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Content STUDY OF TWO SCHOLAR/PRACTITIONERS IN COMPOSITION
DEVELOPMENTAL THEMES IN THE WORK OF
JAMES MOFFETT AND JAMES BRITTON
by
Mary Kay Tirrell
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1988
Copyright 1988 Mary Kay Tirrell
UMI Number: DP23138
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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This dissertation, written by
M a r x _ . JK a ^ T i ;r r e 11....................
under the direction of h..&x.. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DO CTO R OF PH ILO SO PHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date A u g u s t 22} 1988
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS....................... iii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ............................. 1
II. DEVELOPMENTAL CONCEPTS TRANSLATED INTO
COMPOSITION....................... 24
Active Learning ................. 33
Stages in Growth ........ ....... 54
III. ACTIVE LEARNING: PERSPECTIVES FROM MOFFETT
AND BRITTON............................. 75
Active Learning as Drama ............... 7 9
Psychological Theory: Piaget, Vygotsky,
Bruner . 109
Current Theories of Development:
Extending Moffett and Britton ........ 118
IV. STAGES IN GROWTH: PERSPECTIVES FROM MOFFETT
AND BRITTON................................ 128
Metaphors for Growth and Development:
The Perspectives of Moffett and
Britton ..................... 131
Current Developmental Theory: Rethinking
Development .......... 165
V. CONCLUSION.................................178
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................... 201
i i
j
List of Abbreviations
AY
j AVs
I cc
I
!
1 DWA
LL
SCLAC
SCLAR
TUD
Active Voice
Active Voices
Coming on Center
The Development of Writing
Abilities
Language and Learning
A Student-Centered Language
Arts Curriculum
Student-Centered Language Arts
and Reading
Teaching the Universe of
Discourse
Chapter One
Introduction
In his book The Making of Knowledge in Composition,
Stephen North notes that composition became Composition,
a recognized profession and "nascent academic field,"
only 25 years ago. He dates the modern field of com
position to the publication of Research in Written
Composition in 1963 and argues that Composition came
into its own with the call, set out in that study, for
research which could be based on the rigor and methods
used in the sciences. North’s story of the field is
told through his examination and critique of the methods
of inquiry used by methodological communities in com
position, which he names the Practitioners, Scholars,
and Researchers, each with subdivisions.
North’s book reflects a new self-consciousness
about the origins and historical development of composi
tion as a field. His is only one of a number of recent
efforts to conceptualize that field in terms of such
issues as its historical roots, competing ideologies,
relation to other disciplines, teaching practices,
subject matter, or methodology (Emig, Bizzell, Connors,
Lauer, S. Miller, Faigley, Phelps). These recent works
1
signal an effort to get beyond the earlier notion that
composition can be easily understood in terms of a
single unified "process” paradigm that emerged in the
late sixties to challenge the "current-traditional”
paradigm (Young, Hairston).
Compositionists now realize that, while this story
they told themselves served an important ideological and
political purpose in establishing a new professional
identity, it is inadequate to account for the complexity
of what actually happened, especially for the ways that
a "conflict of interpretations" (Phelps) has continued
to operate within the field itself. North’s categories
are not just neutral names for different elements of the
field, representing different types of research; they
explicitly represent conflicting ideologies competing
for control of its future development and professionali
zation. The dynamic significance of this conflict is
suggested by the initial review of North’s book
(Bartholomae), which disputes the image he offers for
each methodology and the relationships he proposes among
them, and by the general uproar over the ideas in it
which was heard in discussions at the 1988 Conference on
College Composition and Communication. In a healthy
way, composition is beginning to reexamine -the tale told
by the first generation--the "founding" myth: to
2
demythologize and argue for different notions of the
field and its paradigms.
One consequence of this rethinking is to open the
way to reconsidering work that has so far been inter
preted and evaluated in terms of the dominant story:
the story that composition emerged as a nascent science
organized by the concept of process, or more accurately,
by a process/product dichotomy. It is now obvious that
no such unified view ever existed. While many claimed
that composing process alone could explain everything
about composition (both the field and the act), this
concept neglects texts, the "products" of process. The
study of rhetoric itself is not focused on composing
process. Therefore, even within the process paradigm
many types of research and differing practices co
existed, representing countercurrents and alternative
traditions to a strongly scientific concept of process.
(Examples are Dyson in research; Winterowd in rhetorical
theory; de Beaugrande in text analysis; in teaching, the
"romantic" pedagogies of Macrorie and Elbow.)
In any story of origins, some work is valued more
highly than others. Certain work is naturalized to fit
the prevailing myth, and thus may be overvalued from one
perspective and misinterpreted and/or undervalued from
another. In general, this is true of "practice" and
3
practitioners, as North suggests, since until recently
practice did not receive much attention from scholars as
a source of knowledge-making, while practitioners
themselves have resisted "theory" as abstract and
indifferent to their needs. For this reason, scholar/
practitioners who straddle this line are peculiarly
interesting now, as we begin to rethink these attitudes.
If we reexamine the strongest of such figures, we may
discover in them a richness of knowledge-making and an
unexpected contribution to theoretical thinking, both
through their own practices and writings for
practitioners and through their abilities to mediate
theory between composition and other related disciplines
whose concepts they have taken up and incorporated into
their work.
I have selected two such figures, James Moffett and
James Britton, for examination in this work. I myself
will take up the role of hermeneutical critic, re
reading their texts freshly in light of certain narra
tives in composition, to explore the way they have
appeared in those narratives or outside them. Specifi
cally, I want to view them as scholar/practitioners,
taking this concept as an underlying theme through vrhich
to understand my primary framework of analysis. I want
to study them as representing an alternate story in
composition, different enough from the mainstream of
work to be sometimes misinterpreted and certainly under
estimated in their contribution to the field.
In this framework I will treat them as early, but
relatively sophisticated thinkers in a developmental
paradigm far richer than the ideas of language develop
ment generally held and applied to practice by other
researchers of the period. Moffett and Britton "trans
lated" theory (from developmental psychology and
language studies) rather than independently theorized;
they approached translation from a broad experience of
language learning among children, primarily in classroom
practice. And they sought out and carefully used devel
opmental theories to explicate and illuminate their
practice. Unappreciated by researchers more narrowly
oriented to the college classroom (who valued them
largely for their discourse theories) , they quietly
exerted a widespread influence on the practitioners of
language arts. Now we may hope to reinterpret and to
revalue their work as precursors of theoretical atten
tion in composition to development, and to observe and
validate the role of the scholar/practitioner in the
field.
Here is how I will approach my task. In Chapter
Two I will offer background for their thinking through
an analysis of the ways in which development has been
represented theoretically in composition in the form of
concepts for understanding children’s and young adults’
writing. These concepts can be seen in the develop
mental terms which have entered the vocabulary of the
field (e.g., active learner, risk-taking); looking at
the use of these terms it is possible to discern a
general paradigm for thinking about development,
although the research is scattered rather than presented
as a coherent body of knowledge. This research will
provide a background for the richer, integrated perspec
tives of Moffett and Britton and their alternative views
of development which I will bring out in Chapters Three
and Four. In my interpretation of their work I will
show how it partly influenced practice, although it did
not succeed in establishing development as a viable
research strand in the field until recently. Only
recently have other scholars and practitioners begun to
draw on the same sources which Moffett and Britton used.
While others did not, however, actually shape richer
interpretations of Britton’s and Moffett’s work, the
terms introduced in it were not lost. Chapter Five will
reconsider the contributions of Moffett and Britton in
relation to other evaluations of them and look at other
aspects of their work.
6
Interest in the field is turning to the nature of
practice and the practitioner, and as part of that
attention I want to identify and define the special
figure of the scholar/practitioner. This figure, as I
have said above, walks the line between two traditional
roles which have until recently been viewed as separate
from one another. Scholars usually are credited with
making knowledge while practitioners apply it, creating
in their application a body of knowledge which North
calls "lore," that is, "the accumulated body of
traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which
Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned,
and taught" (22). The practitioner role, as Phelps
points out, is actually less limited than North’s des
cription when it becomes reflective ("Toward a Human
Science" 211): "Teaching praxis itself is an area for
reflection and theorizing, including experimentation to
test reflective concepts developed directly in and from
primary experience." To these conceptions of the prac
titioner role I am adding that of the scholar who is not
only a practitioner but also a translator who interprets
in two directions--from theory to practice and from
practice to theory.
7
In order to contextualize this role, let me look at
several others who might exemplify the type of scholar/
practitioner I am portraying here with Moffett and Brit
ton. To fit the role these other figures should have a
substantial body of work to draw on; they should be part
of an historical moment; their work should focus on
development, although they need to have breadth to their
interests; and not least, they must be deeply rooted in
practice and have a strong impact on teachers.
Janet Eroig, for one, is a scholar whose first
research study, The Composing Processes of Twelfth
Graders. identified her with praxis to the extent that
in this study she offered several critiques of teaching
practices related to composition. Her other work is
scholarly and strongly oriented toward development by
the theorists she sought out (e.g., George Kelly, Lev
Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Eric Lenneberg, A. R. Luria). As
is true for Britton and Moffett, not much attention has
been given to her translation of the ideas of these
developmental theorists nor to her own theorizing about
development.
Another figure, Donald Murray, is a strong prac
titioner who is sometimes accorded a scholarly role. He
is highly regarded as a professional writer--he has won
a Pulitzer prize for journalism--and is respected as a
8
practitioner who provides special insights into writing
from his vantage point of being a writer. He approaches
teaching from the perspective of the teacher as writer
and has set out his ideas about this role in A Writer
Teaches Writing, a book which transfers his particular
kind of perspicuity about writing to methodology.
A colleague of Murray’s, Donald Graves, is strongly
associated with and has had a great influence on the
teaching of writing, especially in the elementary
school. Most of his research, and that of his asso
ciates Lucy Calkins, Nancy Atwell, and Mary Ellen
Giacobbe, has recorded school children’s individual
variations in writing growth over time. While one can
discern some influence of developmental theorists such
as Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget on his work, Graves does
not present a strong theoretical basis for his research.
He is therefore not generally regarded as a scholar in
the field. His influence has been relatively recent,
building on earlier work such as Emig’s and Britton’s,
so that in a sense he might be viewed as a second gener
ation figure.
As a final example, Ann Berthoff certainly quali
fies as an historical figure in the field who also has a
strong interest in classroom practice. One of her
books, Reclaiming the Imagination is intended to assist
9
teachers in becoming thoughtful practitioners ’ ’guided by
theory." She has been a practitioner herself (she
recently retired), and many of the readings she provides
for teachers in Imagination reflect her own seeking out
and study of philosophy and literary theory, two areas
which have greatly influenced her philosophy of teaching
writing. However, Berthoff stands aggressively opposed
to most developmental theories, as will become apparent
in my discussion of her views in the next chapter.
While these thinkers whom I have chosen to high
light (there are others I might also have looked at) in
many respects mirror some of the qualities inherent in
the conception of the scholar/practitioner I am trying
to draw here, they each fit the role less well than do
Moffett and Britton. Emig is primarily recognized as a
scholar, not as a practitioner. Murray is highly re
garded as an intuitive practitioner of writing, strongly
identified with composing process research, but he is
not a scholar. Graves too is a respected practitioner,
although his work is too recent to predict what his
long-range influence on the field will be. A strong
practitioner, influential on writing teaching theory and
practice, Berthoff is most often viewed, like Emig, as a
scholar despite her practical bent. However, she takes
a narrow view of development and therefore falls outside
10
1 the historical moment which captures the work of Moffett
and Britton.
They, on the other hand, manage successfully to
integrate these two seemingly disparate roles, although
scholars often fail to see their strong practical bent
and practitioners frequently seem to ignore their schol
arly thrust. For Britton and Moffett their scholar/
practitioner role is closely bound to the framework of
development because their practice led them to consider
the more general mental growth taking place in their
students.
Development has been a topic rather than a theoret
ical framework in composition for some time, although it
was overshadowed until recently by the composing process
metaphor. Janet Emig keyed in the term "process" in the
1970’s with her study of high school students’ compos
ing. In her research she found that teachers had more
interest in "a product [they] can criticize rather than
in a process [they] can help initiate . . . (97). Howe
ver, the response to her suggestion for a turn to
investigating writing processes brought about a
polarization of the terms product and process, with the
interpretation of process as centered on the writer, and
a heightening of "an objectivist characterization of
texts and their structures" (Phelps, "Dance of
11
Discourse" 56}. This had to be a rather ironic situa
tion for Emig, to see her idea interpreted outside of a
developmental framework in which she has consistently
worked.
