Abstract
Human written communication operates through discourse genres based on specific spheres of activity and cannot be separated from ideology and culture. In this book, Navarro and Revel Chion review an educational intervention conducted in a secondary school in Buenos Aires (Argentina) introducing the learning of disciplinary discourse genres through a collaboration between Language Arts and History, Biology and Physics.
Drawing on a sociocultural conception of linguistic communication, the authors emphasise writing as a social practice rather than just as a technique: learning to write is always learning to write the texts created within a specific discourse community and from specific cultural assumptions. At the same time, learning the content of a specific discipline is not limited to only a cognitive process that occurs in the private sphere of the individual. Rather, it entails a progressive control of the discursive practices of a community.
From these ideas, the authors develop a model of intervention. They consider the importance of regular practice when learning how to write. However, frequency provides not only implicit learning (in which one learns to write by writing), but also a number of opportunities to develop a meta-linguistic reflection on writing. This reflection is oriented threefold: towards a linguistic product (the text) and its requirements of thematic coherence, lexical cohesion, spelling norms and so on; towards the recursive process of planning, writing and revising the text; and towards the discourse genre to be elaborated, as a recipient of content as well as ideology and culture.
The general methodology of the intervention is based on the activity of transforming texts: modifying text punctuation, paraphrasing a sentence, amplifying the lexical repertoire of a text and so on. This activity is developed in the light of five broad dimensions: (a) cross-curricular writing skills, such as explaining, describing, synthesising, organising or citing; (b) meta-competence, or the ability to take one’s knowledge and linguistic production as an object to reflect upon, engaging in a critical discussion to enhance self-confidence and autonomy; (c) discourse genres, such as a chronological report, a newspaper text or a review; (d) resources offered by information and communication technologies to improve the content of a text as well as how to structure it; and (e) spelling and punctuation norms.
This general intervention model is transferred into the non-linguistic areas. In History, as general skills, students explore mechanisms in narrative texts such as connectives; as a meta-competence they work on how to deconstruct a biography; they explore the main issues of the discourse genre ‘chronological report’; they practise how to contrast three pieces of information found on the Internet on the topic of the Falklands War; and they explore the norms of punctuation. In Biology, students explore mechanisms of academic texts such as nominalisation; they work on the meta-competence of critical discourse analysis; they compare a Creationist article appearing in a newspaper about the concept of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and a scientific text; they email the teacher with their homework as attached documents; and they work on the norms of accents. And finally in Physics, they study mechanisms such as depersonalisation; they focus on the contrast between subjectivity and objectivity in scientific texts; they write a scientific review on excerpts from Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; and they explore how to cite a text.
The authors show students’ reflections before and after the project, highlighting their increasing awareness of how social practice and culture are embedded in writing. They also critically point to practical issues raised by implementing such an innovative project, such as the tensions between students’ and teachers’ previous ideas, fragmentation of the subjects, day-to-day management and so on. An important issue they underline is the need to nurture constant dialogue among teachers to ensure broad agreement on important issues such as evaluation criteria. Carrying on a project like this increases the workload in Language Arts; the authors suggest increasing the time spent addressing texts within each discipline. Finally, the authors rightly suggest that the process of educational change should be fuelled by two opposite and complementary tendencies: one on behalf of teachers (bottom-up) and one on behalf of stake-holders (top-down). Writing teachers are poised between both tendencies, proposing the teachers in the fields to follow a writing programme, while also having a deep need for undertaking scientific inquiry.
Two aspects of the project are especially interesting. First, although the Writing in the Disciplines/Writing Across the Curriculum approach it takes is well known in the English-speaking world, it has received much less attention in Spanish-speaking countries. Second, as the Prologue stresses, it focuses on secondary education, a level that remains largely underexplored despite its importance for teaching the literacy practices that students will encounter at university. Nevertheless, some shortcomings should be underlined. The book lacks a clearly stated theoretical framework: the authors make only scarce references to research on the process of writing and how small group interaction functions as a regulatory resource, which has nevertheless been well studied, and they offer only a limited explanation of the sociocultural approach being presented, as well as of critical language awareness. The presentation of the project should comprise a clearer description of the model and its five parts, as well as a clearer chronology of its actual implementation and the reflection on its outcomes. It would also have seemed important to discuss the different requirements of the three domains of History, Biology and Physics in terms of writing, as well as the matter of non-linguist teachers’ preparedness to engage successfully in such a project.
Nevertheless, the book shows the potential of a sociocultural approach to educational research in writing. Educational research, as a social science, seeks to reach a clearer understanding of how knowledge and cultural/ideological content is embedded, created and reproduced in language, and this study demonstrates the need for this work to be explored within school settings in the context of teaching writing. Thus, educational research in teaching writing ought not to be understood as a separate entity from discourse research, but rather as a fundamental part of it. In this sense, the book outlines a project with a great potential, designed and conceived with courage and effort by the authors, and successfully developed in the classroom.