing Project teachers (Freedman, with Greenleaf & Sperling, 1987), teachers indicated that they valued teacher-student writing conferences highly, though they seldom used such conferences in everyday instruction. Yet, studies are mixed on how

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effectively the writer-reader conversation is actually played out in writing confer­ence discourse for different students.

In an early naturalistic study of college-level writing conferences, Jacobs and Karliner (1977) suggested that the more "conversational" the writing confer­ence—that is, the less it is structured like formal classroom talk—the more valuable it is for the student to come to grips with "ideas." These conclusions were drawn, however, from observing only two conferences between two instructor-writer pairs. Freedman's research (1981; Freedman & Katz, 1987; Freedman & Sperling, 1985), also naturalistic and concerned with the interactive nature of conference talk, examined conferences undertaken by four college students, Asian and White and of varying achievement levels. Freedman and colleagues selec­tively studied sample conferences over a semester and considered them in the context of broader classroom purposes. Like Jacobs and Karliner, Freedman found that in more comfortable conversations the teacher devoted more time to developing students' ideas, yet also found that such conversations correlated with parallel teacher and student concerns. Such parallel concerns could develop over time. Questioning whether students received similar treatment in conferences, Freedman and Sperling (1985) focused on the first-of-semester conference of four students and showed through discourse analysis that in the conference dynamics, higher-achieving students had more opportunities to speak about higher-level writing concerns, including opportunities to model the expository discourse val­ued in this instructional setting. All these studies raise the questions of whether and how conference conversations prepare some students more than others for writing.

Sperling (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994b) developed writing conference research in the understudied area of secondary school writing instruction. She used a case study approach to follow, over several weeks, six ninth graders of differing writing abilities and differing interaction styles. This study was also informed by the fuller classroom context. Sperling concluded that conferences could be col­laborative events for different students if they occurred regularly and frequently, allowing different students to flourish at different times as shapers and directors of conference conversation. In the classroom under study, however, students' individual writing processes were highly valued, and conferences occurred as part of other interactive work such as peer response groups and whole-class discus­sion. Looking at examples of talk and student writing, Sperling (1991) concluded that conferences could contribute to students' writing in the context of an other­wise interactive, writing-intensive classroom environment.

Other naturalistic studies of writing conferences seem to contradict these find­ings. Also using discourse analysis, Michaels (1987) and Ulichny and Watson-Gegeo (1989) found writing conferences to be monologic events in which teachers dominated and students' input counted for little. These studies focused more specifically on the ethnic backgrounds of teacher and students. The researchers maintained that teachers' preformed agendas for what counted as acceptable writing precluded true conversation, especially between the White teacher and non-White students. Florio-Ruane (1986), studying preservice teachers holding writing conferences with elementary school students, also concluded that confer­ences were not the dialogic events they are reputed to be.

However, implicated in these accounts, as with the studies of effective teacher-

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student conferences, is an argument for the interrelationship between conference dynamics and the fuller instructional contexts in which the conference discourse figures. Research that questions the efficacy of teacher-student writing confer­ences needs to address this relationship.

What is notably lacking in much of the conference research are systematic analyses linking conference talk to student writing. Are skills or strategies that are manifested in writing impacted by such conversations? Such analysis, however, is easily confounded by the multiple contextual factors that theoretically influence students' writing decisions. In a highly interactive classroom, conference conver­sation, only one such factor, both conditions and is conditioned by the others. The line to student writing, and to particular discourse characteristics, can be difficult to trace.

Conversation With Peers

Peer response. Studies of peer response groups also grow from the premise that writing can be fostered through instruction in which student writers engage in conversation with present readers. Early theorists assumed that peers, unlike the teacher, approximate "the nearest thing to a contemporary world-at-large" (Moffett, 1968, p. 12) and that peers in the classroom can provide student writers with the immediate experience of watching how their writing affects numerous readers (see also Elbow, 1973; Macrorie, 1976). The growing body of research on peer response groups is reviewed in depth by DiPardo and Freedman (1988). In brief, their review makes clear that research on peer response groups, like research on teacher-student writing conferences, reaches conflicting conclusions regarding their effectiveness, in part because the broader instructional contexts for peer response groups (like the broader instructional contexts for teacher-student con­ferences) can differ vastly from study to study.

