Writing and New Technologies
REANALYSING REVISION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Roger M. A. Yallop¹, Djuddah A. J. Leijen²
¹Doctoral Student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia. ²Doctoral Student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
It is generally accepted in writing research that revision is one of the key components of writing; both generally and in learning to write. Faigley and Witte (1981), in their attempt to build a taxonomy to study revision, correctly stated that the revision process is incredibly complex. Many studies (Min 2006; Yang, Badger and Yu 2006; Woo, Chu and Li 2010; Cho, Kwangsu and MacArthur 2010) have used their taxonomy to obtain a deeper insight into what and how students revise. Current technological developments, such as webbased peer review systems and novel research methods, are making studying revision more accessible. This is used to record the students' drafts and to store digital data to allow a closer analysis of the revision process. For example, written peer feedback during the writing process provides measurable evidence when analysing revision using Faigley and Witte’s taxonomy. This study reports on the complexity of applying their taxonomy on real data obtained from peer review, and specifically when attempting to replicate a strong reliability between coders. The results indicate that despite the logic of the taxonomy, replication on larger sets of data from different writers and contexts require much more transparency or even a revised taxonomy. To obtain a deeper insight into the process for future studies, the authors suggest a mixed method approach of quantitative data analysis with more qualitative evidence to investigate what students really ‘think’ when they decide to revise their text.
References
Cho, Kwangsu, and Charles MacArthur. 2010. "Student revision with peer and expert reviewing", Learning and Instruction. 20 (4), pp.328338.
Faigley, L., and Witte, S. 1981. "Analyzing revision", College composition and communication . pp.400414.
Min, H. T. 2006. "The effects of trained peer review on EFL students’ revision types and writing quality", Journal of Second Language Writing . 15 (2), pp.118141.
Woo, M., Chu, S., & Li, X.X. 2010. " Tracing peer feedback to revision process in a wiki supported collaborative writing ", The 2nd Asian Conference on Education 2010, 25 December 2010, Osaka, Japan.
Yang, M., Badger, R., and Yu, Z. 2006. "A comparative study of peer and teacher feedback in a Chinese EFL writing class", Journal of Second Language Writing , 15 (3), pp.179200.