Process writing research began with adult writers, eventually expanding to include school age children and more recently, emergent writers. Research at the early childhood level has often been directed at specific aspects of writing development rather than an examination of process writing development. This study used pre-existing writing samples to examine writing development in kindergarten and first grade over the course of the school year following the district-wide implementation of a writing process based intervention. The intervention utilized a writing workshop approach to teach the writing process with the addition of two elements: picture plans were used to support emergent writers’ prewriting plans, and teachers focused on a single teaching point to target writing instruction. Beginning and end of year samples from 138 kindergarten and 106 first-grade students from three elementary schools in a medium-sized, public school district in the southwestern United States were used for this study, yielding a total of 488 samples. The samples were scored to investigate the change over time on four outcome measures: quantity of words produced, attributes of prewriting picture plan, evelopmental level, and handwriting. In addition, the impact of fidelity to the intervention features was explored in relation to the four outcome measures. Fidelity to implementation was scored on each of the 10 separate aspects of the intervention: student choice for topics, reading-writing connections, prewriting, peer conferencing, teacher conferences, minilessons, revision, editing, publishing, and modeling. Overall, the study found that the greatest change over time in kindergarten and first grade was in the developmental level. There were also large effects for quantity of words produced and handwriting. A regression analysis was conducted to determine which aspects of the intervention feature were most critical to early writing development. Student choice had a significant positive association with all four dependent measures. Minilessons had a significant association with developmental level and handwriting; other significant positive associations included revision with quantity of words produced, and editing with planning. The findings suggest these features of writing workshops should be included in interventions designed to foster early writing development.

The three studies reported in this thesis investigated the contributing factors of L2 writing among adult ESL learners in the academic setting. The major purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between L2 proficiency, writing strategies, writing attitude, writing errors and L2 writing performance. This thesis aimed to provide insights for the contributing factors that are predictive of L2 writing performance in adult ESL learners, studying in English and non-English dominant settings. Study 1 (reported in Chapter 3) focused on determining the appropriate measures for investigating the individual factors of writing performance; particularly learners’ writing strategies, learners’ second language proficiency, first language (L1) interference and their relation to writing performance. Thirty-one intermediate students of L2 served as participants. A measure of vocabulary size and a writing strategy questionnaire were administered to the students. Findings in this study indicated that most of the participants’ planning strategies were limited to having a mental or written plan whereas over half of the respondents reported that they always start with an introduction and were more likely to stop drafting after a few sentences. In terms of drafting strategies, it was found that most respondents reread what they had written to get ideas on how to continue but did not go back to their outline to make changes in it. With regard to L1 use, a majority of participants do not write bits of text in their native language. Nevertheless, quite a number of participants indicated that they would write in their L1 if they don’t know a word in English. Findings in this study also suggested that participants’ biggest concerns were related to grammar and vocabulary, which resulted in them making surface level changes and checking. An overall analysis of participants’ writing output and responses from the questionnaire also provided important insights to the improvement of the measures. The revision process included rewording and rephrasing ambiguous items, removing irrelevant items from the questionnaire and restructuring the writing task for the next study. In Study 2 (presented in Chapter 4), a follow-up study was conducted to examine L2 writers’ proficiency level, writing attitude, writing errors and writing strategies in an English-dominant setting. Nine research questions were designed to guide the study framework and gather specific data regarding the research aims. A writing measure, vocabulary tests and a questionnaire were administered to the students. Findings from Study 2 indicated that L2 proficiency, particularly vocabulary size, was related to writing performance. In addition, it was also discovered that L2 writers who performed poorly were prone to performing writing strategies related to surface level checking. Therefore, it was concluded that linguistic barriers in L2 affect both writing performance and students’ ability in applying the effective strategies in writing. Apart from that, Study 2 also found that the use of L1 and translation into L2 was associated with lower writing performance. Additionally, Study 2 found that pronoun, word and sentence errors were the most prevalent errors among ESL students. A possible reason for this is because L2 students need to work with two languages while writing, mainly the grammar rules in English which are not found in their L1 as well as their own native language. Thus, L2 students face the challenge of working out English grammar rules while writing. Overall, findings in this study suggest that prevalent writing errors in English may be a sign of L1 interference and that as the use of L1 increases, writing performance decreases. In Study 3 (reported in Chapter 5), the role of proficiency level, writing attitude, writing errors and writing strategies was explored by measuring the relationship between writing attitude scores, errors in writing, strategy use and essay scores. Additionally, the role of L2 proficiency in writing performance was also investigated by assessing the relationship between vocabulary size scores, writing errors and writing performance. Findings from Study 3 revealed unexpected findings with regard to the relationship between L1 use and writing performance among the three sample groups. L1 use was found to be correlated with writing performance for Group A but not Groups B and C. It was argued that L2 writers of different L2 proficiency level and academic experience may have different orientations of L1 use. Further work on the impact of L1 use on L2 writing will be needed in order to provide insights into this area. With regard to writing errors, a relationship between errors and writing performance was reported. It was found that subject verb agreement error appeared to be a common factor for the three groups in the study that was related to writing performance. In addition, errors were also significantly correlated with L2 proficiency, suggesting that as L2 proficiency increased, errors decreased. Overall, Study 3 argues for the importance of developing and enhancing learners’ L2 proficiency to reduce errors and improve learners’ writing performance. Additionally, Study 3 also argues for the need to emphasize effective writing strategies in the ESL writing classroom.

