Calling writers' bluffs: The social production of writing ability in university placement-testing

Abstract

This article examines the implications for testing of a profoundly social model of writing elaborated over the last 15 years by critical composition scholars. Students' development is seen as a process of socialization into the ways of speaking and thinking considered appropriate within academic or professional communities. Such socialization is fraught with conflict in that the values underlying these ways of speaking may differ radically from those that students bring to the situation. Yet, to develop as writers, students must engage these dominant ways of speaking. In this light, testing becomes a kind of “border checkpoint” in the “contact zone” (Pratt, 1987), where students' identities are defined and contested in this textual encounter between writers and readers. Using this theoretical frame, the article examines one aspect of elaboration in student writing as a product of this encounter. Results of a study of a stratified random sample of student placement tests reveal several patterns in the elaboration of “old” and “new” information that deviate sharply from what would be expected in a “cooperative exchange of information between equals.” (Grice, 1967/1975). Yet, these patterns correlate significantly with readers' evaluations of texts. Analysis of these patterns shows them to be two strategies for managing discursive conflict in this situation.