The process narrative by which composition has in
the main defined itself as a discipline for nearly
twenty-five years is not, however, monolithic. At least
three major perspectives about the concept coexist in
the field, according to Faigley. The first is the
expressive, an essentially neo-Romantic view which
centers on ’ ’integrity, spontaneity, and originality."
The second, the cognitive, considers developmental
aspects of writing and includes cognitive models of
information processing as part of its knowledge base.
Finally, the social view bases its central underlying
assumption on the idea that "human language {including
writing) can be understood only from the perspective of
society rather than a single individual" (535). These
three positions, rather than showing coherence and
agreement in the field, represent rather far-ranging
ideas about what a writing process paradigm might in
clude .
This slipperiness of what constitutes the paradigm
is .reflected in another attempt to define it. Hairston
gives a definition of the writing process, which with
12
minor variations is a rather standard one: ’ ’[It is] a
recursive rather than a linear process; pre-writing,
writing, and revision are activities that overlap and
intertwine" (86). She includes among process charac
teristics the notion of making assignments based on the
modes of discourse, a practice which is a part of a more
traditional, product-centered orientation. She also
suggests that teachers intervene in the student’s
writing process, which contains a hint of a more cur
rent, social view of writing. In other words,
Hairston’s definition reveals the sometimes conflicting
and unexamined assumptions about composing process which
the field itself still holds.
This conflict is, however, productive, for in
Faigley’s and Hairston’s attempt to specify, or at least
clarify, what operating within a process paradigm means,
they point in some ways to a developmental view of
writing, which represents both a psychological and a
social orientation to composing. Contrasted to process,
the developmental framework looks at composing over
time— a semester, a year, even several years. This
perspective is illustrated in the case studies of child
ren carried out by Donald Craves and his associates who
spent two.years at an elementary school in Atkinson, New
Hampshire, investigating how children learn to write.
While he is ostensibly concerned with writing processes
and their variability from student to student, Graves
also notes some of the general cognitive factors which
affect writing, such as learning to move out from one’s
own particular point of view to take in other views,
becoming better able to form concepts, and regressing in
some abilities as new ones are acquired. A single
writing process is influenced by the child’s "writing
history," which implies that previous writing processes
have an impact on present and future ones. As most
language arts scholars do, Graves counts the social
interaction of teacher and student as a dynamic factor
\
in growth.
From an enhanced theoretical viewpoint, Graves’
study points to the highly contextual and reciprocal
nature of development in which the person both influ
ences and is influenced by the environment surrounding
her. Graves has studied the classroom and the teacher-
student and student-student interactions which take
place there, but others (e.g., Bissex, Taylor, Mano,
Harste, et al.) also take into consideration the varied
contexts outside of school, especially the great in
fluence which the home has on growth and literacy devel
opment. Researchers who approach writing from a
developmental view are less interested in a single
14
composing event and more interested in the dynamics of a
composing life (Phelps), what Graves terms a writing
history. A developmental perspective therefore takes
into consideration the concept of the learner as an
"active agent constructing a coherent view of the world"
(Barritt and Kroll 54 . ) and the interlacing of her cogni
tive development with her language development over
time .
Britton and Moffett have always operated from a
developmental perspective, as their published writing,
speeches, and practices confirm. Their work generally
falls outside or transcends the process paradigm,
although practitioners have "naturalized" them into it
while taking into account some aspects of the psycho
social elements in their work. Their theoretical orien
tation, however, has allowed each the flexibility to use
the various dimensions offered by process, product, and
social/contextual research emphases without limiting
them to one of these exclusively.
Their views were introduced to a wide audience at
the Dartmouth Conference in 1966, when scholars and
teachers from Great Britain and the United States met to
discuss mutual interests and concerns about English
studies. One of the major topics at the seminar cen
tered on sequencing in English and those aspects of
15
; human development relevant to language learning and
i
I teaching. This focus called for a turn from teacher-
j
I centered to student-centered classrooms, based on the
I
; belief, strongly held by the British educators, that the
curriculum should be centered "not on subject matter but
on the child, his interests and immediate needs, always
with an eye on individual differences'* {Muller 13-14).
Britton, for example, presented a paper which ties
the development of a student’s response to literature in
terms of "an increasing sense of form" ("Response to
Literature" 33) to her ability to perceive more complex
patterns through her experience with the world.
Moffett’s paper, "Drama: What Is Happening," contains
some of his ideas regarding a theory of discourse devel
opment which draws together cognitive growth and lan
guage growth. These theories arose from their classroom
i observations and practices.
Practice, as both a theoretical and practical
construct, has been a recurring theme for Britton and
, Moffett over the span of their professional lives.
James Britton, who this year celebrates his 80th birth-
i
! day, is still active in teacher education. He began his
!
1 own teaching career in London in 1930 at a time when, as
: he describes it, the controversy in English studies
centered on the teaching of grammar: "It was not at
I
that time a question of whether to teach it, but how"
("How We Got Here" 169). Over his years in the class
room, some of the controversies have changed, but
Britton’s philosophy consistently views teaching as an
"ancillary of learning” and considers the child’s
learning in school as simply one other way of tapping
into her curiosity and the learning that she naturally
engages in outside the classroom.
Britton taught for many years, retiring in 1975
from full- time teaching as head of the English Depart
ment in the Institute of Education at the University of
London. During that time he was involved in establish
ing both the local teaching association (London Associa
tion for the Teaching of English) and the national
association. In addition to Dartmouth, he also par
ticipated in the York Conference in 1971 which sought to
amplify the attempt at Dartmouth to place the learner at
the center of the English classroom, but also took up
the broader contexts of language learning in the educa
tional system and society. Prior to his retirement he
became best known in the United States through the study
carried out in the British schools with other colleagues
of his at the University of London, published as The
Development of Writing Abilities and edited by him.
17
Since then Britton has been a visiting professor at
a number of schools, including New York University and
the University of Iowa. He returns to the United States
every year to teach at the Breadloaf School of English
in the summer and to work with teachers involved in the
, National Writing Project. He also works with teacher
education projects in Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and other English speaking countries.
, Britton has had far-reaching influence on the
field, but to trace that influence over nearly 60 years
would take the work of an ethnographer or a specialist
in reception studies. However, one sign of his influ
ence as a teacher is his portrayal in Ken Macrorie's
book Twenty Teachers, in which Macrorie profiles
teachers who are "enablers who help others to do good
: works and extend their already considerable powers"
(xi). Britton as an enabler is pictured there, not in
his own words, but through the words of one of his
j graduate students at Breadloaf. The student’s narrative
! of her experience in the program allows one to catch
\ glimpses of Britton’s philosophy of asking teachers to
I
reflect on what they do in order to understand how
' theorising works.
Seeing Britton in action, one begins to understand
why both teachers and scholars identify with him. He
18
mixes charm with integrity, which at times can be stern.
In 1986, for example, at the week long Fourth Interna
tional Conference for the Teaching of English held at
Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, both aspects of
his character were evident. Britton was twice a keynote
speaker and several times a respondent to other
speakers. His first statement at the conference, "I am
a schoolmaster," endeared him to the audience, and
served as a reminder about where his research interests
lie. Yet because of his long fight against a behavior
istic bent in education, on another occasion as an
invited respondent to the workshop "Interactive Learning.
Through Small Group Discussion," he spoke out strongly
against its premises. His remarks reminded the audience
that one needs to look at the theory behind practices,
for behaviorist principles can inhere in what may appear
to be collaborative and cooperative approaches to small
group work: peer groups had been presented in the
workshop as teacher-dominated activities. This teaching
philosophy is manipulative, Britton pointed out, and
diametrically opposed to his own.
James Moffett does not have quite as long a history
as James Britton in the field of English studies, but
his career has also been very influential. Moffett
began teaching in 1955 at Phillips Exeter Academy, a
19
I boys’ prep school, where, as he says, he was allowed the
freedom to experiment. Here through feedback from both
teachers and students he tested his theory about child-
> ren’s developing cognitive abilities, first in relation
; to literature and then in relation to nonfiction dis-
J course. He spent a year in California studying new
■ teaching methods in the early sixties and was informally
associated at that time with the group of General Seman-
ticists who worked with S. I. Hayakawa. He was drawn to
this group because, as he said to me in an interview,
. "they had an organic, holistic, very interdisciplinary
approach long before it became fashionable" (16 Feb.
■ 1985). Following his publication in 1968 of Teaching
the Universe of Discourse and Student-Centered Language
Arts Curriculum, Moffett moved to California,' working as
a private consultant to school districts. He continues
, to teach teachers through programs such as the National
i
i
Writing Project and the Breadloaf School and, like
Britton, has also been a visiting professor at several
' universities.
i
! Moffett’s sympathies lie with teachers and the
I
i
, students they teach. However, he readily admits that
. teachers often disagree with his ideas about workshop
i
i
i classes, which do not seem to fit with school situations
that require the use of grammar handbooks and
' achievement test preparation. Yet, hearing him speak to
i
large and small groups of teachers and teacher educa-
1 tors, one sees that he is well-respected. He was a
i
keynote speaker at the international conference in
. Canada in 1986 and again in 1987 at the National Council
of Teachers of English convention. His talks at both
conferences addressed the broader issues of schools in
society and the place of English studies in that con-
i text, focusing on the control which textbooks exert on
teaching and on the lack of understanding which exists
between the community and the schools.
Moffett too has fought against a behaviorist phi-
I losophy in the schools. In 1970 he became a member of
the group sponsored by the National Council of Teachers
, of English (NCTE) which eventually produced a collection
of research papers entitled On Writing Behavioral Objec
tives for English. Moffett was strongly opposed to the
1
: idea of behavioral objectives, which posed as "child-
I centered while actually generating a very destructive
i ’constant focus upon the child’” ("Misbehavioral Subjec-
! tives” 11). He ultimately left the study group before
its work was completed, although his position paper
"Misbehaviorist English” was among those published in
; the book. Reflecting on this movement some fifteen
: years later, Moffett notes that its beginning was "an
21
I attempt on the part of educators to state what students
I
1 who meet the curricular goals can actually do ' (SCLAR
I 24). However, that emphasis soon changed to one man-
1 dating very specific competencies and then specifying
i activities teachers should carry on in the classroom
I
which would lead to the goals stated in the objectives.
j
Behavioral objectives turned into a move for teacher
accountability but, as Moffett argues, when people are
told "how to do their job it [becomes] impossible .
to hold them accountable for the results" (24). Moffett
; has a strong sense of the issues which touch teachers
! and he speaks to those issues.
I These brief and rather impressionistic biographies
hint at a critique of theoretical beliefs, assumptions,
| and practices which James Britton and James Moffett have
; carried out in the field. The heart of their interests
lies with the classroom, it teachers and students, and
the intellectual and social interactions which are
* possible there. Because their classroom experiences
j
: showed them that growth of the mind and language growth
. are complementary, their work in English studies is set
in a rich developmental framework. As is already evi
dent, however, they are not the only ones who have
adopted this theoretical perspective.
22
| This framework and its interpretation by others in
|
! the field studying composition and literacy will be the
I
i focus of my discussion in the next chapter. I will take
I
up two major concepts from developmental psychology,
j active learning and stages in growth, for both of these
^ notions feature prominently in the work of Moffett and
l
Britton. The research which has followed their work
will provide a contrast between the ways in which devel
opmental theory has been translated by others, often
indicating a rather limited or popularized account of
| that theory, and the more perceptive synthesis presented
by Moffett and Britton.
23
Chapter Two
Developmental Concepts Translated into Composition
In this chapter I want to examine more specifically
the translation into composition of two organizing
concepts associated with a developmental view, active
learning and stages in growth. Both terms posit a
constructivist perspective on human nature, articulated
strongly in the work of Jean Piaget, and assumed, with
some modification, in the research of other theorists as
well. Commenting on this perspective, Jesse Delia
points to the interpretive character of constructivism
which conceives of "the person . . . as an active agent
who reconstructs his environment and who is a source of
acts rather than a simple responder to external forces"
(69). Delia goes on to argue that constructivism’s
"fundamental commitments" are organismic, by which he
means that constructivism takes a developmental perspec
tive about the active person. This stance follows from
Piaget’s premise of the active nature of learning: "the
development of intellectual operations proceeds from
effective action in the fullest sense . . . since logic
is before all else the expression of the general coor
dination of actions . . . ("Science of Education" 713K
24
In order to indicate what the field generally
i understands by a developmental perspective I will take
i as reference two books developed for graduate courses in
: composition studies, Erika Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for
! Writing Teachers, and David Foster’s A Primer for
Writing Teachers. While these books actually offer
rather conventional interpretations of developmental
ideas, I have chosen them because they attempt to col
lect bodies of theory and practice into one place to
provide a broad perspective about written composition
for teacher-students who may have little or no familiar
ity with composition as a discipline. Neither author is
arguing a new case; in fact, together they indicate the
taken-for-granted interpretations the field generally
holds about development. Yet they are arguing, in
effect, that teachers need certain basic kinds of know
ledge about the field. Both authors include background
i
i
: about the influence psychology has had on composition.
