Recent Research on Writing Pedagogy

Process studies provide insight into the complexity of composing and may also reveal a relationship between instruction and writing. However, recent surveys of writing instruction indicate that what we have learned from process research is not informing pedagogy. Writing continues to be taught according to reductionist and mechanistic models, perhaps because of the problematic nature of incorporating change in the classroom or perhaps because process studies have typically not investigated writing in the naturalistic settings in which it takes place. Researchers have therefore undertaken classroom-based investigations, often ethnographic in nature, in an effort to understand better the links between writing behavior and writing pedagogy and to demonstrate that alternatives to the teacher-dominated paradigm are possible. This research is making us aware of the ways in which contextual factors impinge on the development of students as writers. These studies challenge traditional practices and imply a pedagogy that establishes a supportive environment in which students are acknowledged as writers, encouraged to take risks, and engaged in creating meaning. Finally, recent research suggests that teachers should become researchers themselves and investigate the relationship between teaching and writing development in their own classrooms. Before researchers undertook their important work in the investigation of writing processes, numerous studies were conducted to determine the effectiveness of different approaches to the teaching of writing. Research of this sort, comparing one kind of instruction with another, provided us few significant findings, and these were often contradictory (Zamel, 1976). Given what we now understand about the complexity of writing, this comes as no surprise. These past efforts to establish the best method were based on the faulty assumptions that there was a best method and one just had to find it, that teaching writing was a matter of prescribing a logically ordered set of written tasks and exercises, and that good writing conformed to a predetermined and ideal model.