Research on peer interaction around writing has generally focused on naturally occurring interactions without researcher manipulation. An exception is the recent work by Flower and her colleagues (e.g., Flower, 1994; Higgins, Flower, & Petraglia, 1992), alluded to in the previous section. Building on Flower's earlier investigations of writers' composing processes, for example, Higgins et al. con­ducted intervention studies in which college students were taught to interact through "collaborative planning." In collaborative planning, the student writer explains his or her plan for a piece of writing to a peer "supporter," who asks questions and provides encouragement to the writer based on a set of rhetorical prompts. The researchers maintained that such collaboration can promote reflec­tion, that is, grappling with ideas. Studying audiotapes of collaborative planning conversations, the researchers found that some collaborative planning partners actively negotiated the social context of the writing, challenged or changed the writer's representations of the task and text, and affected important segments of the writer's final draft. Yet, the researchers also reported students' "mixed ap­proaches to collaboration" (p. 80), and structured collaboration did not always produce the hoped-for reflection.

Freedman's (1992) work on ninth-grade peer response groups also raises the question of whether structuring students' talk can produce desired results in students' writing. In a naturalistic study of such groups, Freedman found talk to be more effective in addressing ideas and issues when it was spontaneous and

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informal than when it was guided by the teacher's structured response sheets. Questions about how best to guide student-student interaction or how to provide

the conditions for such interactional response to be fruitful for different students' writing remain largely unanswered. Moreover, like the teacher-student conference studies discussed above, peer response research often perforce focuses more on describing participants' interactions than on determining with precision the im­pact of such interactions on students' writing.

Peer collaboration. The impact of peer collaboration on student writing is receiving increased attention. Daiute (1989; Daiute & Dalton, 1988), for example, studied suburban elementary school students writing collaboratively, in pairs, at the computer. Daiute found that such collaborations offered students occasions for subtle negotiations and language play and that these oral behaviors were key to the development of individual students' writing abilities. Analyzing the talk of fourth-and fifth-grade coauthors in collaborative composing sessions, Daiute (1989) found that through language play, such as exchanging sound alliterations, ex­changing word associations, and mutually devising and revising story plots, children modeled for one another and implicitly negotiated the structure and content of their texts. Such oral negotiation was found to improve the writing scores of students whose initial attempts received the lower scores, a finding that suggests the value of such collaboration for weaker writers. Other research on students collaborating at the computer, however, supports the belief that such collaborations are fruitful only within otherwise interactive and supportive class­rooms (see review by Cochran-Smith, 1991).

When students are given opportunities for such spontaneous collaboration, speaking has been seen to be key in supporting student writing at various grade levels (e.g., Burnett, 1991; Dale, 1994; Dyson, 1989, 1993; Graves, 1983), with special implications for early writing development. In a long-term observational study of a K-2 classroom, Dyson (e.g., 1987, 1988a, 1988b, 1989) focused on students' "journal writing time" (children sat together at tables drawing pictures and writing stories to accompany the pictures) and maintained that the spontane­ous talk that occurred between the children as they produced their journals was critical to their development of written discourse. Through systematic spoken and written text analysis, Dyson found that conversation often provided the explana­tion or description that rounded out a story or picture that on paper appeared fragmented and partial. Such spoken support to written messages was seen to decrease over time for all the children as text itself came to be less fragmented and to carry more fully the message load. Blazer's (1986) study of children composing in five kindergarten classrooms is consistent with Dyson's, as is Kamler's (1980) case examination of a single child composing and talking to herself.

In a more recent observational study that focused explicitly on sociocultural diversity, Dyson (1993), also on the basis of analyzing students' spoken and written discourse, found that orally performed texts, characterized by "dialogue and exploitation of the musical possibilities of language" (p. 28), allowed emerg­ing writers more than any other genre "to express most fully the complexity of their worlds" (p. 211) to one another.