The aim of this study is to examine ways of writing experiences of the strange and different, experiences of the other in his or her otherness and experiences of suffering. The study focuses possibilities and limits for the writing of these experiences and aims at finding a tangible way of writing literature. Part of the aim of this study is to elaborate a proposal for a way of writing experiences of the strange and different, experiences of the other in his or her otherness and experiences of suffering.     The material for the study consists of three different approaches to literature, in which theories on literature or analyses of literary works are presented. This material is initially analysed in separate analyses in which conceptions, strategies and methods for writing experiences of the strange and different, the other and suffering are identified. Secondly, the material is analysed in a comparative analysis, aimed at finding similarities and differences between the approaches but above all to let the approaches supplement and challenge each other. The second part of the study consists of the elaboration of a proposal for a way of writing based on the result of the first analyses.    The result of the study is a way of writing in which the limitations and inabilities of literature are used as critical and creative resources. These limitations and inabilities consists of the violence of the literary naming and designation, and the boundaries between identities that render a complete insight in the experiences of someone else impossible. With these limitations and inabilities as a starting point, conceptions, strategies and methods for writing literature are distinguished and developed. A movement between nearness and distance both in content and form is identified as a fruitful way of writing that can mediate experiences and avoid to arrange what is strange and unfamiliar in these experiences into the familiar, as well as and openness for a manifoldness of possibilities. As distinct way of writing is distinguished in the metaphor, a literary device in which the movement between nearness and distance is made concrete. In the elaboration of a proposal for a way of writing these conceptions, strategies and methods provided the framework for a way of writing which doesn’t reduce experiences or close the literary text for a multitude of possibilities.

Creative practitioners, undertaking practice-led research, theorise their practice within an academic domain. Within a three-tiered, performative research paradigm, this project researched writerly identity during the writing of a novel and exegesis. Firstly, based on the writer’s experience with creative and academic writing, the differences were explored through two first-person narratives in a frametale novel, The Fragility Papers, a process documented by critical and reflective journaling. Secondly, the insights gained during the writing of the novel were theorised within the domain of creative writers. Thirdly, the understandings embedded in the novel were considered in the light of these insights and those gained during writing of the exegesis and further theorised within the areas of voice, the writing process and ontological change. Novel writing, it was found, drew not only on the imagination, research, in-flow stream of consciousness writing and serendipitous occurrences but also on personal embodied inscriptions, linguistic play, logic and reason in the development of narrative coherence, forward planning, previously unidentified editing values based in the sonority of language, and a knowledge of the expectations associated with the literary genre. Acknowledging this breadth of experience led to changes in the writer’s creative-writing process, a questioning of the theorised sole influence of language based texts as proposed in intertextual theory, and the proposal to italicise ‘text’ within intertextual to accommodate this breadth. The theorising of insights and emerging, experiential knowledge during the writing of the exegesis was realised in a series of evolving drafts in which interiorised knowledge was increasingly drawn upon in stream of consciousness writing. Further, in both genres, the dialogic engagement of the writer in conscious and unconscious activity at different stages of the writing process was found, suggesting that unconscious activity has a larger than envisaged role to play in academic writing.

