discomfort, etc.) to explain their difficulties, reflecting then their vulnerability to them, which in turn, supports the result obtained with respect to research question number one -- the students’ low sense of authorship. Interestingly, the students offered familiarity / unfamiliarity with the task assignments as causes for their difficulties; but no relation was found between degree of familiarity and cognitive activities. Finally, I also discussed the student-instructor interactions which, to my view, turned out to have an unpredicted but important role along the students’ composing processes. This specific analysis suggested Tricia as being more dependent on the student-instructor interactions than Brian, who showed a less interactive orientation, except along the second thinking aloud session. As a matter of fact, Brian’s attitudinal shift along the second thinking aloud session has not been thoroughly explained in this study.
knowledge-transforming process of composing. Moreover, they support Ackerman’s (1990) and Flower’s (1994) claim that novice writers bring along a bag full of tacit assumptions about school writing as well as that they appropriate available source ideas as the very source of content for their own texts without adapting or transforming such ideas for their own purposes (Campbell, 1987; Cumming, 1995; Greene, 1990, 1995; Higgins, 1993).
Their sustained focus on content corroborates previous L1 cognitive and socio-cognitive research findings (cf. Flower and Hayes, 1977, 1979; Greene, 1990, 1995), but it also presents a rival perspective to ESL research findings of studies which have reported on L2 students’ form-oriented stance (e.g., Gungle & Taylor, 1989 (in Masny & Foxall, 1992);
Masny & Foxall, 1992; Zamel, 1983). Nevertheless, the findings also pointed to other concerns that help us answer an important question: what conditions might exist to enable student writers to build on, engage in, and, even, challenge knowledge in their fields of study? After all, as Fitzgerald (1988, p. 63) points out, “... any single piece of college writing is part of an ongoing written discussion about a topic, and [students] are expected to make a contribution to that discussion.” .
To date, cognitive and socio-cognitive research together have pointed out that student writers need to have discourse, topic and strategic knowledge in order to conform to the academic writing community demands. The present study builds on this standpoint and adds that student writers also need to have their comfort levels under control to be able to let their sense of authorship prevail along writing task completion. With respect to the notion of authorship, cognitive studies have suggested that writers’ authorship manifests itself through writers’ textual moves, that is, one is a writer based on what and how he or she writes. Following a different trend, socio-cognitive studies have claimed centrality to the social nature of writing whereby writers adapt what they want to say taking the
audience’s likely responses into account. According to this perspective, writers’
authorship is sanctioned not only by what they decide to do, how they accomplish a given purpose and why they consider a given rhetorical move appropriate, but also by how readers respond to their ideas, that is, whether writers are quoted or referred to.
By locating the notion of authorship within a cognitive, contextual, and affective framework, the present study also extends Greene’s (1995) notion of authorship, which leaves the affective component aside. I claimed that the way student writers see themselves as emerging authors, their comfort levels to accomplish the writing task, and their control of the writing situation determine their sense of what to do, how and why to do it, which in turn, reflects student writers’ very sense of authorship. Thus, this study builds upon previous cognitive and socio-cognitive research by adding the affective component which, for me, encompasses students’ attitude toward writing, image as evolving writers, self-confidence and the extent to which they are willing to take hold of their doings along task completion.
In light of these considerations, I may say that the results point to the need to broaden our existing theories of composing from sources so as to encapsulate a pluralistic framework which takes into account factors other than cognitive and contextual ones. Such a framework should comprise the kinds of control that writers need in order to accomplish ill-defined academic tasks effectively, namely: (1) cognitive control of the assigned topic, (2) strategic control of contextual factors that impinge on a written task assignment, (3) linguistic control of the code they compose in, (4) discourse control of academic rules and conventions, and (5) emotional control of their own feelings. Perhaps more important than knowledge itself is control of the assigned topic, of the writing context, of the audience’s needs, of the code and discourse conventions, and of one’s own emotions.
This study does not aim to be predictive of the difficulties our student writers might face while composing from sources in English as a foreign language in areas such as Literature and Applied Linguistics. There are surely other aspects that were not considered here and that may pose difficulties to EFL student writers as well. For instance, cultural ones. Do we raise our kids to accept the canon? Do we encourage them to challenge it? Do we motivate our kids to speak their minds? This study aimed to be descriptive and as explanatory as possible. I am glad to have faced the challenge of pursuing my initial goal of exploring the entire composing process and not just the final written product that writers hand in. Thus, I consciously chose to cross a still unpathed road, full of turns, holes, barriers, which unveiled themselves gradually and which I had no control of. The student writers who participated in this study provided me with raw material; they went through three writing tasks during a whole semester writing then their stories of students who had no other choice than playing the school game, handling task demands, making sense of sources, coping with their foreign language difficultes, facing their traumas and insecurity with respect to writing, worrying about their final grades, and wondering whether I would sanction their written texts. And there was I, my videocamera, and my tape-recorder ultimately writing my own story, trying to document as much as possible, under the pressure of the same discourse academic rules, and willing to have my data sanctioned by my supervisor and, then, be able to tell that particular story that took place on the backstage of those students’ composing process. It may not be representative of a large group, but it was real. I am very proud to have portrayed this generally neglected picture, for it helped me deconstruct what is still seen as purely cognitive into a socio-cognitive, affective, strategic, and why not to say, cultural matter.
I hope this study will be of some use to those who are committed to helping students compose from sources all the way through and to those who see writing as a learning device.