Underlying Dyson's studies is the strong suggestion that young children as developing writers naturally exploit the fuzzy boundary between oral and written language in order to communicate with one another and that such boundary

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bending is especially compatible with socioculturally diverse ways of communi­cating. Because in these cases writing is clearly socially situated, peers in the classroom, like key family and community members in broader cultural contexts (Fair, 1985; Gundlach, McLane, Stott, & McNamee, 1985; Heath, 1983; Miller & Vander Lei, 1990; Moss, 1988), play critical roles in individual students' writing development. We still need to know how this process might occur for children at different grade levels, writing in different genres and disciplines, and working in different sociocultural and academic settings. It would be helpful, as well, to apply a consistent theoretical lens to studying such varied contexts.

Peers in class discussion. Research that focuses on whole-class discussion to understand whether such talk supports writing is scant. However, in a case study of a tenth-grade multicultural urban classroom taken from long-term observa­tional research, Sperling (1995) used discourse analysis to examine both a class discussion that preceded writing and the writing that students produced. The study allowed her to examine the discourse of students from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, with particular focus on the discourse of one African American student. In their talk and texts, the students were seen to construct multiple sets of roles and relationships that reflected their stances toward one another in the classroom and toward the world they discussed outside the classroom. The study focused on one discussion and one set of student texts, but it suggested that, as writers, students were involved in a "complex of roles" that spoken dialogue in the classroom helped to support (see also Sperling & Goen, 1995; Sperling & Woodlief, 1995). Because students from different ethnic or sociocultural backgrounds may express this role complex differently, how different role patterns in the classroom enlighten written discourse needs to be investigated.

Written Conversations

Other studies have addressed methods that aim to connect students with their readers through writing itself. These studies are based on the assumption that some types of writing can parallel the interpersonal and functional conditions of face-to-face conversation and so set up expectations in writers for the expectations of their reader-interlocutors. Investigators examining the effects on students' writing of exchanging dialogue journals with the teacher (e.g., Shuy, 1986; Staton, 1985; Staton and Shuy, 1988; Staton, Shuy, Kreeft, & Reed, 1987) or exchanging letters with other students (Heath & Branscombe, 1985) found that through such exchanges students developed critical and analytical skills valued in writing and that their language came increasingly closer to standard forms because it was shaped by their writing partners' modeling of spellings, usage, and other linguistic devices. Such exchanges were found to improve the writing of nonmainstream as well as mainstream students (including ESL and deaf students in Staton and Shuy's work, and remedial Black students in Heath and Branscombe's study). A critical area for further exploration that such studies suggest is that of writing transfer. We need to ask, for example, whether writing skills honed in an interac­tive written discourse context, including mastery over standard forms and conven­tions, transfer systematically across time or to different contexts—for example, to more conventional noninteractive contexts such as essay or narrative writing.

Complicating the findings on dialogue journals, Reyes (1991), studying both dialogue journals and literature logs of limited-English-speaking middle school

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students, found that the dialogically organized writing in these two media did not in and of itself help these students with their writing and that students' attention needed to be drawn explicitly to English forms and conventions in order for their skills to improve. However, Reyes's data suggest that the classroom teacher followed somewhat mechanistically this dialogic instruction, and it is question­able whether students in the classroom studied were given full opportunity to use dialogic writing to best advantage. The study, like others discussed in this review, asks us to question, along with the instructional value of particular dialogic activities, the critical role for students' learning of such activities' proper imple­mentation.

Recent research has pointed explicitly to the central role of the fuller classroom context in determining the efficacy of writing exchanges. In a 2-year ethnographic study that focused on exchanges of many types of writing, including essays and narratives, Freedman (1994) paired four urban classrooms of diverse student populations in California with four similar classes in the United Kingdom and studied the writing exchanges between the paired classrooms in their broader instructional environments. Students' writing got stronger, in part because ex­changing writing with the audience abroad helped shape students' writing strate­gies; however, it was also found that writing was substantially strengthened in those classrooms that promoted high within-classroom involvement and peer interaction around these writing exchanges. Freedman concluded that classroom interactions are critical to writing and, furthermore, students interact on a "con­tinuum of involvement" with one another: Interactions can be more or less involving for different participants and, hence, more or less meaningful for their writing. Involved students, for example, were seen to choose their own topics for writing and challenge their thinking with uncommon perspectives on the issues they wrote about to the students abroad.

