Students' decisions on information organization in writing

Abstract

Writing instruction in school seeks to develop students' language toward a more formal and elaborated language which is necessary for writing expository texts. In a developmental perspective, advanced writers can write with a higher degree of syntactic complexity and correctness (Crossley, 2020) and take a reader's perspective during the writing process (Kellogg, 2008). However, in a school context, there may be large individual differences between students with regard to writing skills and understand of their writing process. To be able to make informed choices about how to structure their texts, students need knowledge of what effect different ways of organizing information into clauses and sentences have on the text.

The aim of our study is to uncover the different decisions students make when they organize information into clauses and sentences in their texts. The following research questions are addressed: 1) What is the relationship between the students' planning and revising behavior in and their own perception of their writing process? 2) What is the relationship between the students' planning and revising behavior and the sentence structure in the final texts?

The conducted study is a pilot study, designed as an experiment with mixed methods with 15 9 grade students in Sweden, as part of a larger project. The students were given a written assignment and produced their texts in a key stroke logging software, registering pauses and revisions during writing. Subsequently, they read their texts aloud, which forced them to take a reader's perspective. Finally, we performed stimulated recall interviews to investigate the students' intentions and degree of awareness regarding sentence organization and boundary markers between clauses and sentences.

The study will have didactic implications for writing instruction in school. Preliminary results show very different profiles among the students, both regarding sentence organization, planning, and revising, and regarding the ability to motivate linguistic choices.