Lindemann, in her attempt to be comprehensive,
paints many themes in rather broad stokes. In the
chapter entitled "What do teachers need to know about
I
; cognition?" she takes up the topics of perception,
conception, creativity, the work of Piaget, and
Moffett’s interpretation of Piaget through his discourse
schema. She has more to say about Piaget than about the
25
I other topics, but she chooses a book on child develop
ment as the major source of information about him rather
than Piaget himself or using one of several books avail-
I
able by interpreters recognized for their careful
readings of his work. (I refer here to Flavell, Furth,
i
' and Ginsberg and Opper.)
Lindemann is most interested in Piaget’s discussion
of stages in growth. Perhaps guided by her source, she
! falls into the trap of equating a person’s stage of
development with his age. For example, she states that
"by the time they are twelve, children have developed
rules of logic .... They are also less egocen
tric . . . [but] their thinking is still tied to the
concrete" (70-71). While it is convenient to think
about children as being "in" a stage, it is incorrect to
assume that because they are twelve, they are therefore
always working at the stage of concrete operations.
The "age equals stage" position also leads
Lindemann to suggest general kinds of writing assign-
: ments based on Piaget’s stages. It is worthwhile to
quote at length here because what she says about a
sequence of assignments exemplifies a kind of uncritical
! attitude which others, whose ideas will be discussed in
detail below, object to:
Prior to about the ninth grade, writing
courses should emphasize self-expressive
26
writing, description, . . . fairly concrete
subject matters. As Piaget tells us, students
at this age tend to be preoccupied with them
selves and concerned with their immediate
environment. . . . After grade nine, however,
they can reason in progressively abstract
ways.
However, some kinds of writing will
present difficulties even for high school and
college students. Generally they handle
descriptive and narrative modes of discourse
confidently, but evaluation, classifica
tion, . . . and topics which require theoriz
ing, abstraction or predictions about the
future can be troublesome. (71)
Perhaps because of her assumptions about the strong
correlation between ages and stages, Lindemann misinter
prets a developmental phenomenon, regression of skill or
ability. Using herself as an example, she presents a
problem, one she terms "typical for children eleven or
older," in which a circle is divided into six wedges,
five with letters of the alphabet, one empty. The
problem is to decide what letter fits in the blank
section. Describing her own difficulty solving the
problem, she says that it "made me feel like a slow
seven-year-old because my perceptions inhibited my
powers of reasoning" (67-8). Of course Lindemann is not
seven, but because she assumes that she can normally
carry out formal operations, that is, use logic to solve
problems, she fails to understand one of Piaget’s devel
opmental principles: nothing is ever really lost as a
person grows in cognitive ability. Difficult or unusual
27
! problems often send a person back to the concrete stage
in which he is bound by the specific situation before
I
its logic becomes apparent. Were Lindemann next asked
to solve other similar problems, no doubt she would
figure them out quickly: she now understands the prin-
i ciples that drive them.
Because she is not a critical enough reader of
| developmental psychology, Lindemann oversimplifies
developmental phenomena. In turn, she also simplifies
Moffett’s intent with his schema of discourse. She
1 correctly understands that Moffett proposes a spiral of
t
!
writing assignments which requires increasingly more
I
j sophisticated conceptualization, but she assumes that
there is an absolute progression to the assignments, the
• sort of problem Moffett himself notes regarding the
! interpretation of his scheme. Inadvertently Lindemann
l
! turns Piaget’s developmental theory and Moffett’s spec
trum of discourse into maturationist theories; while she
does not seem to believe in behaviorism as a principle
of language education, she seems to interpret Moffett’s
spectrum of discourse behavioristically.
I
! David Foster, on the other hand, provides a back
ground of developmental studies which delves more into
theoretical issues and is more critically written. He
notes the affinity Composition has to rhetorical studies
28
1 but acknowledges the change taking place in the field
j through studies in linguistics and psychology that
^ provides new insights into the teaching of writing.
i
Psychology, he argues, has offered "persuasive inter
pretations of language as a function of thinking" (10).
Foster discusses not only the work of Piaget, but that
!
of Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner as well, so his is a
better-rounded, if also brief and selective picture of
> influential outside forces on the field.
Taking a broader look at Piaget’s theories than
Lindemann, Foster notes that Piaget’s is a recent in-
i
fluence on composition studies, although his influence
had been felt in psychology shortly after World War II.
Foster says that Piaget has interpreted language "as an
1 activity of the mind," one which
permits the development of increasingly com
plex cognitions, and through a process Piaget
calls ’decentering’ it enhances the child’s
ability to understand other perspectives on
reality and distinguish them from his own
. . . . Decentering is essential to the
i maturing process, and language is essential to
decentering, by permitting the child to inter-
' act with others. (10, 12)
Like Lindemann, Foster focuses his discussion on
Piaget’s cognitive stages of growth, but he sees the
interrelation of intellectual growth with general sym
bolic growth and does not attempt to work with growth in
terms of absolutes as Lindemann does. Further, Foster
29
; notes the recursiveness built into Piaget’s theory: the
! decentering process is one that moves not just forward
I
j but backward as well and thus enables the child to see
! different perspectives.
i
J
Foster distinguishes Vygotsky’s theory about the
I
1 communicative and conceptualizing functions of language
I
from Piaget’s, a distinction not always made by others,
(e.g., Lunsford has described basic writers as egocen-
' trie "in Piagetian/Vygotskyian terms"). He notes that
the contrast lies in their differing ideas about the
function of egocentric speech: Piaget views egocentric
: speech as part of the child’s general egocentric per-
; spective on the world, which lessens and disappears
through decentering. Vygotsky believes that egocentric
speech decreases as the child is able to "think words,"
. but rather than disappearing, it goes inward and becomes
1 inner speech, a concept which, Foster notes, Piaget
eventually accepted.
Foster argues that neither theorist asserts that
thinking and constructing language are the same thing,
although they are certainly related. He describes their
| differences in this way: Vygotsky believes that lan-
I
■ guage is essential to intellectual development; Piaget
agrees that language is crucial, but it is not the only
form of cognitive development. As Foster points out,
30
; for Piaget "mathematical logic is an important mode of
i
thought, as are image-making and other nonverbal
processes" (13).
i
. Foster centers here on a major point of difference
, between Piaget and Vygotsky, but one which is often
I
overlooked. Because both theorists write about intel
lectual growth and tie it to language development,
compositionists sometimes interpret the theories in one
of two ways. Either Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories
are conflated and made to seem as if each agrees with or
is the same as the other, as in the Lunsford example
above; or the theories are pitted against each other and
; Piaget is pictured as taking a fairly rigid mechanistic/
1 positivist approach to the study of development as
opposed to Vygotsky, who is regarded as taking an in
tegrative approach (e.g., Ann Berthoff’s position, which
I will discuss below).
The discussion of Bruner’s work is limited to a
brief paragraph, in which Foster suggests that Bruner
simply follows the thinking of Piaget and Vygotsky on
language. But at least he mentions this important
theorist and recognizes that Bruner too "insists on
; language’s crucial ability to make learning possible"
(14) .
31
Foster’s account of the influence of psychology on
composition theory and practice, for all its brevity,
makes use of his readings of some of the three
theorists’ primary works, not popular interpretations of
it, and as a result his discussion tends to be more
perceptive than Lindemann’s. He includes Vygotsky’s
theory of language development, a glaring omission in
Lindemann’s book, which she does not correct in the
second edition. Vygotsky’s work is generally known and
is influential in composition studies, for most com-
positionists have read or are at least familiar with the
ideas in Thought and Language. The difference between
Foster and Lindemann arises from the ways they have
chosen to approach a book for writing teachers:
Lindemann’s purpose is to provide information about
areas she views important for teaching, whereas
Foster’s, as his Preface indicates, is also to "clarify
and evaluate" theories, theorists, issues, and problems.
Lindemann and Foster exemplify, however, what
composition theorists to varying degrees know about
psychological development and how it can be translated
to writing theory. It is not unfair to cite Lindemann’s
work as an illustration of the limited interpretation of
human development which permeates the field. She, like
others, has removed the concept of stages from its broad
32
; developmental matrix, taken it at face value, and not
I
allowed for a rich interpretation which actually makes
it a useful term for praxis. While many, though not
1 all, psychologists agree that a normal child progresses
: through stages like those set out by Piaget, for ex
ample, they appear mechanical in Lindemann1s applica
tion. Foster’s discussion, on the other hand, allows
the reader a glimpse of the complexity of some of the
issues, and indicates that development is not simply
arriving at a particular stage at a certain age.
Active Learning
; While understanding that stages in growth is one
I
important part of a developmental perspective, it is not
the sole focus, although it may seem so from the preced
ing discussion. I will deal with that concept, but I
want to turn first to an examination of the notion of
active learning and other concepts and terms which are
related to it. Active learning is often taken as a
given in much of the research on writing, especially
that which studies adolescents and young adults.
; Lindemann and Foster write for an audience of college
and high school teachers and that fact probably accounts
for their unstated assumption of an active learner
behind the composing act, although Lindemann’s
33
maturationist stance about stages of development seems
to overlook somewhat the active nature of growth. The
commonness of the idea has turned it into a cliche in
psychology, as Patricia Miller points out (89), and it
is true of Composition as well, as Phelps indicates:
[A]ll powerful psychologies now picture the
person as inherently active. In composition
this idea translates into the familiar idea of
the "active learner." Piaget holds a major
responsibility for establishing that develop
ment occurs through the activity of the or
ganism, which does not need to be explained
because it is simply an inherent characteris
tic of life. ("Conceiving Literacy
Developmentally" 8)
Active learning is now a paradigmatic concept in
the field, although it is more an idea than a fact,
especially in practice. Emig, for example, distin
guishes between what she calls magical and non-magical
thinking paradigms which are acted out in the schools.
Magical thinking believes that writing is mainly taught;
non-magical thinking believes that it is mainly learned.
Magical thinking believes that the parts of writing
should be taught before wholes; non-magical thinking,
that a writer works both ways, from parts to wholes and
from wholes to parts depending on what he is concerned
with at particular points in the composing. But what
one often finds, particularly with demands made on
teachers by the schools, is that teachers believe one
34
thing--that children can learn to write and may even
find it a natural activity--but they practice another--
assigning topics or grading papers as if only correct
ness counts, rather than ideas.
To find active learning treated as a theoretical
and practical concept (outside of work like Moffett’s
i
and Britton’s) it is necessary to go to studies of young
children in pre- or elementary school. Most composi-
tionists for some reason seem to believe that the study
of writing is productive for research only at the
college level and have until recently generally left the
• study of children as writers to language arts special
ists in schools of education. Other disciplines have a
long tradition of studying children’s behaviors.
Psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists, for
example, regard the study of children as specialized
theoretical fields within their disciplines (Ochs,
Developmental Pragmatics). Moffett and Britton are some
of the few who are engaged in the study of a broader
range of language arts activities throughout all the
| years individuals spend in school.
One of the important differences between studies of
j children and studies of older adolescents and young
adults is that in the latter the social context of the
writing is often divorced from the writing act:
researchers focus on the cognitive behaviors and ignore
the social factors which influence them. Discussing
language studies, linguist Elinor Ochs, for example,
points out that "it is a commonplace to say that lan
guage is a social behavior. But the social quality
itself is not seriously examined" ("Social Foundations”
207). Except for research about children, what she says
is true for composition studies as well.
