Short story student-writers: active roles in writing through the use of e-portfolio dossier

Finally, a paper-based survey was applied to gather information about how students evaluated the process and the fi nal results. As validity is an essential criterion for evaluating the quality and acceptability of the research (Burns, 1999), subjectivity was avoided by taking the students’ points of view on the study’s fi nal conclusions and using of rubrics to evaluate the instruments’ effectiveness. Triangulation was also used to check the study’s validity. This was the data analysis approach used to cross-check the information and state the fi nal categories. These emerged from the commonalities found after analyzing each of the instruments: the refl ections in the teachers’ blog, the surveys, the fl owchart and the two short story drafts.

Findings

The most frequently observed patterns (those occurring three or more times in the researchers’ annotations, Sagor, 2005, p.116) were summarized to fi nd the categories used to answer the research question. This analysis revealed that the combination of two strategies enabled students to understand, use and evaluate their story writing competency. These strategies are illustrated and commented upon below.

The analysis of the fl owcharts obtained in the pre-writing stage revealed patterns of clarity, creativity, attractiveness and effectiveness. Five features were assessed in the fl owchart: Title, Opening, Climax (Problem), Resolution and Mechanics. Each one of these features was registered in a protocol form for data analysis. Group performances were subsequently compared and analyzed.

Review of the flowcharts provided evidence of how the students initially organized their short stories. Given that, at this stage, students had to shape their thoughts and make decisions as to agents and actions involved in the story, it can be seen that this strategy provided students with a sequential scheme on which to base their thoughts. Additionally, it was found that certain features such as clarity, creativity, attractiveness and effectiveness became recurrent patterns of analysis throughout the data processing stage.

Clarity was examined through the students’ capacity to transmit thoughts and provoke consistent relationships between the different story elements (such as characters, settings, situations, and genre). The sentences listed in the flowcharts showed short but clear ideas. Results indicate that students had clarity of diction and sentence structure. Most of the groups were consistently interested in including additional information in their flowcharts as they organized and produced the preliminary sections of their short story. Sharing ideas, peer assessment, tutor’s monitoring and prompt assessment facilitated the control of students’ performance and guided them towards the first draft stage.

Creativity was analyzed according to the students’ originality in creating the story’s characters, settings, situations and genre. The study revealed that students were able to elaborate a composition that mixed fictional and real characters and contexts based on their prior knowledge and their points of view about life.

Attractiveness was evaluated as to the students’ capacity to arouse interest in the reader by posing an interesting topic, catchy plot and also proposing an innovative procedure to carry out the resolution of the story problem. The topics selected by students ranged from passionate love stories to crime fiction and ghost tales. All the stories developed a problematic situation that in the end was resolved. It was also noted that the most recurrent theme was death.

Effectiveness was evaluated with regard to the students’ capacity to use the flowchart: to write the first composition and the final draft showing an improvement in their short story writing process. Data indicated that the sections containing the flowchart enabled them to create a mental structure of their story. The majority of students reported that their ideas resulted from the association of words with concepts and categories (semantic mapping strategy).

Extracts from students’ comments

During the while-intervention writing stage, the first students’compositions and the final draft were assessed using the same set of rubrics but the occurrences were different for each instrument. In the first composition, the first evaluated aspect was the story structured sequence. This relates to the organization of the story,the connections between its parts: beginning, middle and ending. The groups’ stories maintained the structures initially drawn in the flowchart. Students’ improvements in the texts was noticeable in 76% of the class. For the remaining 14%, it was noticeable that students maintained the same performance and score as in the first draft, with no major changes or additions.

The second observed aspect (setting) gave an account of the way student-writers created the story’s environment. According to McCoy (2002), if there is no a setting, there is no story. Characters need a believable background that helps deliver their story as they grow, and the plot must be developed in an specific setting, keeping in mind the kind of story the student wants to tell. Students were reminded of the importance of creating characters immersed in a context in order to develop their stories feasibly. Data analysis showed that all the groups worked effectively to create fictional characters and credible situations. Generally, most of the students were in agreement about this aspect in both stages (first and final composition): for them, it was interesting to construct the storyline as a team. There were few/no cases of groups who showed discontent with their characters and chosen situations.

The third analyzed aspect showed how the story characters, setting and genre merged to convey logical relationships within the story. In conversations with the groups, a 100% of the students agreed that the aspects outlined in the Flowchart and the suggested order and relationship between them (indicated by arrows) enabled them to know what ideas preceded others. There was no difficulty in determining what the opening or the resolution should contain. Each section had logical and related ideas within the text.

The fourth aspect (cohesion-coherence) examined how clear and logical connections between ideas were presented in the story, so that readers could easily follow the storyline without any difficulty. All the groups had difficulty making paragraph-to-paragraph connections when moving from one part of story to another. Some students made tangential connections between ideas with ambiguous cause-effect relationships. The teacher emphasized and provided students with strategies such as mind mapping and outlining in order to assist them in identifying possible grammatical, lexical and semantic links that could connect parts of their texts to other parts.

