David Galbraith presented two papers at last week’s EARLI conference in Munich. The first (with Veerle Baaijen and Kees de Glopper from the University of Groningen) was about “Building content during writing”, and presented a new method for investigating the processes involved in developing understanding through writing. The paper provided clear evidence that this involves a combination of reflective thought and more spontaneous language production processes . See David’s paper on “Writing as discovery” (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/337490/) for more about these processes, and Baaijen, Galbraith & de Glopper (2012) (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/339044/) for more about using keystroke logging to investigate them.
The second (also with Veerle and Kees) was about the “The effect of writing beliefs on writing performance”, and showed that beliefs about writing have a strong influence on how well students write and on how much they learn from writing. In particular, it suggested that the traditional advice to make an outline before writing is not helpful for some writers. It doesn’t help them write any better, and it actively prevents them from developing their understanding while writing.
David was also the discussant for a symposium organised by Martine Braaksma and Gert Rijlaarsdam (University of Amsterdam) on “Intervention studies in writing-to-learn”. A meta-analysis presented by Steve Graham (Arizona State University) at the symposium demonstrated that writing can have strong effects on reading comprehension. A keynote at the conference by Alexander Renkl (University of Freiburg) on a particular implementation of writing-to-learn research – learning journals – suggested that this kind of reflective writing can play an important role in students’ learning and the development of their learning strategies.