I am using context in a broad, social sense, rather
than in a more restrictive linguistic or cognitive
sense. Active learning is transactional, and various
psychologists have argued that research must take into
account social influences on the cognitive behaviors of
individuals. Vygotsky, whose work is predicated on
Marxist principles which are socialist and social,
proposes that all of the higher mental processes are
situated in the relations among people. In more recent
work, Klaus Riegel calls for a dialectical view of
development which posits the interplay of an active
person in an active world, and which understands the
crises that arise from this intersecting activity in a
positive, developmental sense. Urie Bronfenbrenner,
studying the systems which a person is part of, argues
that context is an ecological environment made up of a
series of structures, one nested within the other like a
, series of Russian dolls. Each level is related to every
1 other, beginning with the microsystem of the child-
caregiver dyad and ending with the macrosystem of cul
ture in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing,
, for example, economic, political, and religious systems.
While the premise of active learning (and also of
stages in growth) feature prominently in the work of
Moffett and Britton, for my purposes here I intend to
defer the discussion of their work to subsequent chap
ters. Instead I want to concentrate on how these devel
opmental premises have featured in research carried out
by other researchers studying written composition and
i literacy in general. While neither concept is neatly
separable from the other, it will be more convenient to
look at them now as somewhat separate entities. Some
representative studies will illustrate what the concept
• of active learning means in language arts.
In her book for elementary teachers, Children*s
I
' Language and Learning. Judith Lindfors contrasts the
active to the passive idea of learning in a way reminis-
| cent of Emig. Lindfors discusses the nature of the verb
I learn:
i
I
! "Learn" is an active verb if ever there was
one. We don’t "learn children"; children
learn. Our language encodes our realization
I of the active nature of the child in her
learning by providing a structure of doer
(child) + action (learns). Our language
' 37
reflects our understanding that learning is
something someone does, not something which is
done to someone. (206)
Also, like Emig, she conceives of the language classroom
as an "interactive environment," a community in which
the teacher, as well as the students, is an "active,
ongoing learner" (271). She refers to children
variously as "active processors," and "sociolinguist[s]
figuring out how the spoken and the written language are
used appropriately and powerfully for various functions"
(312). In her view, the child is responsible for his
own learning processes, he makes his own choices, and he
interacts in very aggressive ways with the teacher.
Complementary to Lindfors’ conception of the term
is that of Ferrerio and Teberosky in their study
Literacy before Schooling, which is based on Piagetian
ideas about learning. They note that intellectually
active learners do not necessarily perform activities
which can be observed. The mental activities of compar
ing, categorizing, and forming hypotheses, among others,
are often observable only in their products or outcomes.
The researchers’ qualification of the term serves to
underline the fact that children’s actions, whether or
not they can be observed, are purposeful, not random.
Other language researchers speak about the child as
a "creative" language user (King); as an "inventor"
38
(Bissex); and of the "generative language abilities,
[which are] developed [by young children] in social
interactions involving conversations and simple written
compositions” (Wittrock, 78). Anne Dyson ("Teachers and
Young Children") describes written language as a puzzle
which children as "active investigators" must solve to
make sense of the written system. Gordon Weils, who
carried out a longitudinal study of children’s language
development in Bristol, England, titled it The Meaning
Makers. The children, ranging in age from fifteen
months to thirteen years, helped Wells to discover the
strategies they were developing for "actively making
sense of their experience" through language, first at
home and then later when they transferred those strate
gies to the context of school. The term "active
learner" pervades current research literature under many
guises, all of them indicating the constructive nature
of learning from experience.
Closely tied to the conception of the active
learner as an active participant in his learning is the
notion of scaffolding. This term originated with cogni
tive psychologist Jerome Bruner ("Ontogenesis") to
characterize the temporary structures adults construct
to assist children’s langauge development. Scaffolding
is often implied in synonymous terms such as reciprocity
39
of learning and collaborative learning as will become
evident.
Courtney Cazden, whose work has centered on lan
guage development of young children, identifies two
types of scaffolds in conversational exchanges, vertical
constructions and game-like routines. In vertical
constructions the adult asks for additional new informa
tion from the child with each utterance, "with the adult
helping to ’hold’ each previous utterance in focal
attention while asking the child to say more" ("Adult
Assistance" 6).
During game-like routines, slots are created by a
routine at first originated by an adult which then can
be filled in by the child. Cazden calls peekaboo games
the prototypical scaffolds: the mother initiates the
game by hiding herself, but gradually the child "takes
over the actions and then the speech, reverses roles and
asks, ’Where’s Mommy?’" (8). With picture book reading,
the mother may begin by saying "Look," and follow that
by a question such as "What’s that?” Again, the child
gradually takes over the activity. Additionally, as
Lehr points out in her review of scaffolding, caregivers
change their talk as children develop, demanding more of
them and helping them only when needed. They also take
children’s efforts to communicate seriously.
Cazden also points to the linking of Vygotsky’s
"zone of proximal development" with scaffolding since
both constructs indicate expert assistance given to a
novice. She makes the distinction that scaffolds pro
vide "visible and audible support" to the novice so that
he can take part in a "mature task from the beginning;
and they [scaffolds] do this by providing support that
is both adjustable and temporary" (Classroom Discourse
107). Scaffolds allow the learner to function in his
zone of proximal development, providing initial help for
what he can eventually do alone.
Gordon Wells observes that in the action which take
place between infants and caregivers scaffolding is not
built solely by the parent or caregiver. Through "in
tersubjectivity," which he defines as a "pattern of
mutual attention," infants learn to take an "active part
in controlling the sequencing of turns that make up an
interaction and discover the contingent nature of the
relationships between turns" (35). He points out that
parents make it easy for children to take part in lin
guistic interaction by modifying their speech. They
keep utterances short and grammatically simple; they use
exaggerated intonation for emphasis and to hold the
child’s attention; and they limit the topics discussed
to what the child knows about. Wells contends that
41
parents must also be good listeners, paying attention to
contextual clues and. using their knowledge about the
child’s likes and interests to guess at what he intends.
In other words, adults are called upon to make a "rich
interpretation" of the interaction.
However, the implications behind the concept of
scaffolding, especially as it applies to the classroom,
has been called into question by researchers Harste,
Woodward, and Burke. They argue that the term scaffold
ing assumes adult control of the language interaction
and the need for simplified language. They prefer to
use Michael Halliday’s term "tracking," which views both
child and adult as conversational informants for each
other. Each participant "semantically tracks" the
other. Because simplification of language is often
implicit in the term scaffolding, they argue that in
school this idea translates into simplified language
environments being viewed as "natural" ones for
learning.
Cazden, too, noting that scaffolds continue into
the school context, finds some problems with their
interpretation in that situation ("Adult Assistance”).
She argues that while turn-allocation procedures in the
classroom are very much like those used in picture book
reading, they differ in significant ways. School
I scaffolds often do not respond to the child’s growing
I
i competence--they do not self-destruct--and generally
i
( students do not get the opportunity to take over the
j adult role.
The limited conception of scaffolding in the
schools is the focus of several other studies. Applebee
and Langer point out that the instructional support
needed by students to successfully carry out an assign
ment is often supplied in two very opposite ways:
through essay questions, whose assumption is that no
support should be given; and through highly structured
exercise material which
I
i usually takes over all of the problems in
herent in structuring text, leaving the
student to do little more than slot in what
ever information is missing .... There is
neither the need nor the opportunity for the
students to reflect on new ideas, to integrate
or apply them in new ways, or to make them
their own. (186)
Similarly Dennis Searle questions who controls the
language of the classroom in his article "Scaffolding:
Who’s Building Whose Building?” He cautions that scaf-
' folding can impose structures on students rather than
allowing students to discover structures for themselves.
, If it is used simply as a way of making up assumed
' deficiencies in child language, then scaffolding loses
its original conceptual richness and merely .justifies
classroom patterns of interaction which have long been
I
' in place. He contends that to be effective in schools,
j scaffolding must allow the children to control language.
■ Bruner’s concept, as Searle and others note, suffers
1 from misinterpretation and misapplication as it is
! translated into the school setting.
The idea of play, another conceptual element re
lated to active learning, inheres in scaffolding in the
context of the peekaboo games described by Cazden. Play
: as a developmental concept is often documented (and
treated with respect) in research in child language, but
its value for older children, especially beyond the
! elementary grades, has largely been overlooked or ig
nored. However, John Warnock, writing about college
composition, says that if he were "to sum up in a word
what kind of activity ought to prevail in a writing
classroom I would use the word play" ("New Rhetoric"
1 19). Warnock uses play in Huizinga’s sense: "as the
warp and woof of the higher cultural functions. In this
I
strong sense of the word, play becomes more basic than
■ non-play" (19). Play functions in a writing class, he
says, to allow students to gain writing competence which
they can then apply to similar writing situations in the
future.
44
Language play, however, is usually discussed in
terms of young children in the home context or in terms
of how children engage in play at school. Mary Beaven
documents two kinds of play, each appearing at different
times in a child’s life. In dramatic play, which
emerges between two and three years, a child tries out
adult behavior through imitating adult actions, e.g.,
she may get a hair dryer and pretend to dry her hair as
she has seen her mother do. Sociodramatic play, which
emerges between four and seven, occurs when several
children play together and centers on a theme, such as
playing house or playing restaurant. They add new
information or change the play as needed to "reproduce
their impression of adult behavior and speech" (15).
For older children, planning the sociodramatic play may
become the focus of the activity to the exclusion of
playing out the ideas. Beaven contends that the move
from the action of dramatic play to the speech of socio-
dramatic play indicates a move from the concrete to the
abstract.
Linda Gibson Geller, studying word play, finds it
)
to be a "fundamental aspect of language development"
(124). Children play with words in different ways at
different ages, becoming more and more sophisticated as
they grow older. Three-year-olds enjoy repetition of
! word rhythms and verbal nonsense. By the age of five or
k
k
‘ six, children engage in game chants like those associ
ated with jumping rope; the chants are related to
nursery rhymes but are more closely associated with
physical and social play. From about the age of eight
■ to eleven, children like tongue twisters, homophones,
I
. parody, and the ambiguity that is often inherent in
language. For example, a call to "Pick up your room"
from a parent will often be answered by "I can't; it’s
too heavy." Geller concludes that word play is not an
isolated phenomenon:
[W]ord play is most often embedded in other
areas of youngsters’ development: physical
and social growth, for example, in the early
years and struggles with authority in the
later years. Children rarely explore aspects
of their experience in isolation; they tend,
rather, to move in many directions simulta
neously. (125)
Shirley Brice Heath found that language play is
also cultural. Children in predominantly white Road-
.ville and predominantly black Trackton use play with
language in different ways, which reflect differing
i
i
cultural views of children. Roadville children are
encouraged in language play, and parents use it to teach
i names of things, as most other white parents do. In
I fact, Heath notes that parents sometimes take over and
direct play to teach children how to engage proper
46
I social interchanges. She gives an example of two three-
[
year-olds playing "tea party" whose mothers, within
earshot, correct their daughters’ social interchange:
Wendy handed a cookie to Kim saying "Here."
Wendy’s mother broke in and said, " Wendy,
that’s no way to talk, ’Have a cookie.’ Now
say it right." Kim held the cookie and
j waited. Wendy repeated "Have a cookie," and
i Kim began munching happily. (124)
Trackton parents, on the other hand, do not view
young children as conversationalists, nor do they use
naming games to teach their children about the world.
Younger children learn the common sorts of topics that
make up question-and-answer situations similar to those
they will meet in school in the white homes of Roadville
through playsongs. Usually these are sung by older
, girls and are often spontaneously made up to accompany
jump rope games.
Clair Woods argues that teachers should look at
i
play as a serious activity for children. Play in a
classroom is not trivial, and the dichotomy set up
! between adult work and child play is a false one. Like
; scaffolding, play "depends on the collaborative trusting
1 relationship established between teacher and student"
(206). Judith Schwartz further advises that one must
remember that for children word games are "play and
whether the medium is speaking or writing, [they] should
47
, maintain the voluntary, self-initiated quality of all
I play behavior,” as opposed to turning games into merely
more class assignments (85).
Like Woods, Judith Lindfors believes that in the
J classroom the teacher can capitalize on the child’s
interest in wanting to engage in play by letting him use
language in ways that are meaningful to him. Lindfors
makes the point that in play the consequences are not
the same as in real life because play is safe: "it
allows the child to try out new behaviors and actions in
a buffered, non-threatening situation" (206).
The safety of play, especially because of its non
threatening aspect, allows the child to take risks that
he might not take under other circumstances. Kantor
points out that taking risks means that the child ex
periences a temporary loss of control, another reason
j that children in school must feel that they can operate
I
in a supportive atmosphere where risk-taking is allowed.
i
| Risk-taking indicates that the student is experimenting
j with something new, and as Holdaway asserts, taking
! risks is essential to growth and "efficient" language
learning.
