ABSTRACT

Traditionally, across a broad range of national and educational contexts, writing instruction has focused on features of the completed text: spelling, word choice, syntax, and genre. Some students manage to develop good writing skills through exposure to this kind of teaching. However, many students, and certainly those with more general literacy or learning difficulties, need broader and more sophisticated training. There is evidence that instructional programs that (1) focus not just on written products but also on the processes by which these are produced and (2) aim to develop students’ motivation and self-efficacy alongside their writing skills, tend to result in substantially greater gains in the quality than interventions that are wholly product-focused (Graham, 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007). The success or otherwise of instructional programs depends in part on the educational context in which the instruction takes place. This provides the main motivation for this chapter. The bulk of the studies cited in, for example, Graham’s (2007) meta-analysis of writing instruction evaluations were conducted in North American schools. Research has, of course, been conducted elsewhere but, partly because of publication in non-English journals, receives less attention. In this chapter we present a very brief overview of a number of studies conducted over the last eight years by García and co-workers from the University of Leon in northern Spain. Our work, all conducted with native Spanish school-age students, comprises both intervention evaluations and more general exploration of writing performance within the Spanish education system. Aside from the Spanish context, three broad themes mark out our research. First, and in common with other researchers, we aim to understand what helps students develop into independent competent writers rather than how to achieve short-term goals on specific tasks. Central to this is the concept of self-regulation: alongside understanding of written products and writing processes students need metaknowledge, self-awareness, and

motivation to apply this knowledge flexibly across a broad range of writing contexts. Gains in self-regulation require specific teaching methods and are both harder to achieve and harder to assess than short-term gains in text quality. Second, we explore writing in both typically developing and struggling students (low-achieving students or students with learning disabilities, which we will refer to collectively as LD students). For practical reasons a focus on LD students is important. In primary1 teaching it is very easy for low-performing students to slip increasingly far behind in their writing development, particularly in contexts where instruction is productcentered. The fewer words a student gets down on the page the less there is to comment on, and so the less they are able to benefit from teacher feedback. As we discuss below, one of the ways round this is to provide feedback directly on process. Finally, and consistent with recognition of the importance of educational context, we aim to explore performance and evaluate interventions within the context of normal literacy classes and delivered by students’ normal classroom teacher. This introduces a certain amount of additional complexity in ensuring evaluations are properly controlled. However, we believe that this is outweighed by gains in generalizability. Also, and importantly, writing instructors, as end users of our research, are more likely to adopt novel interventions if we can demonstrate that they have already been implemented effectively by teachers like themselves in an everyday school context. In the remainder of this chapter we will first briefly describe the Spanish educational context in which we conduct our research. We will then summarize findings from research aimed at establishing the particular strengths and weaknesses of writers who are learning within this system. Finally, we will provide an overview of evaluations of interventions that we have developed to meet these writers’ needs.