ABSTRACT
The idea that ‘writing consists of applying knowledge of a set of linguistic patterns and rules for sound-symbol relationships and sentence construction’ has underlain ‘a great deal of policy and practice in literacy education’ (Ivanič, 2004, p. 227) in many English-speaking countries. A traditional approach to teaching writing focuses on the teacher as authority, instructor and sole audience; the teacher of discrete skills, such as spelling and planning and the suppression of errors. Interaction, especially between learners, has not been encouraged (Smith and Elley, 1998). Implicit in such an approach is the idea that writing can be accounted for in purely cognitive terms, a matter of manipulating symbols, with the writer coordinating a complex variety of elements (Wray and Medwell, 2006). More recent psychologically based models of writing have cast the student writer in a more agentive, problem-solving role than in the traditional classroom, and afford some room for social context in terms of both the ‘task environment’ (Flower and Hayes, 1980) and the text’s eventual audience. However, they persist in characterising the writing task as a matter of orchestrating cognitive processes (Flower and Hayes, 1980; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987), an endeavour to be undertaken, albeit with some teacher support, by the individual learner. Indeed, one model (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987) identifies the need to compose without the benefit of a conversational partner, as one of the key features of writing which the young writer needs to accommodate (Smith and Elley, 1998).