■ The most thorough examination of risk-taking as a
t
: concept for learning has been undertaken by researchers
Harste, Woodward, and Burke, who devote a whole chapter
48
of their book to the topic. Language users, they say,
are vulnerable, for during writing they leave a "trail
of marks" for others to read and use as an evaluation of
their success or failure with literacy. They point out
that three- and four-year-olds are less cautious and
will take greater risks than five- and six-year-olds
because the older children know more about language:
knowledge can be both liberating and inhibiting since
"the more that is known [about writing], the more that
must be taken into account" (138). Younger children
test bolder hypotheses about literacy, get into more
trouble, and are therefore more successful with their
learning of language.
Concentrating on correctness, particularly in the
early grades of school, often discourages risk. Harste
et al. use as an example the language story of Jason,
who at age 8, had stopped writing because of an overem
phasis on correctness in his first-grade reading
program. When he was sent to them for remedial help,
the researchers encouraged him to write, but he chose
only to draw pictures. Because they continued to en
courage him and assure him that they could read anything
he wrote, he finally wrote a twenty-eight page story to
accompany a picture book he especially liked, thus
demonstrating his extensive knowledge of langauge. The
researchers were willing to accept "functional"
spelling, rather than insisting on correct spelling, and
Jason was therefore willing to put himself in a vul
nerable position and take risks with language.
The research team contends that five- and six-year-
olds display a "learned vulnerability, [which is] not
something inherent in the literacy process” (140). They
note further that while "constraints operate in any
language setting, what our data confirm is that when
awareness of constraints is heightened, the result is a
decrease in the very risk-taking behaviors which Weaver
argues in her article on error, teachers can "afford" to
encourage risk-taking, because it will allow children to
make errors and thereby encourage growth.
Error is a natural result of taking risks. Neither
error nor risk-taking exists in isolation one from the
other, and without both concepts operating, as Weaver
notes, there can be no growth. However, error has not
always been regarded by the profession with such equani
mity. Only within the last ten or so years, particu
larly with the publication of Mina Shaughnessy’s study
Errors and Expectations, has the field begun to under
stand error and regard it as a topic worthy of serious
study.
50
In 1975, two years previous to the publication of
her book, Shaughnessy founded The Journal of Basic
^ ■
Writin g. The theme of the first issue was error, and in
introducing it she speaks of error in this way:
[Ejrror [is] the unintentional deviation from
expected patterns. And while no English
teacher seems to have difficulty counting up
and naming errors, few have been in the habit
of observing them fruitfully, with the intent,
that is, of understanding why intelligent
young adults who want to be right seem to go
on, persistently and even predictably, being
wrong. (4)
It is her fruitful observation of error as a positive
and productive phenomenon that resulted in the book and
its hallmark, her sensitive description and reconstruc
tion of what her basic writing students were attempting
to say.
However, error in the context of inexperienced
college writers is viewed very differently from error in
the context of young children’s risk-taking with lan
guage. Children make errors and grow from the experi
ence, but college writers are expected to produce the
accepted conventions and are therefore penalized for
their errors. If the errors are serious enough, the
students are labeled remedial. Yet, as evident from the
quotation above and especially true in Errors and Expec
tations . inherent in Shaughnessy’s conception of error
is that fact that errors "are the result not of
51
carelessness or irrationality but of thinking" (105).
She notes that basic writing students are often truly
beginning writers and must, like all beginners, make
mistakes in order to learn. She of course recognizes
that adult students, unlike young children, are linguis
tically sophisticated; but like all learners, they
actively construct hypotheses about language. Otherwise
their errors would not be so consistent. They are also
not naive about conventions and asking them to overlook
their errors for the sake of getting down their ideas is
often difficult for them to do.
David Bartholomae notes that Shaughnessy’s study
did not distinguish between individual and general j
systems of error, thus making it impossible to discern |
if there are stages in the acquisition of fluency for
inexperienced adult writers. In his essay "The Study of |
Error,” Bartholomae also studies the systematic errors
of individual students, and like Shaughnessy believes
error is "evidence of intention" of a writer actively
constructing language and making hypotheses about it.
Both Shaughnessy and Bartholomae are concerned to
find developmental models which are appropriate for
adult native speakers. Bartholomae notes that it is
possible to chart the growth of individual basic
writers, but that there is no research yet to suggest it
52
is possible to chart "natural" development for a whole
i
group of basic writers over a semester. Shaughnessy is
I also concerned at the lack of developmental models--but
' cautions about the appropriateness of models like those
I
I
i for second-language learning. In the classroom she
i
^ notes that teachers usually evaluate writing by "abso-
I
lute, rather than developmental standards" and asks how
they will
interpret the phenomenon of increased error at
the end of a semester of writing except as a
sign of ineducability, even though it is not
unusual for people acquiring a skill to get
’worse’ before they get better and for writers
to err more as they venture more. (119)
She understands, as do teachers of young children, that
errors are inherent in taking risks and that writers
often regress as they are growing.
To summarize, the concept of active learning re
quires a view of the learner as acting upon his environ
ment rather than being acted on, a view of the learner
as a meaning-maker. Related to this is the idea of
! scaffolds which temporarily assist learners and are
mutually constructed by the learner and the person
assisting him. Scaffolds are built, at least in the
beginning, during playful situations, but play continues
for language learners as an important and valuable
activity. Play allows learners to take risks without
53
! penalty as they test hypotheses about language, and it
also allows individuals to make mistakes which they can
; learn from and which are required for growth.
!
Stages in Growth
The perspective which comes from the studies of
active learning argues that growth takes place through
the physical and/or mental activity of the individual in
his environment, or context(s). Composition is con
cerned primarily with mental, or psychological develop
ment, but that process is embedded in a social setting.
Only recently have the contextual elements of the
writing act featured in discussions of stages in growth,
at least in the ways the concept is characterized for
older writers.
The concept of stages has been borrowed directly
i
from psychology, but its interpretation and subsequent
application to models of writing growth have been
subject.to a slippage of meaning. The concept is a con
troversial one within the field of psychology itself.
Let me briefly illustrate this controversy by summariz
ing Patricia Miller’s discussion of two developmental
theories, in which she contrasts Piaget’s structuralist
model of development to the social learning model. In
the stage model which Piaget proposes, growth and change
54
occur through the process of equilibration, one which
brings "into harmony social experience, experience with
physical objects, and physical maturation" (221). The
| person uses cognitive structures to interpret and under-
! stand new experiences, but learning depends on his
cognitive level. Social learning theory, which is
directly opposite to Skinner’s behavioristic theory of
learning, posits that development takes place through a
person’s experiences with the social world. Albert
Bandura, whose work has been most influential in this
area, characterizes stages as "ill-fitting types."
Social learning theorists generally object to classi-
■ fying children as being in a particular stage of
development, and believe development occurs through
observational learning gained in social experiences.
Yet another view of growth accepts a stage view of
development but considers stages as part of particular
domains of knowledge. David Feldman, for example,
argues that change is limited to certain areas in which
a person is gaining expertise. Therefore, a person may
be at different levels of development in relation to the
domain in which he is working and the experience he has
with it.
The point here is that as compositionists and
others in the area of language arts look to psychology
5 5
for insights into composing and its development over
time, they must proceed with caution, for there are many
competing theories about development. (Miller, for
example, discusses six.) As will become evident in the
following discussion, however, compositionists strongly
rely for their explanation of the developmental aspects
of writing on theories set out primarily by Piaget.
Vygotsky’s theories about the social nature of language
development and Bruner’s regarding growth in ability to
symbolize are not widely recognized; in some studies of
college writers, William Perry’s theory of ethical and
moral development has been important. However, com
positionists use these theories selectively, more
through reference than analysis.
While there seems to be a developing consensus
regarding a broad conceptualization of the role an
active learner plays in learning to read and write,
there is less agreement about the premise of stages in
growth. In fact, not only is the term used to describe
somewhat different aspects of writing growth, but often
the descriptions of what constitutes that growth are at
odds with one another. Reading through the literature
which looks at writing from a developmental perspective,
one must therefore ask what aspects of writing the term
"stages" describes. The answer at times reflects a
5 6
rather shallow or limited knowledge of a very complex
concept.
Let me briefly explain Piaget’s stages of cognitive
development, since compositionists refer to these more
often than to any others. Piaget says that children go
through three major periods of growth: the sensori
motor, in which they handle objects in order to know
them; the concrete operational, in which they can use
symbols to represent objects; and the formal operational
state in which they can perform abstract thought opera
tions such as hypothesizing and drawing conclusions. In
Piaget’s view, these stages are universal and take place
through the child’s active engagement with the world
about him as new information is continually assimilated
into his system which in turn is restructured and accom
modated. He is much more interested in the order of
acquisition than he is in the ages at which cognitive
structures are acquired (Inhelder and Piaget, The Growth
of Logical Thinking 245-255 ) .
In his early work, Piaget also placed much stress
on the part which decentering played in the child’s
developmental processes. He did not use the term in a
negative sense but described it as the person’s increas
ing ability to shift from his own limited perspective in
order to take in several different aspects of a
I situation at the same time. (See especially Language
i
and Thought of the Child. ) Decentering and egocentrism
are two terms which often come up in discussions which
center on the developmental aspects of writing.
j To exemplify the misconstrual of Piaget’s concept
I
of stages, I want to look first at one practitioner’s
application of Piaget’s theory in the classroom. Paula
Tremblay states that she has "developed a series of
writing assignments which help students make the transi
tion from concrete to formal operations” (342). She
uses the Piagetian progression of stages for these, but
she seems to have a limited understanding of the concept
as evidenced by the fact that she believes students can
change from concrete to formal operational thinking
through a series of carefully constructed assignments.
She suggests that students begin with their concrete
experiences and end by synthesizing and analyzing their
perceptions of those. The process actually begins with
a short piece of writing that is loosely narrative and
ends with one that is "thesis-centered." Rather than
changing thinking, it can be argued that Tremblay is
teaching students to write papers which contain a cen
tral argument. While learning to make a point is a
necessary requisite for academic writing, it does not
necessarily lead to the stage of formal operations.
58
Tremblay attempts to translate theory too literally into
practice, something which is not uncommon when theorists
know only a little about one theory.
Andrea Lunsford, in one of her early essays on
; basic writers, generalizes that basic writers "have not
I
attained that level of cognitive development which would
allow them to form abstractions or conceptions" (257), a
stance which actually could be said of any college
students who have difficulty abstracting. She states
further that these students are operating "well below"
the stage of formal operations and "have great diffi
culty 'decentering’ and performing tasks which require
analysis and synthesis" (261).
However, Piaget himself never made this inter
pretation about young adults unable to perform formal
operations. He said only that they may not be able to
carry out formal reasoning in the particular area in
which they are being tested, although in other areas
they may be quite capable of it:
It is highly likely that [young adults] will
know how to reason in a hypothetical manner in
their specialty, that is to say, dissociating
the variables involved, relating terms in a
combinatorial manner and reasoning with propo
sitions involving negations and reciprocities.
They would, therefore, be capable of thinking
formally in their particular field, whereas
faced with our experimental situation, their
lack of knowledge or the fact that have for
gotten certain ideas that are particularly
familiar to children still in school or
59
college, would hinder them from reasoning in a
formal way, and they would give the appearance
of being at the concrete level. ("Intel
lectual Evolution" 10)
Some writing theorists attach a pejorative connota
tion to the term egocentrism and believe that being
unable to decenter, to take another’s perspective,
places a person at a less sophisticated stage of devel
opment. The belief is that a mature writer can easily
or always write for an audience other than himself.
However, Annette Bradford shows a clearer understanding
of the concept and interprets it in the spirit of
Piaget’s thinking. Egocentrism, she notes, is a part of
all developmental stages; in adolescence, for example,
it often takes the form of "naive idealism," as young
people ignore the practical problems involved in
carrying out idealistic schemes. She argues, rightly,
that stages are viewed too rigidly, for composition
theorists, at least, often want to believe that there is
a holistic age/stage correspondence. The remedial
college writers she describes exhibit qualities of the
concrete operations stage. When asked to write about
literature, for example, they cannot handle hypothetical
or theoretical questions; their writing tends to be
bound to the concrete context of a specific text.
