Writing , Response , and Contexts of Production or , Why It Just Wouldn ’ t Work to Write about Those Bratty Kids

To respond well to something — whether it is a conceptual problem one is trying to solve, a question asked by a colleague, or a student paper — we need to understand what we are responding to. Unfortunately, we often don't, especially in the case of student papers. While we may (or may not) comprehend the propositional content of a given paper, we seldom understand the equally important influences that shape that content. (1990) have noted that " the written product can be an inadequate, even misleading, guide to the thinking process that produced it " (p. 21); Wallace (1996) has found that student texts alone don't reveal the range of different problems students face in producing those texts; and Prior (1994) has found that the multiple influences which shape textual production can be " literally marked by their absence " (p. 31). Prior goes on to point out that we need to analyze the unique complex of influences shaping the production of specific texts if we want to more fully understand the nature of disciplinarity. The same holds true for student writing: if we want to more fully understand it, we can no longer ignore its " context of production, " to use Nystrand's (1987) term. 1 Fortunately, a body of naturalistic studies has taught us much about the types of influences that shape student work. Examples of such influences include students' interpretations of the teacher's personality (Prior, 1991); stu-dents' views on the extent to which the writing they're asked to do will help them gain access to the " real world " of their chosen career (Chin, 1994); classroom discussion of a student's topic (Prior, 1994); students' interpretation of how routine a task is (Herrington, 1985); students' choices to read the textbook before or after writing (Walvoord and McCarthy, 1990); and students' assumptions about the extent of the teacher's knowledge and authority (Sperling and Freedman, 1987). Taken together, these studies suggest both that student writing is shaped by such contexts to a great extent and that the range of these contextual influences is incredibly wide. They suggest, moreover, that the writing and learning of any given student is shaped by its own unique configuration of such influences. It is this last issue that poses the problem: since each student's writing is shaped by a unique complex of influences, the students we teach differ both from the students in …