Before writing. Prewriting practices in digitally rich Finnish and Swedish upper secondary school classrooms
Submitted by:
Riitta Juvonen
Abstract:
Producing shorter or longer texts is a common practice within teacher-initiated tasks in classrooms. It requires preparation and planning, as prewriting activities are considered an essential part of the writing process (cf. Torrance 2015). When writing is studied as part of the ongoing interaction in the classroom, all activities that precede the actual producing of visible text can be seen as relevant to writing process. In digitally rich classrooms where the students use digital devices, e.g. laptops, tablets or smartphones, the scope of prewriting practices is even wider: students seek and select information, tackle technological problems and interact with peers in and out of classroom. Moreover, since digital devices are usually connected to Internet, students may conduct their own literacy events during the lessons (cf. Blikstad-Balas 2012).
This paper explores teacher initiated writing tasks and prewriting practices in Finnish and Swedish upper secondary schools. We approach writing as part of formal and informal interaction and literacy practices in classrooms. We concentrate on activities where digital devices are involved, and explore the ways in which prewriting practices are connected to the ongoing interaction, and how they shape interaction and are shaped by interaction. The data consist of video-recorded face-to-face interaction and students’ texts written during the lessons, with assistance of smartphones and/or laptops, from two larger corpuses of video-recorded interaction collected for the projects Textmöten (Finland) and Connected Classrooms (Sweden). As a method, we apply conversation analysis with a multimodal approach (Mondada & Svinhufvud 2016).
Keywords: digital literacy practices, prewriting, upper secondary school
References
Blikstad-Balas, M. (2012). Digital Literacy in Upper Secondary School – What Does Students use Their Laptops for during Teachers Instruction? Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy 2(7), 122-137.
Mondada, L. & Svinhufvud, K. (2016). Writing-in-interaction: Studying writing as multimodal phenomenon in social interaction. Language and Dialogue 6:1, pp. 1–53.
Torrance, M. (2015). Understanding Planning in Text Production. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham & J. Fitzgerald (eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 72-87). Second Edition. New York: The Guildford Press.