However, Bradford’s point is that "although these
60
students have entered Formal Operations, it is wrong to
assume that, like clockwork, every adolescent emerges
j from Formal Operations at age fifteen, ready to deal
with high-level abstractions and logical thought pro-
! cesses" (21). Actually it is the inexperienced college
, writers who are most often characterized as egocentric
and operating below Piaget’s highest stage.
On the other hand, studying writing growth of
average college students is problematical. There are
few models available which are as descriptive as
Piaget’s, and writers certainly continue to develop long
after they have reached the period of formal operations.
: Susan Miller turns to Lawrence Kohlberg’s model of moral
development, preferring that to the psychological models
of Piaget and Vygotsky because it is more closely akin
to "the rhetorical skills of analyzing, accepting, and
identifying with a number of audiences and points of
view" (123). These skills require a relativistic point
; of view, an advanced stage of moral development on
i
1 Kohlberg’s scale. Miller points out that a pattern of
I movement which allows for progression as well as regres
sion, suggestive of the recursiveness of writing, is
also a feature of the Kohlberg model, a further reason
; she finds it satisfactory to explain rhetorical matur-
. ity.
i
1
61
Yet another stage model used to track writing
growth in adults is William Perry’s scheme of intellec
tual and ethical development in the college years.
Janice Hays bases much of her work on Perry’s model
because it eliminates the problem with other models
which seem to tie growth to chronological age. Perry
examined the world views that students (or at least
students who attend Harvard) brought to college and the
changes that took place in those views over four years
of liberal arts education. Perry found that the stu
dents grew from a belief in Absolutes, one which is a
dualistic, right-wrong view of the world to a belief,
similar to Kohlberg’s, in relativism, which comes from
the ability to reflect and make commitments to ideas
which will shape their adult lives.
Hays’ first discussion of her work using the Perry
model has been criticized by Myra Kogen for oversimpli
fying Perry’s stages, of plotting cognitive growth as a
move from simple to concrete to complex thinking. There
is validity to the criticism since Hayes used Perry’s
scale in the same monolithic way that others have used
Piaget’s by attempting to rank a group of essays as
fitting particular stages of intellectual development
along points on the scale. Although the use she makes
of Perry’s work is fairly typical of face-value
62
interpretations of other developmental schemes, Hays at
least understands that "freshmen are not simply
recalcitrant or stupid when they write in ways that seem
. . . puerile and simplistic. They really are strug
gling to achieve a new perspective on reality" (142), a
more sympathetic reading of student essays than they are
usually accorded.
In an article which responds to Kogen’s criticisms,
Hays sets out to clarify misconceptions.some composi-
tionists have about the relevance of developmental ideas
to writing. She makes some valuable points: adults
continue to develop, a developmental perspective can
illuminate writing problems, and intellectual growth
does not occur in a single semester. Yet she seems on
■ one hand to accept all developmental approaches to
: writing as equally worthwhile, and on the other to
; believe in Perry’s scheme in a very uncritical way. She
does not answer the question, What do we gain when
students have been placed on precise points of the Perry
! scale as evidenced by their writing? Without knowing
i that, it is difficult to understand why many teachers’
' intuitive responses to students’ dualistic views are not
equally valid.
Patricia Bizzell, like Hays, takes Perry’s scheme
as a reference point, but she uses it to mark general
63
i growth rather than more discrete stages of development.
In fact she argues that rather than looking' at separate
elements of the complex experience, or world view, which
writers--in this case basic writers--bring to the uni
versity, we need a more comprehensive approach. Bizzell
| notes that only three elements of writing are normally
studied, and often separately: "difference in dialects,
discourse conventions, and ways of thinking" (296). She
suggests that broader features need to be examined
through Perry’s model of intellectual and ethical
growth, rather than turning to a genetic model like
■ Piaget’s. Genetic models, she argues, tend to place
I basic writers at the bottom of the scale of development,
and lead teachers to look for ways to correct "cognitive
i
! dysfunctions." The Perry model, on the other hand,
■ allows one to more easily discern the view of the world
I
which basic writers bring to college and learn "what
; they themselves think about the cost of acquiring a new
i one" (300). Bizzell is concerned with growth of
I
[ writers, but notes that too narrow a focus is helpful
I
! for neither the teacher nor the students.
I
| The writers just mentioned discuss general growth
as it is reflected in rhetorical growth. Lester Faigley
' t looks at some of the problems that arise when re
searchers study growth at the sentence level. He argues
I
64
that terms like growth, maturity, and complexity are
used by compositionists without much consistency. He
points to the sentence-combining experiments of the
seventies and questions what the term growth refers to--
the ability of students "to write longer sentences or
. . . a more significant kind of cognitive development"
(296). He views sentence-combining as a technique which
succeeds in changing student writing habits, but it has
not been shown to provide important cognitive develop
ment, although students do learn about broader rhetor
ical principles which they can then apply to units of
discourse beyond the sentence. More importantly,
Faigley argues that growth and maturity in writing
cannot be defined solely at the sentence level, but
rather must be defined within the "situational and
cultural contexts of a particular text" (299).
Freedman and Pringle, like Faigley, argue against
studying only syntactical features. They believe that
writing growth is better demonstrated through processes
which are harder to investigate and which, they contend,
have been largely ignored. These are abstracting abili
ties related to the complexity of the task the student
has undertaken and indicative of the "nature of the
intellectual processes of the writer" (316).
65
The Canadian researchers discovered that while
I
; third year university students not surprisingly could
I
I
j abstract at a much higher level than students in their
' final year in high school (comparable to grade thirteen
in the United States), the university students could not
; organize, develop, or write essays any more coherently
than the high school students. Neither group had more
rhetorical control than the other. They conclude:
There may be a direct relationship between
these two phenomena— the seeming lack of
growth in rhetorical control and the growth in
the capacity to abstract to higher levels.
Because a cognitively more difficult task is
being undertaken, the rhetorical skills are
being taxed further. (321)
In other words, Freedman and Pringle discover a
general phenomenon of growth, the regression of skills
’ that normally accompanies a new or more difficult cogni
tive task. They find that development is not "linear,
that intellectual growth . . . may involve temporary
' setbacks in rhetorical control" (323). Freedman and
j Pringle here describe what others call the wave-like
I movement of development. For example, Wilkerson, et
I
| al., note that the developmental process is not com
parable to climbing a ladder but is "more like the waves
i breaking on a beach, advancing and retreating in par
ticular areas" (881). And Zebroski ("Vygotsky and
Writing") speaks of the phenomenon as a "’tidal wave’"
66
picture of development since there is a cumulative
! effect" (13).
In an article published six years after Faigley’s
l and Freedman and Pringle’s, Sandra Stotsky returns to
sentence syntax as a way to measure cognitive growth in
i
writing. Through a study of the subjects of sentences
and the "network of semantic relationships [writers]
create among these sentences," Stotsky believes she can
; show "what precisely constitutes growth in learning to
write about ideas" (277). Further, she determines
growth by the student’s increasing ability to use "non
personal objects or concepts" as the grammatical sub
jects, an ability she believes "may be necessary before
students can move beyond an egocentric perspective to
decentered writing and thinking" (287). One of the
major problems of this study comes from Stotsky’s as-
: sumption that the ability to abstract is tied to sub
jects of the sentence, which in her study turned out
j often to be personal. Her understanding of egocentrism
here is limited: she believes that because the writers
focus their writing on themselves they are therefore
I
egocentric. Further, because she has chosen students
from a small town, she believes that all of them "have
fundamentally the same understanding of the world in
6 7
which they live" (284), but this takes into account only
one context they have in common and ignores many others.
As might be expected, studies of stages and of
growth in general are more integrative when they focus
on younger children. I now want to take up two studies
which are representative of that research. Robert
Parker questions vrhether it is possible to investigate
children’s writing in the same way that their speaking
has been studied, and concludes that it is impossible to
study one aspect of language in isolation from the
others: speaking, listening, reading, and writing are
all of a piece. His study integrates the theoretical
work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner, orchestrating
their ideas as complementary explanations of how lan
guage development proceeds to suggest a theoretical
framework for analyzing children’s writing growth.
First, he argues, language development is a unitary
process. Next it must also be seen as part of broader
semiotic development and take into account the person’s
overall history of development. Third, individual
semiotic development must be considered as part of a
larger sociosemiotic growth, and finally all of this
growth must be viewed from an "interactionist-construc-
tivist" perspective. Parker sees writing development as
68
1 embedded in and continuous with other language and
i
■ literacy processes.
Marcia Farr focuses more specifically on writing
growth, drawing on several studies of writing develop
ment in young children, but she also indicates points of
! difference in actual practice. She argues that because
development has traditionally been viewed as a series of
discrete stages, teachers tend to work on subskills with
, the assumption that learning these will bring about
competence in using broader skills. Referring to the
study by Harste, Woodward, and Burke, she notes that
i
their work has uncovered some "process universals” used
: by both children and adults which are not "outgrown but
maintained and used in all literacy events" (129):
i textual intent, negotiability of meaning in context,
! risk-taking. She argues that instead of relying on age-
correlated stages of writing development, growth in
written discourse must be viewed in terms of the child’s
i
j experience with writing' and in the context in which the
J
! learning takes place. On a practical level the research
indicates that a "literacy rich" classroom allows for
I
i
j more growth than one that is skills-based, that con-
1 ferences and dialogue journals contribute to growth
because they provide necessary scaffolding, and that
allowing writers to "own" their texts gives them the
69
control and responsibility needed for growth to take
place. Both Farr and Parker stress general growth over
pigeonholing students into rigid stages, although Farr’s
essay indicates that the particle approach, the way in
which stage theory is often translated, is the more
common practice in classrooms.
I have been discussing critiques of differing
conceptions of development common in the field to arrive
at a more adequate view of the phenomenon of develop
ment. However, developmental approaches to writing are
not without critics and one of the most consistently
outspoken is Ann Berthoff. While I do not agree with
all of her statements and conclusions, it is worthwhile
to review them. In her article "Is Teaching Still
Possible?" she brings up several problems with a devel
opmental approach and reveals common assumptions about
it.
Berthoff argues that Piaget’s model, intended to
describe the development of children, is mistakenly
applied to adult reasoning. She contends that it is
useless to compare what a child cannot do to what an
adult cannot do and then say they both face similar
problems, because they do not, at least "so far as
motivation or function are concerned" (744). She is
also skeptical of empirical research which makes claims
70
about learning, primarily because experimental design
applied to language study most often tries to control
language and limit its meanings. Further, she says,
"failure to reach the stage of formal operations is made
equivalent to an inability to ’think abstractly’ which,
in turn, is identified as processing and producing
logical propositions" (744). Abstraction, Berthoff
argues, is what human beings do all the time and is not
a special skill; generalization is what they find dif
ficult .
In assessing "the hazards of developmental models"
Berthoff argues that the primary one "sanctions the
genetic fallacy— that what comes first is simple, not
complex, and that what comes after is a bigger version
of a little beginning" (752). She attempts to pin this
"fallacy" on Piaget, who would certainly not subscribe
to its implications. The simple to complex notion is an
oversimplified and mechanistic view of development, not
the theory which informs Piaget’s work. Berthoff’s very
critical stance toward Piaget seems to ignore the signi
ficance of his work in favor of furthering her argument.
Berthoff criticizes using psychological models
since these are based on empirical studies, echoing a
criticism by others that scientistic measures do not fit
a humane discipline like composition. Her implied
71
comparison of empiricism in psychology and its trans
lation into composition studies has some validity. In
their attempts to establish composition as a theoretical
field, compositionists earlier on felt the need to carry
out quantitative empirical studies which were often
acontextual. Berthoff rightly points out that "neither
language nor thought is meaningful outside a social
context .... Language is symbolic activity and from
the first establishes itself in a social setting" (749).
The point that she misses, however, is that research
into language can be carried out in a richly contextual
manner, even in a laboratory setting, as psychologist
Urie Bronfenbrenner convincingly argues.
Berthoff criticizes the prevalent notion that the
ability to form generalizations can come from teaching
models which ask students to begin with narrative and
end with expository writing (cf. Tremblay). Teachers
assume that this sequence is a developmental model
through which students will learn how to abstract.
While Berthoff herself argues from a narrow knowledge of
developmental psychology, she is correct when she says
that developmental models are often "uncritically de
ployed." The field’s knowledge of developmental
theories is fairly limited, and the little we do know
about them is often overly simplified through
72
interpretations of interpretations of the original
theories as they get translated into classroom prac-
tices.