Summary Discussion

Writing research that reflects the belief that writing is similar to speaking has generally emphasized the dialogic relationship between writers and readers and advocated instructional approaches in which writers' familiarity with readers is paramount. Strongly interpreted, such instruction promotes real conversations, whether spoken (in pairs or larger groups) or written (in writing exchanges), on the assumption that such conversations inform, and can be extended by, students' subsequent writing. Genuine conversations in which students' involvement reaches beyond simply pleasing the teacher promise to result in writing that speaks to readers other than the teacher-examiner.

Critically, however, we have evidence that process instruction does not mean, in and of itself, that such beneficial conversations will take place (Freedman, 1994; Reyes, 1991). Research across methods indicates that the nature of such interactions and their impact on students' writing depend heavily on the broader instructional environments of the classroom. In a study of writing process instruc­tion for elementary-grade Latino students, Gutierrez (1992) found that process-oriented classrooms varied widely and that only teachers following highly inter­active and constructivist classroom "scripts," including carefully configured physi­cal and social arrangements, shaped conversations that could support students' written work. More such study is needed.

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A related concern, voiced by teachers themselves, is that interactive practices such as writing conferences and peer groups take up precious class time that needs to be allocated to a range of needs (Freedman, with Greenleaf & Sperling, 1987). How the efficacy of such interactive approaches to teaching is related to time, as both a pedagogical and a policy variable, has not been studied, although as with broader studies of teaching, studies of writing instructional contexts (e.g., Freed­man, 1994; M. Myers, 1982) implicate these variables as critical constraints on the quality of teacher-student interactions around writing.

Importantly for both pedagogy and theory, we also lack studies that attempt to understand the relationship between the writer in the process of speaking to others in conversational contexts and the writer in the actual process of writing. Behind the assumption that writing is conversational is an indication that speaking and writing are dialogically the same; however, it is clear that the two situations are usually different. We know that in addressing absent interlocutors writers must employ mental strategies that speakers, who negotiate with present others in real time, do not (Florio-Ruane, 1994). We know, too, that writers must choose linguistic devices—including forms and discursive conventions—that carry com­municative force in this particular communicative situation. Research working within a conversational framework that accounts for the ways writers make such choices is critical if the conversational model is to be fully useful in instruction. Significantly, it is at this intersection that the similarities between speaking and writing cease to seem as important as the differences between them discussed in the previous section.

Finally, complicating the belief that interaction is critical to writing, recent research that attempts to understand writing and learning to write by understand­ing students' involvements or relationships with multiple others in the writing setting suggests social possibilities about writers and writing that we as yet know little about. May writing and learning to write be systematically defined in terms of writers' connections to multiple others? If so, will these connections appear or be expressed differently for different types of students—for example, students from diverse academic or sociocultural backgrounds, or students with differing writing abilities? Will they vary across disciplines? Pursuing such questions could yield much information on the social processes behind writing, extending and developing current social cognitive models of writing that speak mainly of "the writer" and "the reader" (see, e.g., Nystrand, 1989; Rosenblatt, 1989). Yet, again, expanding definitions of writers' processes must contribute to understanding how students make linguistic choices appropriate to producing written texts.

Conclusion

This article reviewed writing research that centers on writing's relationship to speaking. Its purpose was to present knowledge about the teaching and learning of writing as well as to suggest areas where knowledge is limited and research needed. I have presented two theoretical positions on the writing-speaking con­nection that have informed writing research and that writing research, in turn, has helped to shape: (a) that writing differs from speaking and (b) that writing is similar to speaking. On the basis of this review, I would argue that neither position can be disregarded, as both bring to the surface questions and issues relevant to

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teaching writing today. These I have raised in the review. Yet, each position, when seen against the other, clearly reflects incomplete

assumptions about writing and learning. Finding ways to integrate the positions into useful pedagogy would appear to be a worthwhile goal, but there may also be problems in integrating them. To this end, I present the following implications to guide future research on teachers, teaching, and classrooms, with attention to the particular circumstances seen as critical in this review: disciplinary contexts and cultural diversity.

