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Studies documenting regression in learning to write

Bean, John C. (1996. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. See pp. 63–64.

Berkenkotter, Carol, & Thomas N. Huckin. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Documents the erratic progress of a graduate student, Nate (see Nate’s response in the Appendix).

Bever, Thomas G. (Ed.). (1982). Regressions in Mental Development, Erlbaum. See especially the editor’s piece in the volume, “Regression in the Service of Development,” pp. 153–188.

Carroll, Lee Ann. (2002). Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop at College, Carbondale: Southern Illinonis University Press. Maintains that students’ writing may sometimes get worse before it gets better.

Condon, William, & Diane Kelly-Riley. (2004). “Assessing and Teaching What We Value: The Relationship Between College-Level Writing and Critical Thinking Abilities,” Assessing Writing, 9.1, 56–75.

Corder, Stephen Pit. (1981). Error Analysis and Interlanguage, London, New York: Oxford University Press. In second-language studies, “interlanguage” refers to a period of skill acquisition typified, in part, by regression from first-language skills. Error analysis makes this clear.

D’Angelo, Frank J. (1983). “Literacy and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective.” In Richard W. Bailey; Robin M. Fosheim, Literacy for Life (pp. 97–114), New York: Modern Language Association of America. Contains an analysis of college-student problems in analytical thinking (classification, comparison, causation, definition, syllogistic reasoning), problems that can be explained as an effort to write about matters conceptually when the students are used to dealing with them perceptually or imagistically: “What sometimes passes for error in student papers is really the product of mental activity that is in an incipient stage of development” (p. 108).

Dickson, Marcia. (1995). It’s Not Like That Here: Teaching Academic Writing and Reading to Novice Writers, Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook.

Elbow, Peter. (1973). Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press [paperback]. Elbow provides a classic explanation of regression due to interaction among writing subskills. He is speaking about setbacks in the process of learning writing. “Long plateaus aren’t the worst of it. There’s also backsliding. You’ve been wandering around in the dark trying to get better at the interconnected, contrary skills, X, Y, and Z. Perhaps you’ve made some progress, though not yet visible or felt. But there inevitably comes a point in the learning process where you cannot get any better at XYZ till you start actually using them. And that means abandoning the global complex of interrelated skills you are now using, A, B, and C. But since the skills are global and interrelated, and since you are now good at ABC, if you start using XYZ your writing will get much worse, in fact it will probably fall apart. That wouldn’t happen in a hierarchical skill where you could really isolate elements and learn them one at a time” (pp. 135–136).

Freedman, Aviva; Ian Pringle. (1980). The Writing Abilities of a Representative Sample of Grade 5, 8, and 12 Students. ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 217 413. G11 and G12 students make more mistakes in pronoun reference, probably because they are attempting longer and syntactically more complex sentences. See also their “Writing in the College Years: Some Indices of Growth,” College Composition and Communication 31.3 (1980), pp. 311–324.

Haswell, Richard H. (1988). “Error and Change in College Student Writing,” Written Communication 05.4, pp. 479–499. Argues that sometimes errors may be “not so much mistakes as mis-takes . . . wrong turns made when new tactics are attempted.” Sophomore and juniors, for instance, incorrectly form over half of their possessives, whereas freshmen misform only one third of theirs. Yet the older students are attempting more difficult constructions, such as possessives for plural and abstract nouns and for nouns embedded in strings of complex nominal modification (e.g., “the present day countries practices”). Sophomores also commit more faulty prediction than do freshmen, yet the sophomores are making the subjects of their sentences more complex (leading to mistakes such as “The incidence of crimes committed by juveniles actually are declining.” Also comma splicing increases as the older student attempt longer sentences.

Haswell, Richard H. (1991). Gaining Ground in College Composition: Tales of Development and Interpretation, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press. See “regression” in the index. The book accepts the fact that regression or temporary backsliding is a standard feature in human development, often documented, connected with knowledge and skill of all types. The book provides empirical evidence for a number of writing regressions during the college years. It also finds evidence of “quid-pro-quo trade-offs” during the first-year course: “Higher production is achieved along with some simplification of organization, fuzziness of word choice, and increase in error. There is also some regression in syntactic play. Sentence, clause, and T-unit lengths decline slightly in size, and T-unit variance decreases” (pp. 317).

Hayes, John R.; Jill A. Hatch; Christine Murphy Silk. (2000). “Does Holistic Assessment Predict Writing?” Written Communication 10.4, pp. 569–598. Does not study regression per se, but documents an essential fact that supports it, namely that the compositions produced by most students during a writing course do not steadily improve. If one charts successive papers in terms of time and quality, the majority of students will show some back slidings.

Jacobs, Suzanne E. (1985). “The Development of Children’s Writing: Language Acquisition and Divided Attention,” Written Communication 02.4, pp. 414–433.

