Abstract
Over the years, research on writing has increasingly emphasized the value of adopting a sociocultural perspective to understand how social context and social interaction relate to writing regulation. Using the theoretical lens of participatory appropriation, this study investigates the self-regulatory behavior of three successful Bachelor essay writers in literature, and how the interaction with their supervisors supported students’ development of writing regulation in disciplinary-relevant ways. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews at three key moments in the term; Pintrich’s self-regulation framework was used as coding heuristic to trace participants’ self-regulation behavior over the term. Self-regulation data was cross-analyzed with data coded as participatory appropriation to identify the overlap between students’ self-regulation of writing and their social experiences, especially the dialogue with their supervisors. Our results show how the supervisors acted as agents of socialization, providing frames for adoption of disciplinary-relevant ways of thinking and doing, as well as indirectly sustaining the students’ motivation and re-conceptualization of the writing experience. Overall, this investigation responds to calls for inquiries of self-regulation against the backdrop of the social context in which it is embedded.
Highlights
In an unconventional piece titled “Academic writing, I love you
Since our study reports interview data, the concept of participatory appropriation (PA) allows us to spotlight those instances in the data where appropriation is shown: when participants report, engage with, and transform into new thoughts and questions the dialogue and the episodes of social interaction that they see as meaningful for their writing regulation
We provide the reader with both quantitative and qualitative data, giving a general overview of the participants’ self-regulation (SR) of writing over time, as well as participatory appropriation (PA) data overlapping with self-regulation
Summary
In an unconventional piece titled “Academic writing, I love you. Really I do”, Hayot (2014, p. 66) describes academic writing as an experience of transformation:A self-chosen apprenticeship in academic prose can be transformative ... others I know and don’t know, faculty and students, have been stymied and frustrated and expanded, glorified, and changed by their passage through the demands and possibilities of the writerly disciplines that govern scholarship in the humanities today.In this paper, we will describe three such experiences of personal transformation, catalyzed by writing an academic piece – a bachelor essay in the humanities.Academic writing is a pathway for the development of expertise: the acquisition of content knowledge and the unique cognitive skills required to think about and communicate this knowledge to specific readers (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Carter, Ferzli & Wiebe, 2007). We will describe three such experiences of personal transformation, catalyzed by writing an academic piece – a bachelor essay in the humanities. Academic writing involves self-regulation of learning (SRL): setting goals in response to task, topic and audience, and regulating one’s behavior, thought, and affect in the process of writing. Research from a sociocultural perspective that illuminates how writing regulation develops naturalistically, in social contexts and in advanced disciplinary ways, is not as densely populated. In their recent review of the past two decades of empirical research on writing regulation, Sala-Bubaré and Castelló In their recent review of the past two decades of empirical research on writing regulation, Sala-Bubaré and Castelló (2018, p. 773) point out that an emerging challenge is to “account for regulation in situated HE [Higher Education] contexts”, together with the need for more conceptual clarity about how regulation is investigated
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