Teachers, Teaching, and Classrooms

The teacher remains a central force in writing instruction, not only as a reader of students' work but also in orchestrating students' writing processes and gener­ally arranging instruction to provide useful language experiences as students learn to write. Common sense would suggest that the more teachers know about written discourse—the forces that shape it, what written text conveys to readers in particular circumstances and why, and in what contexts written form and content must meet conventional expectations—the more likely they are to design instruc­tion that helps students write effectively in a range of writing situations. Yet, we know little about the role of such knowledge in instruction.

Specifically, except for a small corpus of ethnographic information, we know little about what motivates teachers' decisions regarding instructional emphases for different students and different classes. We especially lack evidence that teachers can take seriously both the idea that it is important for students to learn the characteristics of written discourse and the idea that writing is a dialogic process supported by interactive classrooms. If they do, how do they decide for different students what kind of instruction to provide, how much to provide, and when to provide it? Are teachers' decisions about what and how much to teach, about what to make explicit and what to let students develop and discover through social processes, informed by broader principles of writing? Can such principles cut across classrooms, sociocultural contexts, and grade levels? If so, what are these principles? If not, what forces—for example, policy constraints—counter­balance them?

Further, certain teaching techniques stemming from both positions developed in this review have been criticized for having little effect on student writing—for example, the explicit teaching of discourse rules to basic writers or the use of certain interactive methodologies among socioculturally or ethnically diverse students. In these and other cases where one might wonder about intrinsic contra­dictions, it is generally revealed that the problems may lie not so much in the methods themselves but in their implementation and in the broader instructional contexts in which they are used. Research must tease apart these factors in drawing conclusions about effective writing pedagogy. It may not be incidental that the ways teachers create supportive classroom environments and the ways they make such environments work for students learning explicitly about written discourse is woefully underexplored. How do such classrooms look in different sociocultural and academic contexts and at different grade levels?

Research indicates that writing is a process born of and manifesting human relationships. These appear to include not only the central relationship between writers and readers but also relationships forged between writers and others in the

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learning environment that help to construct writers' realities and inform writers' discourse. Research indicates that peers working in groups or pairs, teachers and students working together, and teachers and students interacting with others outside the classroom all influence students' awareness of the social-communica­tive undercurrent in writing and provide a context in which writing can have communicative force with particular audiences. Yet we know little, specifically, about the impact of such classrooms on students' specific written discourse skills and strategies, or about what skills and strategies students might take from such classrooms into other writing settings, including other classrooms. Such issues sit at the center of social cognitive learning theories.

Discipline as Context

Research and theory have pointed to the critical role of context in shaping written discourse. Yet, writing research has only begun to sort out and explain the complexities of writing in the contexts of different disciplines (indeed, research has virtually neglected the teaching and learning of writing in the content areas for students in kindergarten through 12th grade). Research outside the field of writing shows teaching and learning to be highly domain- and discipline-specific. Writing research has yet to realize its full role in both contributing to this work and expanding its own base for understanding how writing might be taught in different disciplinary contexts. For example, what kinds of conversations occurring in classrooms might contribute to students' producing written discourse in, say, biology, history, or mathematics? What is the role of teachers and peers in such conversations?

Further, in the context of the disciplines, students have an uncommon opportu­nity to learn about the nature of disciplinary knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs by learning about different disciplines' forms of written discourse—that is, the forms, features, and conventions of various genres (for example, the lab report; the mathematical proof; the criticism of literature, art, or music; the historical anec­dote). We do not know how these two may best come together for students. How might students learning the discourse of, say, the scientific proof come away with a deeper understanding of what counts as the broader communicative purpose and social context of such discourse? How might such knowledge impact students' understanding of science or what gets taught in science classes? How might such understanding impact students' readings of scientific texts?