Keech, Catharine Lucas. (1984). Apparent Regression in Student Writing Performance as a Function of Unrecognized Changes in Task Complexity [doctoral thesis], Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley. Includes case studies of high-school students moving from one task/genre to another. A switch from narration to exposition resulted in drops in essay quality “as students attempt to use composing skills different in kind from those formerly mastered.”

Kroll, Barry M.; John C. Schafer. (1978). “Error Analysis and the Teaching of Composition,” College Composition and Communication 29.3, pp. 242–248. Analyzes the writing errors as more than a by-product of risk taking. Errors, in fact, are a method of learning.

Kutz, Eleanor. (1978). “Between Students’ Language and Academic Discourse: Interlanguage as Middle Ground,” College English 48.4, pp. 385–396. Argues that many college-student errors can be attributed to their efforts to achieve a learned style they have not yet mastered. (For “interlanguage,” see Corder, 1981.)

Maimon, Elaine P.; Barbara Nodine. (1979). “Words enough and Time: Syntax and Error One Year After.” In Donald M. Daiker; Andrew Kerek; Max Morenberg (Eds.), Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing (pp. 101–108), Conway, AK: L & S Books. After two semesters of sentence-combining practice, their first-year students lengthened their clauses and t-units yet doubled the number of punctuation and agreement mistakes when embedding syntactic units. See also their 1978 piece, “Measuring Syntactic Growth: Errors and Expectations in Sentence-combining Practice with College Freshmen, Research in the Teaching of English 12.3, pp. 233–244.

Mayer, John. (1990). Uncommon Sense: Theoretical Practice in Language Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. “Each time we try to write—and, in particular, each time we try something substantially new as a writer: writing to a new audience, in a new genre, or about a new subject—requires a cyclic recapitulation of the process of development. Even experienced writers can become dysfluent under such conditions, and that makes their struggle to be clear even harder, and frequently even causes them to seem to have slipped back in their mastery of such things as spelling and punctuation, to say nothing of the more complex aspects of rhetorical structures” (p. 229).

Murray, Denise. (1994). “Using Portfolios to Assess Writing.” Prospect: A Journal of Australian TESOL 9.2, pp. 56–69. Studied first-year student portfolios at San José State University. First and last writings in the portfolio were scored by means of an analytical rubric divided into Purpose, Organization, Development, and Usage/Mechanics/Sentence Structure. Combined scores showed only a modest gain during the course, from 20.3 to 21.4. Murray guesses that the modesty of the gain may have been affected in part by genre. The early assigment was a personal essay and the late assignment was an argumentative one. “End-of-semester tasks were often more difficult than early tasks and so many students did not perform as well on the more difficult tasks” (p. 61).

Onore, Cynthia. (1989). “The Student, the Teacher, and the Text: Negotiating Meanings through Response and Revision.” In Chris M. Anson (Ed.), Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research (pp. 231–260), Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Case study of three undergraduate students whom the teacher pushed through comments on their papers to reformulate or reconceptualize their ideas in their revisions. Two did not and were rewarded with gains in holistic scores, and one did and suffered declines in holistic scores: “Miranda acted more authoritatively, revised according to a coming-together of her own and the teacher’s meanings, inquired deeper into her self-selected subject matter, in short, did all that we might wish an inexperienced writer to do, and still her texts declined in overall quality from draft to draft” (p. 244). Real growth in writing, concludes Onore, will entail losses, and teachers need to expect such regressions. “If we insist on a linear model of growth . . . then we can certainly expect to be disappointed by students’ attempts to explore and expand their linguistic and intellectual repertoires” (pp. 233–234).

Ross, Janet. (1971). “A transformational Approach to Teaching Composition,” College Composition and Communication 22.2, pp. 179–184.

Schwalm, David E. (1985). “Degree of Difficulty in Basic Writing Courses: Insights from the Oral Proficiency Interview Testing Program,” College English, 47.6, pp. 629–640.

Sommers, Nancy. (1982). “Responding to Student Writing,” College Composition and Communication, 33.2, pp. 148–156. Discusses law students whose writing falls apart when they enter a new discourse.

Wiener, Harvey S. (1980). “Basic Writing: First Days’ Thoughts on Process and Detail,” in Timothy R. Donovan and Ben W. McClelland (Eds.), ‘’Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition’, Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. 87–99. Notes how students who have been taught the need for detail and sensory language sometimes develop problems with “overmodification.” They will fill their prose with adjectives (pp. 94–99.

Williams, Joseph M., & Gregory G. Colomb. (1990). “University of Chicago,” in Toby Fulwiler & Art Young (Eds.), Programs that Work: Models and Methods for Writing across the Curriculum, Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, pp. 83–113.

Witte, Stephen R.; John A. Daly; Roger D. Cherry. (1986). “Syntactic Complexity and Writing Quality,” in McQuade, Donald A. (Ed.), The Territory of Language: Linguistics, Stylistics, and the Teaching of Composition (pp.150–164), Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

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