The overall aim of the present study is to develop knowledge of Swedish students’ writing in English, and how teaching of a specific kind of writing can be designed and enacted. The study focuses on what the students need to discern in order to develop a more differentiated knowledge of how to adapt a message to an unknown receiver—in this case a message for a person at a hotel. The research question addressed is how aspects of text and receiver can be varied and explored by teachers and students jointly in order to expand the students’ capability to adapt a text to an unknown receiver. The study is based on transcribed lesson data from a learning study, which is a research approach where teachers and researchers work together in an iterative process to understand and improve teaching and learning of a specific object of learning. The research question was explored in five cycles with five different groups. Thirty-four Swedish students, 14–16 years of age, from a special school for students with dyslexia and neuropsychiatric disorders, participated in the study. The theoretical framework of the study was variation theory. A basic assumption of variation theory is that, in order to develop a certain piece of knowledge, it is critical to discern some particular aspects of that knowledge. To enable the discernment of such aspects, they must be made discernible by means of variation. The results show that a short message, used as an example, needs to be deconstructed into its aspects. Once the students had discerned the concept of the receiver, they started to contrast ways to express the same content for known and unknown receivers. With the help of the concept of the receiver, the students explored the aspects amount of information, politeness, and formality together with the teachers. Each aspect needed to be focused on separately but within the framing whole of the specific context, that is, writing a message to a hotel. The findings also show that certain aspects on the macro-level were possible to discern when two texts were compared, whereas other aspects on the micro-level, such as modal verbs, had to be varied against the background of an invariant clause in order for the students to discern them.

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This dissertation explores discipline-specific writing support spaces in an attempt to better understand disciplinary writing from various perspectives. Neal Lerner suggests that writing center scholarship would benefit from interdisciplinary work; therefore, I investigate spaces that are uniquely positioned in disciplines to identify disciplinary questions within writing center work. These spaces will allow writing center professionals to gain a better understanding of the intersections between writing in the disciplines and writing center work, and the writing center's role in student learning, from within the disciplines. We can then integrate these interdisciplinary frameworks into writing center scholarship to broaden perspectives and subsequently better accommodate students across disciplines. This scholarship could offer some clarity as we try to expand our scholarly purview in order to identify some of the questions writing center professionals should be asking. Through ten interviews from three different academic institution, this dissertation interrogates questions that have been embedded within writing center scholarship for decades. This dissertation shows the prominence of the generalist / specialist debate, the 'students can't write' narrative, and explores a situated learning theory in writing center practice. While there has been valuable research done in writing center research and scholarship in an attempt to move writing centers out of the margins, many writing centers still maintain a marginalized status to some faculty and administrators within their institutions. Unless we shift the perception of, and the narratives coming from, writing centers, we might be replaced by writing support centers that are not affiliated with writing centers. These writing support spaces, as shown in this dissertation, provide students a plethora of discipline-specific resources, often including research and communication. If writing centers do not distinguish themselves as a place that can help students across disciplines, writing centers might move from a marginalized position into having no position within the institution at all. For writing center scholars, professionals, and students, the findings of this dissertation mean that as writing centers attempt to accommodate students who write in the disciplines, our identity potentially becomes distorted. Therefore, we must pay special attention to the narratives we use in the writing center and subsequently circulate to our faculty. We have an opportunity to reconsider those narratives and offer a new theoretical framework for how we conceive of and define writing center work. If we do not adapt a situated learning theory in writing centers, we might consider other alternatives so that writing support spaces, such as those highlighted here, do not replace writing centers altogether. Those of us who are involved in writing center theory and practice have a responsibility to consider the alternative venues students might seek for help and to, as a community, identify best practices and theoretical frameworks as writing centers seek to accommodate disciplinary writers. / Ph. D.