In the final draft the first evaluated aspect was corrected mistakes; the second observed aspect was making improvements. Results indicated that in these stages, the majority of the students showed interest in finding out how to correct their mistakes. Students also displayed a positive attitude about their creations and openly expressed their enjoyment of each stage of the writing process. The majority of them was engaged with and committed to the improvement of their writing processes. Most of them used the commentaries, assessment provided by the teacher (via proofreading charts, word documents and e-mail notes) to improve their writing.

The last aspect in the writing process referred to the reasons why the students made new mistakes. Data analysis revealed students’ lack of attention, lack of training in the use of word processing tools and lack of English language mechanics. Some groups had difficulty in using MS Word™ tools such as Insert/Delete comment and Track Changes. When the teacher e-mailed the feedback to students, some students decided to rewrite a new text instead of revising the section on which the teacher had commented.

During data analysis, a new stage was discovered that helped students see the writing process holistically. In this new stage, apart from creating individual drafts, students could understand that the final product implies a systematic process of writing development. This integrated stage also reminded them of the importance of following specific steps in order to achieve the creation of an elaborate product. The criteria that emerged from the e-portfolio creation included the following features: organization, students’overall effort, creativity and usefulness. In conclusion, during this phase, two cognitive processes were being developed simultaneously. One related to the process of learning the specificities of short stories as genre and learning to write them; the other related to the organization of the e-portfolio.

The table below illustrates the related focus for each criteria:

Dealing with time and group issues

The while-writing stage took more time than the researcher had anticipated in the production and correction of students’ short stories (45%). Less than a fifth (13%) of class time was spent on the pre-intervention writing stage and on tutorials about how to create and optimize the use of the e-portfolio. However, in the end, the time planned for socialization was not used because of some external issues that affected the normal development of the project (such as state school strikes and facility problems).

The information collected for certain weeks in the grading book was analyzed by comparing class groups’ performances. In general, there was a slight tendency towards improvement in the short story writing in terms of aspects such as general structure, layout, cohesion and coherence.

The artifacts (stories) were created both in an individual and collaborative mode. Although students were meant to work together in groups to support each other’s work within the group, in practice a single student usually came to dominate the activities of each group. This student was generally the leader of the group, a learner who best committed to make revisions and improvements to the compositions, a student who guided his/her team members to stay focused on the tasks and to be organized and time- efficient

Implementing the e-portfolio

Another recurrent pattern was the dedication and interest shown by most of the learners for the use of the e-portfolio dossier as a learning tool. Despite the fact that the students did not have optimal access to computers and the Internet in their school, they developed most of the activities successfuly and participated actively in the improvement of their short story writing process by doing the online and digital work at home or in Internet cafés.[5]

Organizing the data for analysis

Initially, after an exhaustive reading of all the information collected during the project’s intervention, it was classified and reduced by making lists of the available data. Each one of these lists was organized, named, and focused on the most meaningful data to help answer the research question. Listing was the strategy selected to highlight the most important issues, ideas and situations that could provide clear evidence on the study’s results.

Taking into account the twofold nature of the research question, it was necessary to separate the instruments in two different files: Genre-process approach (GPA) and e-portfolio dossier. The GPA file contained all the meaningful instruments that were used during the pre- and while-writing stages to improve students’ short story writing process. In the e-portfolio file, evidence of students’ development in the construction of their own web pages was stored chronologically. Due the great amount of collected information, the deductive (theory-driven) approach suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994) was used for reducing and systematizing the data.

First of all, a coding schema was developed based on the key themes that emerged from the data processing. It was useful to describe and explain the pattern of relationships and interactions because data could be grouped according to clearly defined codes. Frequently revisiting the records in the researcher’s computer allowed visualization of the different stages during the short story writing process. From this exercise, the first labels emerged. This was a list that resembled the one that included the five writing process stages stated by O’Brein (2004).

When the chosen instruments were examined, commonalities between the different labels were established. Afterwards, these commonalities were displayed in a matrix that revealed the emerging categories. It was necessary to frequently check the records to count the occurrence of each label in each instrument. Having the numbers for all the labels and revisiting the data, labels were grouped according to the issues presented in them. The coding process was the first step in the data reduction, and it began by describing the attributes of the different resources and identifying commonalities between the different labels. The commonalities were coded with abbreviations of key words (Marshall,1999).

According to Strauss and Corbin (1990), categories are formed by grouping similar incidents, events or other instances of phenomena under the same label. After revising the data with the aim of finding the commonalities to answer the action research question, a new sub-question about the actions performed by the learners in each one of the writing process stages emerged from the analysis: What specific actions will the learners carry out to improve the short story writing process and the implementation of the e-portfolio dossier?

