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IMPROVING THE WRITING SKILLS OF STUDENTS.
Abdiolimova Qizlarxon Subhonali qizi
Qahhorova Mavluda Mukarramovna
Farg’ona davlat universiteti
nemis va fransuz tillari kafedrasi mudiri
filologiya fanlari nomzodi, professor
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13892833
Annotation
: Advanced writing skills are an important aspect of academic
performance as well as of subsequent work elated performance. However,
American students rarely attain advanced scores on assessments of writing
skills (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2002). In order to achieve
higher levels of writing performance, the working memory demands of writing
processes should be reduced so that executive attention is free to coordinate
interactions among them.
Key words:
writing skill, effective writing, thinking, ability cohesive text,
interaction, generating, planning.
Effective writing skills are central both in higher education and the world of
work that follows. One’s ability to compose an extended text is the single best
predictor of success in course work during the freshman year (Geiser & Studley,
2001). Gains in informative and analytical writing ability are, moreover, taken as
a good indicator of the value added by higher education (Benjamin & Chun,
2003). Finally, a large share of the value added by businesses in a knowledge-
based economy is codified in written documents, placing a premium on a literate
workforce (Brandt, 2005).
Despite the importance of writing skills, the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP, 2002) has painted a dismal picture of the writing
preparedness of American students. Less than a third of students in 4th grade
(28%), 8th grade (31%), and 12th grade (21%) scored at or above proficient
levels. Only 2% wrote at an advanced level for all three samples. Although
writing scores had reliably improved for 4th and 8th graders since the 1998
testing, they decreased slightly for 12th graders.
Writing well is a major cognitive challenge, because it is at once a test of
memory, language, and thinking ability. It demands rapid retrieval of domain-
specific knowledge about the topic from long-term memory (Kellogg, 2001). A
high degree of verbal ability is necessary to generate cohesive text that clearly
expresses the ideational content (McCutchen, 1984). Writing ability further
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depends on the ability to think clearly about substantive matters (Nickerson,
Perkins, & Smith, 1985).
Finally, working memory is severely taxed by the production of extended
texts. Representations of the author’s intended ideas, the meaning of the text as
it is written, and even the possible meanings of the text as construed by the
imagined readers need to be transiently maintained during text production
(Traxler & Gernsbacher, 1992). Moreover, mature writers concurrently juggle
the planning of ideas, the generation of text, and the reviewing of ideas and text,
placing heavy demands on executive attention (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Kellogg,
1996). Given these demands, it is not surprising that both developmental and
individual differences in writing ability can be explained in terms of the
limitations of working memory (McCutchen, 1996). One must have the capacity
to maintain multiple representations and to control the interactions among
planning, generation, and reviewing in order to write well.
Cognitive science has focused more on numeracy and the reading side of
literacy than on writing (Levy, 1997). Even so, several findings have implications
for the design of writing instruction, as noted in previous reviews of the
literature (Hayes & Flower, 1986; Rijlaarsdam et al., 2005). Our focus here is on
a principle found useful in training complex skills but relatively overlooked to
date in the field of written composition. Deliberate practice has been proven
highly effective in training performance on related tasks, such as typing (one
motor output for writing), chess (another planning-intensive task), and music
(another creative production task). The very best violinists, for example, have
accumulated more than 10,000 h in solitary practice, whereas lesser experts
(7,500 h), least accomplished experts (5,000 h), and amateurs (1,500 h) have
devoted proportionately less time to self improvement (K. A. Ericsson, Krampe,
& Tesch-Römer, 1993). We suggest that deliberate practice theoretically offers a
too infrequently exploited means to attain the working memory control required
in writing.
In what follows, we first briefly review some facts on the importance of
cognitive control in writing skill. We then present the elements of deliberate
practice in the training of college-level writers and evidence of their importance.
Finally, we discuss difficulties in implementing deliberate practice in writing
instruction.