To summarize) in composition studies one generally
finds a mistaken idea that a person’s age and his stage
of development are almost directly correlated. This
assumption leads to a belief that writing assignments
alone can affect a student’s internal cognitive struc
tures. On the other hand) like the debate in psychology
over structural versus social theories of learning) some
compositionists have turned to theories which describe
ethical development and seem less tied to age. However,
these theories are valued for their application and have
yet to be more theoretically and philosophically
grounded as they are in psychology. Misinterpretations
also exist regarding the concept of egocentrism and its
complementary term decentering, for the former is taken
as a negative and attributed to mental immaturity.
Regression of abilities which is built into most
theories of development is only briefly noted in some
studies, but this omission probably indicates that
researchers are simply unfamiliar with the broader
implications of developmental theories.
Some of the best developmental research on writing,
and something that college composition researchers need
73
to become more aware of, is that which studies young
children, for it considers all the language arts in the
context of their use. I now want to examine specifi
cally the work of James Moffett and James Britton and
the interpretations they have made of the developmental
concepts of active learning and stages in growth.
Through their careful reading and sensitive translations
of the work of developmental theorists in psychology, I
believe they have arrived at some original insights
based on developmental principles which have enriched
composition studies and practices in ways not yet suffi
ciently realized.
74
Chapter Three
Active Learning: Perspectives from Moffett and Britton
In Chapter Two I used the concept active learning
as an umbrella term for a group of ideas: the active
learner who constructs his own learning, scaffolding,
piay, risk-taking, and error. These terms indicate the
interpretation of the overarching concept which has in a
sense become an explicit part of current research con
sciousness in language arts studies. J
' „ . !
I now want to examine this concept by reading it j
t
t
as it appears in the writing of James Moffett and James
Britton. They provide rich interpretations of the term,
for they use it in theoretical and concrete ways to
illuminate how children learn generally and learn lan
guage specifically, and they take into account not only
the constructivist self, but the interactive relation
ships that exist between the learner and her environ
ment. While this chapter and the following one will
examine the developmental framework specifically, it is
important to keep in mind that what Moffett and Britton
have to say about the concept of active learning arises
from their own observations, intuitions and practices in
the classroom, for which they sought confirmation in
75
developmental theory. In other words, their role as
scholar/practitioners is always implicitly embedded in
these chapters even when it is not a point of discus
sion .
The research presented in Chapter Two reveals that
without an active mind, language and writing growth
cannot take place. Those studies are set primarily in
the classroom, but they illustrate that neither the
child nor the adult simply reacts to the environment.
Rather they reveal that for language abilities to grow,
or for growth of any kind to take place, the person must
have the opportunity to interact with other people as
well as with physical objects in the environment.
Further, the individual becomes directly involved with
and greatly responsible for her own growth.
I noted earlier that Jean Piaget is credited with
originating the concept of active learning and the
active learner. However, as I will discuss below in
more detail, Piaget’s ideas about learning depend much
less on language as a means of cognitive growth than
Moffett’s and Britton’s use of his work might imply, and
yet he does not stand alone in this respect. Other
developmental theorists also posit the active learner
but do not feature language as a necessary part of
development. As representative of this stance, let me
76
comment briefly on several other theories; again I am
relying on Patricia Miller’s excellent book which expli
cates a number of these orientations.
Ethology, one of several interactionist theories,
posits an interweaving of heredity and environment; the
person acts to meet the demands of the environment which
may, but do not have to be met through language.
Eleanor Gibson's perceptual theory views the "perceiver
as performer." People develop through the process of
abstracting, choosing and extracting distinctive fea
tures; through filtering out irrelevant information; and
through attending to features. Information-processing
theory also sees humans as active, "self-motivating
cognitive systems. They bring about their own learning
and development, with help from experience with the
environment" (Miller 286). Language as a way of learn
ing is not a strong feature in any of these theories.
Of course, Moffett and Britton are most interested
in language development, with emphasis on how it is
manifested through written discourse. They turned to
the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, as well as that of
Jerome Bruner, which acts as a mediating force between
the other two theories. Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky and
Bruner look more closely at cognitive development as it
is aided by language. The work of these theorists is
77
repeatedly invoked by many other language arts and
composition specialists who relate developmental theo
ries to language. But because most of them think in
terms of application, they often place the work of
Piaget, Vygotsky, or Bruner side by side, thus forging
an implicit synthesis. While their theories are com
patible, they are certainly not exactly alike and may
even be argued to represent radically different views.
Moffett and Britton have never forgotten this point and
are quite explicit when they synthesize.
I want to bring out the rich and original thinking
concerning the active nature of language development in
the work of James Moffett and James Britton. I do not
contend that they are the major source of developmental
ideas in composition, for tracing their influence would
be difficult, but certainly their influence has been
important, if at times unacknowledged. I will also
discuss the concept of active learning in terms of its
sources for Moffett and Britton primarily in the theo
ries of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner. (In choosing to
concentrate on these developmental theorists, I am
necessarily leaving out others who have influenced their
thinking. Among these are Heinz Werner, Joseph Chilton
Pearce, Swami Sivalingam for Moffett; Suzanne Langer, D.
W. Harding, Michael Halliday for Britton.) Finally, I
78
want to examine current research in developmental psy
chology that considers the constructivist role of the
active learner in order to show how Moffett’s and
Britton’s ideas regarding the importance of the active
learner are related to it.
Active Learning as Drama
As will become evident in the following discussion,
the term active learning, and its representation in the
active learner, is more implicit than stated in James
Moffett’s work. However, it is a thread that runs
through his writing and finds its best expression in his
conception of drama. James Britton, on the other hand,
makes active learning an explicit concept, which re-
i
1 fleets the strong influence of George Kelly’s construct
theory on his thinking. Britton contends that human
beings "generate and use symbols" to represent the world
to themselves; as the world changes, representations of
it change and in turn alter people’s behavior (and the
■ world itself). Britton finds confirmation for his
i
I argument in Kelly’s view that people "behave in what is
I
i
; essentially the way a scientist behaves." In other
words, Britton says, Kelly "stresses the active nature
of man’s approach to experience" (LL 16). Experience,
79
especially experience with language, is a key term in
Britton’s work.
Like Piaget’s theory, Kelly’s is predicated on the
individual’s inherently constructive nature. Britton
quotes from Kelly:
Experience is made up of the successive con
struing of events. . . . The constructions one
places upon events are working hypotheses
which are about to be put to the test of
experience. As one’s anticipations or hypoth
eses are successively revised in the light of
the unfolding sequence of events, a construc
tion system undergoes a progressive evolution.
(Quoted in LL 17-18)
To complete his idea of active learning, Britton turns
to the philosopher Martin Buber, specifically this
quotation: "Experience comes to man ’as I’ but it is by
experience ’as we’ that he builds the common world in
which he lives" (quoted in LL 19). Britton argues that
while each person builds his or her own representation
of the world, others affect the representation of that
experience, "so that," he says, "much of what we build
is built in common" (LL 19). This synthesis is com
patible with the developmental theories of Piaget and
Vygotksy, but also meshes with current contextualist
theories, which will be discussed below.
The social nature of active learning is a major
theme in both Moffett’s and Britton’s work. Learning,
they argue, takes place in large measure through
80
interaction, primarily through interaction associated
with talk, or conversation. While the two thinkers
agree on the importance of talk for building a framework
for experience, their emphases about how talk functions
regarding learning are at some points complementary, at
others divergent in certain respects one from the other,
as will become evident.
I have purposely chosen the title of this section
to highlight Moffett’s unique and very productive con
ception of drama as a mode of language learning. This
tack will require me in some cases to discuss Britton’s
views on the efficacy of talk for learning in light of
Moffett’s concept of drama, but I do not believe that
this method will in any way lessen or place in a subor
dinate position Britton’s insights. Both scholars agree
that talk contains elements of drama. However, I must
add that not everyone in the field believes that drama
is central to active learning. Ann Berthoff has been a
strong opponent of Moffett’s broad conception of the
term, although some of her opposition to it comes from
her misinterpretation of his meaning. (See "Problem-
Solving . " )
Moffett states that drama is the "matrix of all
language activities, subsuming speech and engendering
the varieties of writing and reading" (61). He devotes
81
one whole chapter in TUP to drama in what Janet Emig
reviewing TUP called "the strongest essay on one phase"
of a sequence for English. It is here that his most
comprehensive discussion of active learning appears. In
an interview I conducted with him in 1985, Moffett
indicated to me that he views that particular chapter as
a key one in the body of his work because drama consists
of action, especially verbal action which "is of a sort
we practice all the time” (TUP 63 ) .
Moffett distributed this essay at the Partmouth
Conference in 1966 and found that the British educators
there were very interested in what he .had to say:
"We [the British and Moffett] were really
working on very much parallel courses. It’s
just that the British had so much more practi
cal school experience, particularly at the
secondary level, with drama. But I was using
drama in a much larger sense than just theater
and they understood that. I was using it
metaphorically." (Interview, 16 Feb. 1985)
He defines drama broadly as "any raw phenomena as they
are first being converted to information by some obser
ver” (TUP 61). In applying this definition to theatri
cal drama and "street" drama, he notes that a person
meets both kinds head on at a "gut” level. Drama of
either sort takes on meaning when the individual has a
frame in which to place it, a frame built through inter
action with others.
82
While James Britton does not capitalize on drama in
the same sense Moffett does, it is still an important
i
; feature of his approach to language learning generally
and learning to write specifically. He follows what
I
appears to be the British thinking about drama, that it
!
is integral to classroom language activities. What
begins as solitary play for the young child evolves in
time into the "more sociable" play of several children.
Make-believe play moves into improvisation and eventu
ally becomes a more demanding "corporate product" (LL
143 ) .
Britton knows about drama firsthand, for unlike the
practices of most American schools, British schools
provide places in the classroom for drama to take place.
Referring to a report entitled Drama developed by the
British Department of Education and Science which speci
fically discusses places in the classroom called "play-
corners," Britton describes as an example the play a
group of seven and eight year olds were enacting about
Viking raids on the city of London. This "drama" was
based on a story they had read about the Vikings. The
students were not only attempting to reenact the event,
but they had also carried out other activities based on
the historical event preceding the play performance:
they had painted a picture and constructed a collage
83
around one episode in the story. Britton notes that
improvised drama can serve as a starting point for
written composition, although there is the possible
drawback that "if the drama is a success the actors are
likely to feel that all that matters has been expressed"
(DWA 30). In sum, he says, drama is social and requires
cooperation of its participants. It also extends stu
dents’ experience for shaping their language, often
taking it from spoken forms to written ones.
Moffett’s practical conception of drama is brought
out clearly in Student-Centered Language Arts and
Reading: A Handbook for Teachers. In this book, which
combines many workable ideas with a firm grounding in
the ideational background they come from, one sees the
practical working out of his theoretical ideas. He
brings up language interactions from several perspec
tives, beginning with the "basic processes" of talking
and listening--the informal drama of the classroom—
which provides
learning of a sort that seldom occurs in
casual out-of-school conversation. Because
conversing requires the listener to comprehend
and the speaker to compose, it is a good way
to get voluminous, timely and well-motivated
practice in getting and giving meaning. This
process transfers readily to reading and
writing. (79)
84
Moffett views listening skills as basic to reading and
talking skills as basic to writing. For this reason, he
contends that in the classroom, much of the responsi
bility for "task talk" should be carried on by the
students rather than by the teacher. Interactive ex
perience about topics is gained through incidental talk,
which occurs when students are collaborating— giving
directions, discussing projects they have in common,
playing games, and so on. He argues that small group
discussion needs to be one of the "staples" of classroom
processes. The teacher, rather than being outside this
process, is integral to setting it up and guiding it i
I
along, but not to dictating its progress. j
In TUP. Moffett takes up three aspects of drama
i
relevant to his argument: soliloquy, dialogue, and j
monologue. Ironically, he discusses them in that order, j
which seems contrary to his language theory, that dis
course begins in dialogue, dialogue being the primary
term, for it influences both soliloquy and monologue.
Thus, he identifies a person’s conversational inter
changes with others as the most significant for develop
ing language, yet he seems to construct the presentation
of his theory out of step or order with itself.
Beginning his discussion of drama with soliloquy,
he seems to imply that it is at this point that language
85
development begins, in the self. And Moffett does not
really believe that. Its placement at this point in his
/
discussion of drama leads Newkirk, for example, to
criticize Moffett for depicting younger writers as
^ "handicapped" in their abilities compared to older
students, and as arguing that "early discourse is first
for the self" (598). Perhaps its placement also ac
counts for Berthoff’s disdainful references to Moffett’s
term "student-centered."