Discussion of findings

Three main categories emerged from data analysis: student—writer as a planner, studentwriter as a builder, and student-writer as a reviewer. The following diagram illustrates these findings.

The student-writers as planners (SWP) are learners who are able to organize effective texts; that is to say, these are learners who outline their ideas clearly in a scheme (namely a chart, a flowchart, or a mind map) and show evidence of gathering the elements that make of their written work a simple, precise and concise unit. SWPs are also creative and original, and they produce appealing texts that catch the reader’s attention. Moreover, they are resourceful in problem solving and making decisions.

Student-writers as builders (SWB) are learners who are able to narrate well-structured stories. These learners take into account the outlining structure of short stories to produce well thought-out and sequential narrative texts. Moreover, they are aware of the importance of being cohesive and coherent through the whole text. Cohesion refers to the grammatical and lexical links used to join sentences together, avoiding unnecessary repetitions. This includes the use of synonyms, lexical sets, pronouns, verb tenses, time references, and grammatical references. Coherence is related to the manner in which sequences of ideas are clearly and logically organized. Additionally, SWBs maintain consistent relationships between characters and between characters and setting, taking into account the context in which the story takes place.

Student-writers as reviewers (SWR) are learners who are able to reflect on their writing development in order to carry out further improvements. SWRs are able to use the teacher’s feedback to elaborate their drafts and/or add new ideas to produce a better version of their stories. They are also able to discuss their peers’ work and collaborate on its improvement.

One of the main findings of this study was that learners showed progressive improvement in their short story writing processes as evidenced in the evaluation done for each one of the instruments filed in their e-portfolios. The instructional strategies used in the study proved to be effective to assist students in the development of their short story writing. Learners gradually built and enjoyed the process of writing short stories having in mind the core features of the genre, learning to write them and using the e-portfolio as a tool to organize and self-assess their progress. Although not all of the students participated in the same way within their groups, it must be said that the major achievements were seen in terms of personal benefits, opposed to collective benefits. The role dominance of a student in each one of the groups denoted the absence of a team working together to achieve goals successfully (Brown, 1994, p.81).

Additionally, it was found that students’ and the teacher’s roles transcended an active learning dimension. Students emerged as self-directed and responsible learners, which enabled them to become planners, builders and reviewers of their own short story writing process. Likewise, the instructor/researcher emerged as an enabler of collaborative learning: Her role changed from being a lecturer to becoming a facilitator, from controller of a teaching environment to a cocreator of a learning experience (Labonte,2003): an instructor who, supported by documented research, was also able to make informed teaching decisions.

In spite of the problems caused by the lack of technological resources in the school, the new roles adopted by learners were developed in the different writing stages and also in the use of the e-portfolio dossier. The e-portfolio dossier allowed them to be aware of their progress over a period of time and proved to be a useful means to teaching, learning and assessment.

The instruments involved lots of planning and effort. The use of rubrics and the proofreading chart was functional because students could find support to review their drafts, reflect upon their mistakes and self-correct them before writing the final version of their stories. Training students in the use of these assessment instruments helped them understand how they worked. It can also be concluded that despite the fact that learners had very little English, it was possible for them to write short stories. Realizing that they had made something new with the very limited English they had was very motivating and productive for them.

Limitations

Technical problems related to Internet connection and computer room availability forced students to use internet cafés as a strategy to develop the project. As a result, students took more time than the estimated for creating, editing and proofreading their drafts. Moreover, teacher assessment time increased significantly as new student tutorials had to be planned asynchronously (via e-mail) or in different classtime (for example, during recess or other courses’ classes).

Directions for further research

Further research is needed to investigate the effect of collaborative work in the writing process through the use of e-portfolio dossier. Understanding how the members of a group can achieve writing goals under standard conditions could be beneficial not only in planning their writing development but also in approaching their different learning styles and in providing students with new learning opportunities within a community of builders. To develop similar studies, learning strategies and technology training need to be leveled according to each student’s case to achieve the desired outcomes.

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Notas

[1]According to the Common European Language Framework for Languages (2001), a portfolio contains three parts: My Biography, My Passport and My Dossier. The e-portfolio’s dossier is a learning instrument or a value source of information used by learners, during a period of time, to reflect on and record their achievements and language-learning experiences.

[2]An A1 language user can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases to meet specific needs. Can introduce him/herself and others, ask and answer questions about personal details. Can interact in a simple way (CEF, 2001).

[3]A flowchart is a visual representation of a story sequence. It is a working map that allows student-writers to visualize all the major steps and elements involved in the writing process.

[4]Blended lessons refer to classes with an online and a face-to-face component.

[5] café internet is a public commercial place where people access to the Internet service .