Implied in these questions, too, is the issue of how much writing instruction to provide in disciplinary contexts. Do classes that emphasize writing and classes that do not emphasize writing impact students in different ways? Indeed, do classes across disciplines that emphasize writing exist to a significant degree in our schools?

Cultures and Diversity

What writing researchers know about spoken and written discourse practices and the relationship between them is based largely on studies of White middle-class students. Yet, studies examining writing instruction and learning for diverse sociocultural and ethnic groups have yielded glimpses of critical differences across groups that raise serious questions not only about writing instructional methods but also about instructional goals.

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Research from the two positions explored in this article may be mutually illuminating in suggesting, on one hand, that the spoken strategies used by students from many nonmainstream cultures do not transfer easily into main­stream expository or narrative style and, on the other hand, that written discourse that in one way or another draws on a range of oral interactions can have potent communicative force. Under what circumstances might all students learn to expand the repertoire of their written discourse to include a range of characteris­tics and strategies? How might such characteristics and strategies be taught within a broader context that promotes principled understandings of audiences and of purposes of different types of texts?

Further, we do not know how to exploit the diversity in students' own discourse strategies. How would early school experiences with students' own socially or culturally familiar discourse strategies impact their learning of the academically valued written discourses of mainstream culture? Studies of bilingual students invariably point to such students' greater metacognitive awareness of language features and processes, given instruction that exploits their native language abili­ties (e.g., Hakuta, 1986), but no attempt has been made either to study bicultural students' discourse knowledge or to exploit such knowledge for pedagogical purposes. Hence, we are left believing that culturally different discourse strategies interfere with learning to write—a confounding situation, since we do not know what might be done with these discourses in the service of students' learning. All these issues implicate the differential instructional emphases received by diverse groups of students and the need to examine cultural difference in the context of supportive learning environments.

In closing, there has been a growing acknowledgment among writing research­ers and practitioners that a range of discourses comprise spoken and written communication, both among our students and in different instructional contexts. Yet, as this review indicates, writing research has only begun to explore connec­tions among spoken and written discourses that might make writing instruction and learning more fruitful for different students working in current instructional settings.

Notes lrΓhis research fits into a large body of work in which researchers have attributed

children's reading success to being raised in "print rich" environments in which they engage in reading activities that lead to knowledge of text features and written language characteristics (e.g., M. Clark, 1984; Cochran-Smith, 1984; Ninio, 1983; Olson, 1984; Snow, 1983; Teale, 1984). Much of what we know about the relationship between such early experiences and children's use of written-like language when actually writing is limited to children's production of print conventions such as word segmentation, punctuation, and spelling or their use of genre formulas such as "once upon a time" and "the end" (Bissex, 1980; Goodman, 1988; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1988; Himley, 1986).

2Freedman (1994), in comparing U.S. and U.K. secondary writing teachers, found that in U.S. schools analytic writing is valued over all else, whereas in U.K. schools expressive and imaginative writing is most valued. That such a difference in values across countries exists is supported by Vahapassi (1988), who in discussing school writing for the IE A study of written composition writes that "different educational

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systems and programs emphasize somewhat different types and skills of writing" (p. 29). Vahapassi also points out, however, that "in all systems, school-leaving examina­tions . . . seem to require mastery of the presentation of explicit meaning, i.e., the comprehension of texts and the production of autonomous text" (p. 29).

3This finding is supported, in fact, by research outside the purview of rhetoric. The Harvard Assessment Seminars (Light, 1992), on the quality of undergraduate teaching at Harvard University, found that occasions in which students could write for one another, especially when they formed groups with peers, were significantly more valuable for their writing than those in which they wrote for professors.

4This concern has strong implications for more general teaching and learning studies that utilize writing as an outcome variable. How the researcher as audience constrains the written products of either teachers or students is seldom if ever an issue in such research.

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Author MELANIE SPERLING is Assistant Professor, Stanford University, School of Educa­

tion, Stanford, CA 94305-3096; mels@leland.stanford.edu. She specializes in writ­ing, literacy, and oral and written discourse.

Received January 22, 1995 Revision received August 24, 1995

Accepted November 10, 1995

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