Cognitive Control in Writing
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Composing an extended text appears to require the selfregulation of
planning, text generation, and reviewing through metacognitive control of these
processes (Graham & Harris, 2000; Zimmerman & Risemberg, 1997). All three
basic processes require executive attention, in addition to maintaining
representations in the verbal, visual, and spatial stores of working memory
(Kellogg, Olive, & Piolat, 2007). Mature writing requires numerous transitions
among planning, generation, and reviewing (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Levy &
Ransdell, 1995), as the author attempts to solve the content problem of what to
say and the rhetorical problem of how to say it (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). Three facts indicate that self-regulatory control
of written production depends on having adequate working memory resources.
First, measures of working memory capacity correlate with writing
performance (Ransdell & Levy, 1996). This is but one instance of a wide range of
complex cognitive tasks, including tests of fluid intelligence, that are uniquely
predicted by one’s ability to control processing through executive attention
(Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999). Neuroimaging of the frontal lobe
regions linked to executive attention in working memory also reveal greater
activation in individuals with high fluid g than in those with low fluid g (Duncan
et al., 2000). Converging experimental results show that distracting executive
attention with a concurrent task disrupts both the quality and fluency of text
composition (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 2002).
Second, children’s fluency in generating written text is limited until they
master the mechanical skills of handwriting and spelling (McCutchen, 1996).
Learning the mechanics of writing to a point of automaticity during primary
school years frees the components of working memory for planning, generating,
and reviewing (Graham, Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, & Whitaker, 1997). Mastery
of handwriting and spelling is also a necessary condition for writers to begin to
develop the control of cognition, emotion, and behavior that is needed to sustain
the production of texts (Graham & Harris, 2000).
Third, advancement to the use of writing as a means of thinking, as well as
language production, emerges only after a decade or so of writing experience. In
late adolescence and young adulthood, writers move beyond merely telling the
reader what the author knows (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). Mature adult
authors transform their own ideas as a consequence of generating text and
reviewing their ideas and text. They come to use writing as a way of thinking
through matters and constructing new knowledge structures in long-term
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memory. Reviewing the text often triggers more planning that transforms the
author’s ideas about the topic. Reviewing can also trigger more language
generation to reduce the difference between what the author means and what
the text says at the moment.
Such knowledge transforming requires concurrent representations in
working memory of the author’s ideas and the text’s meaning (Traxler &
Gernsbacher, 1992). It also requires the coordination of complex interactions
among planning, generating, and reviewing. As McCutchen (1996) documented
in her review of the literature, each of these basic processes is constrained by
working memory limitations. The number and qualitative nature of processes
that a writer can coordinate at once depend on attaining sufficient fluency with
each process. Absent mastery of and cognitive control over planning, generation,
and reviewing, writers appear to never move beyond knowledge telling.
Several factors no doubt underlie the development of cognitive control in
writing. These include (1) the maturation of working memory throughout
adolescence (Sowell, Thompson, Holmes, Jernigan, & Toga, 1999), (2) learning
strategies for prewriting, drafting, and revision that manage the demands of
composition (Fayol, 1999), and (3) rapid retrieval of domain-specific knowledge
from long-term memory when needed during composition, thus avoiding the
need for transient storage in short-term working memory (Kellogg, 2001;
McCutchen, 2000). However, the use of deliberate practice to reduce directly the
working memory demands of each writing process offers an obvious and
potentially valuable alternative that has yet to be fully realized in writing
education.
Conclusion
Deliberate practice, we suggest, should be a fundamental principle that
guides the instruction and training of student writers. As with the acquisition of
other complex physical and cognitive skills, acquiring expertise in the writing of
extended texts takes many years of deliberate practice. Presumably, such
practice helps writers to gain cognitive control over text production by reducing
the individual working memory demands of planning ideas, text generation, and
reviewing ideas and text. A writer’s ability to use linguistic and domain-specific
knowledge in composing a text and in solving the content and rhetorical
problems it poses depends on achieving such control.
That only 2% of high school seniors achieve an advanced score on the NAEP
test of writing skill may be at least in part a consequence of insufficient or poorly
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designed practice. Research is needed, in our view, on the best ways to
implement deliberate practice in educational interventions, including
application of the spacing effect and advances in automated essay scoring. Such
applied cognitive research has the potential for making significant
improvements in writing education.
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