Abstracts - Earli

enefits for text quality, but it remains unclear whether this effect is mediated by changes instudents’ writing strategies or by developing their knowledge of the features of good text.Effects of instruction in self-regulation for writingAmos van Gelderen, University of Amsterdam, NetherlandsRon Oostdam, University of Amsterdam, NetherlandsA series of lessons is developed for the instruction of self-regulatory skills for writing in grade 11of bilingual (Dutch-English) education. Dutch students are given English writing assignments withinstructions for regulating their writing behaviour. Each assignment is supplemented withinstructions for different regulatory activities (planning, translating, evaluating, revising). Anexperiment with 120 students has been carried out comparing this self-regulatory training withanother treatment directed at improving lexical fluency in English and a control group. Instead ofthe self-regulatory training, the lexical treatment contains lexical exercises. By comparing theeffects of both treatments two models are tested. The first is the additive model in whichinstruction in lexical fluency and self-regulation have independent contributions to writing skill.The second is the conditional model in which lexical fluency is a prerequisite for an extracontribution of self-regulation. Effects are tested using six post-test writing assignments, requiringthe students to write paragraphs with different purposes and in different genres. The differencesbetween conditions on global ratings of text quality (so-called primary trait ratings) will bepresented.Co-constructing writing strategies and plans: ‘Expert’ and ‘struggling’ writers in sociallymediated contexts of instructionTriantafillia Kostouli, Aristotle University, GreeceThis work advocates a sociocultural perspective to strategy instruction in classroom communities.Among the issues raised are: How is strategy instruction and learning mediated by theparticularities of the specific classrooms (students’ academic abilities, the types of writing tasksused, the activities constructed)? How does the teacher mediate curriculum knowledge oncognitive strategy instruction to students? Are there more versus less effective strategies adoptedby teachers in this mediating process? How is strategic learning interactively constructed bydifferent groups of writers? Building on the premise that meanings are collaboratively created, thisstudy traces the trajectories teachers and students constructed while negotiating their writing tasks.Attention is directed to two different groups of, ‘struggling’ and ‘expert’, 6th grade writers in twoGreek classrooms as they navigated through two different contexts. These included whole-classnegotiation of a structure of strategies concerning expository and argumentative text writing(brainstorming, goal setting and text-structures) and small-group discussions (consisting of thecollaborative negotiation of these strategies) which led to the production of written expository andargumentative texts. As shown, the distinction between ‘expert’ and ‘struggling’ writers is toorough and sub-distinctions need to be made between different kinds of writing expertise among theparticipating children. In addition, it is indicated that the route from whole-class to groupdiscussions does not involve a transfer of a set of given strategies from the teacher to students;certain strategies are singled out and their content is shaped and reshaped by the different writinggroups; ‘expert’ and ‘struggling’ writers tended to single out different strategies and arriving atnew (poorer or richer) ways of co-constructing their meanings. The implications to strategicwriting instruction are discussed.– 821 –