Let me turn to his conceptualization of drama to
bring out what he means by it and some of its implica-
i
tions. Without doing too much violence to his thinking,
' I will begin not as Moffett does, with soliloquy, but
with dialogue because for him it is such an important
‘ form of behavior. I want to follow out all the implica
tions of dialogue for both Moffett and Britton before I
discuss soliloquy and monologue; this method will pro
vide a richer picture of their thinking about each form
! than would separating Moffett’s and Britton’s ideas from
each other.
j Dialogue, Moffett hypothesizes, is "the major means
of developing thought and language" (TUP 73). Conversa
tion is "dia-logical," a "mental duet [in which we
incorporate] the view, attitudes, ideas and modifica
tions of ideas of our partner, even if we openly reject
86
them" (73). One can extrapolate from these statements
that active learning begins in social interaction since
the dyadic relationship of conversation requires verbal
collaboration. He predicates his idea on the premise
that thought is generated through overt verbal action.
Moffett argues that dialogue will assist the devel
opment of more sophisticated language operations. He
points out that younger children lack the ability to
qualify their ideas; they are not able to analyze or
synthesize very well. Children "overcodify," that is,
they often speak in a style reminiscent of Dick and Jane
books: "I saw a fight. It happened yesterday. Two
boys fought." And so on. However, the conversational
partner requires the speaker to qualify her thoughts and
to elaborate on them, the latter process in particular
fostering the development of more complex sentence
structures through the dynamics of ongoing conversation.
Moffett argues that "Discourse does not just convey
thought, it also forges it" (TUP 78). Dialogue is
therefore an essential part of more complex mental
structuring.
However, Moffett does not overlook the fact that
dialogue is also rhetorical because it is our first
means of acting on others. Of course, he is not think
ing of rhetoric in the traditional or limited sense of
87
! persuasion. "Dialogue," he says, "internal or external,
will establish language as behavior, . . . an attempt to
' do something to or for or against or with another
■ ’party.' This is the genesis of rhetoric" (TUP 41).
1 The activity of dialogue furthers the give and take of
j
i later, more sophisticated dialectic.
]
Examining language from a broader context than
Moffett’s, James Britton also argues for the primacy of
dialogue for learning. His study of the ways in which
language is learned, set out in his book Language and
: Learning. covers a larger range of language learning
' than Moffett’s, for it begins in infancy with the ear-
: liest dialogues between mother and child and continues
through secondary school. (Moffett’s work concentrates
on children’s language development once they enter
school.)
Britton notes that through talking the individual
makes sense of her experiences, for talk provides for a
: "two-way traffic in meanings" ("Talking" 114). However,
! he argues that while one’s world representation is
i verbally organized,
what is organized is far more than words.
Woven into its fabric are representations of
many kinds: images directly presented by the
senses, images that are interiorized experi
ences of sight, sound, movement, touch, smell
and taste: pre-verbal patterns reflecting
feeling responses and elementary value .judg
ments; post-verbal patterns, our ideas and
88
reasoned beliefs about the world: images
derived from myth, religion, and the arts.
(LL 28-9)
Britton is making a distinction here between discursive
and other kinds of thought. In other words, thought is
not only verbal but is represented in many different
modes in a person’s mind.
Britton explains that the very earliest behaviors
between child and caregiver are "patterns of action"
which become meaningful because they are repeated. He
notes that mothers often imitate what children say;
these are not reductions of the child’s utterance but
expansions of it. Using research carried out in the
sixties by Brown and Bellugi on children’s syntax, he
gives an example: the child says, "Baby high-chair" and
the mother expands it to "Baby is in the high-chair."
The mother is providing scaffolding, temporary struc
tures devised between mother and child to aid in the
development of the child’s language. In other words,
dialogue becomes a way of assisting the child in con
structing her language.
Other studies confirm that in child-caregiver
interactions, the child comes by the means to construct
language because the caregiver treats the child as if
she understands what is being said to her and is there
fore an active participant and partner in the
89
transaction. (See, for example, Bruner, "Ontogenesis";
Ochs, "Introduction"; John-Steiner and Tatter, "Interac-
tionist Model.") Throughout the verbal interactions and j
their repeated patterns, the mother or caregiver con
structs with the child the scaffolding which will aid
the child in eventually constructing meaningful utter
ances on her own from the flux of language that envelops
her ("Talking" 117-8). As John-Steiner further elabor
ates, scaffolding is a "dependence relation" but one
which is "an active process, in which both child and
caretaker participate in the scaffolding of knowledge
necessary for the child’s movement from dependence
t
toward competence and independence." !
I
Whereas Britton talks about patterns of action,
Moffett uses the term "feedback" for scaffolding to
point to one of the added pluses of dialogue which takes
place in the classroom. Conversation choreographed by
the teacher can create an atmosphere for "questioning,
collaborating, qualifying, and calling for qualifica
tion" (TUP 82). He notes that an adult is not always
necessary to provide "adjustive feedback . . . but an
adult may be necessary to establish the necessary char
acteristics of the conversation" (82). Feedback assists
in the internal structuring of ideas, for by internal
izing dialogue the person both amends what was said and
90
__
elaborates on it. Dialogue journals, described by Jana
Staton, through which the teacher and student carry on a
written conversation, seem to provide a similar kind of
scaffolding for students.
One of the major components of child-caregiver
interactions is play. Britton has a great deal to say
about the role of play in the development of language
because he believes that play is organized by talk and
therefore helps shape experience. Much of the early
mother-child interaction is playful: games like peek-a-
boo contain a great deal of language, and although the
mother may take both roles in the game in the beginning,
she treats the child’s vocalizations as meaningful. The
home, Britton says, "provides a language workshop, an
environment of language-in-use" ("Talking" 118), al
though it is often interrupted and fragmented by other
activities.
Britton interprets play with language in two ways:
first, it is play with similar sounds, whether they are
meaningful or not. He quotes an example taken from a
study of pre-sleep talk carried out by Ruth Weir, in
which a child plays with certain sounds: "bink, let
Bobo bink, bink ben bink, blue kink" (quoted in LL 80);
or corrects his own pronunciation: "berries, not har
ries, barries, barries, not barries, berries" (LL 81).
Britton also counts as this sort of language the strong
rhyming or sing-song words that children repeat either
to themselves or as a performance for a listener.
The second kind of language play is that which
regulates action. Britton explains that talk
plays an organizing role. . . . Children, when
they play together and even when they play by
themselves, will normally use words to assign
these roles: not till language has some power
to regulate activity can they be persisted in
and the imagined situation allowed to develop.
(LL 89-90)
Much make-believe play is solitary, but as the child
gets older play becomes more sociable as other children
take part in it. The dramatic talk and action of make-
believe deals with subjective aspects of experience and
carries on into sophisticated adult forms of linguistic
activities.
In his chapter on informal classroom drama in
SOLAR, Moffett discusses play in the classroom as a
framework for constructing experience. Like Britton, he
notes that solitary play is a child’s first dramatic
activity, "not so much to deliberately imitate what he
sees about him as to become it. This early drama wells
up from a passion to understand, to find one’s identity
through action" (99). In the beginning the child car
ries out this action through objects, in much the same
92
way that adults, called on to improvise, find it much
easier to do so when given a prop to use.
Moffett suggests that objects which can stimulate
dramatic activity need to be available in classrooms.
In the classroom, children may act out alone, but they
will move on to acting in pairs and playing in larger
groups over time. For example, Moffett suggests puppet
play as a way of furthering dialogic activities; it
fosters interaction and collaboration by the children on
tasks such as deciding who will make the puppets, who
will take the parts of the various characters or be the
narrator, who will make the scenery; the children sup
plying the puppets’ voices must be able to effectively
compose orally and cooperate with dialogue. It is also
less threatening for children to create dialogue through
i
puppets since an audience will focus on and react to the
puppets rather than to the children behind them. While
puppeteering indicates one specific way in which drama
aids in creating dialogue and furthering social interac
tion, Moffett is careful to point out that he does not
suggest these activities for enrichment. Rather, he j
sees them as integral to classroom work, as "serious,
yet enjoyable" parts of language arts education. Not
, only does dramatic play enhance the development of
language, and "further peer socialization of a learning
93
sort not usually possible outside of school" (SCLAR
118), but it also provides students with certain oppor
tunities with language. Among these are developing the
capacity to elaborate on stories, to learn the limits of
nonverbal "movement and gesture," to act out situations
before they actually happen, to discuss and compose
orally, and of course to force a person to think on her
f eet.
This last aspect of dialogic drama is one Britton
capitalizes on to illustrate the importance of talk for
learning. In an essay which appears in the research
report Language, the Learner and the School, he provides
several transcripts of taped discussions which took
place in secondary schools. One of them features a
group of sixteen-year-old girls talking about their
relationships with other family members. Britton’s
transcript of this conversation shows how talk is a
means of getting at understanding through group effort.
The final transcript illustrates task talk that takes
place during a science experiment in a secondary school.
While the teacher orchestrates the task, his questions
are very open-ended and allow the students to think
about what might be happening during the experiment.
Britton notes that the conversation between the students
and teacher moves "from what might describe a particular
94
event to a generalization that might explain that event"
("Talking to Learn" 114). Britton sees this progression
of activity as moving inward: only after a person
learns how to shift from description to generalization
through speech can she then learn to do the same in
thought. In other words, he says that once this pattern
is structured in thought it can then emerge in written
composition. One assumes that Britton is hypothesizing
rather than presenting this progression as a fact, for :
I
i
it does not account for simultaneous speaking and !
I
writing or transcribing of spoken thought to paper. j
i
The move from collaborative/interactive speech i
situations to verbalizing to or for oneself brings this
discussion back to Moffett and his conceptualization of j
soliloquy. He notes that dramatic soliloquy represents |
|
"unuttered thoughts," although on the stage it is heard I
i
by an audience. Soliloquy is the "drama of what is j
happening inside someone" (TUP 71), or in. terms of j
active learning, the internal activity of structuring
concepts, ideas, thoughts. He argues that while most
thinking which a person does is actually an "unvoiced j
conversation with oneself" (64), it is only after inter
action with others that the child is able to discrimi
nate between speech for herself and speech for others.
In other words, he argues with Piaget that early speech
95
is "egocentric" in the sense that the child cannot
discriminate between the two contexts. She mediates all
' her tasks in the beginning with speech whether others
are actually included in her conversation or not.
Moffett reflects here Piaget’s view about egocen
tric speech. Piaget argued that because most adults
will go out of their way to make sense of what she is
saying, the child believes that she has no need to
consider the other person’s viewpoint. Piaget divided
early speech into two categories: egocentric speech,
which includes the child’s monologue or running commen
tary on her actions spoken to herself or addressed to no
one in particular; and socialized speech, which includes
questions, answers, requests, and other sorts of talk,
which takes another person into account to a greater or
lesser degree. With maturation, he believed, the child
develops highly socialized speech, for she learns how to
internalize her hearer (Language and Thought) .
However, Moffett does not rely solely on Piaget’s
thinking about language. (Piaget had less to say about
that than others have, as I indicated earlier.) He also
goes to the work of Vygotsky, who views early language
in a different way; in fact, in Thought and Language
Vygotsky criticizes Piaget’s ideas about the function of
egocentric speech. Vygotsky argues that the child’s
96
language behavior begins with socialized speech, or
conversation. That type of speech then divides itself
in two ways: its social elements become better tuned to
communication, while its egocentric elements, which
Vygotsky argues are social in origin, move inward.
*
i
I Egocentric speech, he says, "develops along a rising,
I
not a declining, curve; it goes through an evolution,
! not an involution. In the end, it becomes inner speech"
j
| (133). Later, in commenting on Vygotsky’s ideas in
I
! Thought and Language. originally published in 1934 but
not published in English until 1962, Piaget agreed with
Vygotsky’s hypothesis. (See "Notes" to Thought. rev,,
ed. 274-276.)
Let me turn to James Britton’s "translation" of
these ideas into the following synthesis to indicate his
understanding of how the two theories are, however,
generally complementary:
[A] limitation of view-point will affect in
some degree everything a child says: it is
Piaget's point that attempts to converse run
counter to this egocentrism, whereas the
running commentary and other forms of mono
logue run with it. . . . Piaget regards the
gradual disappearance of the running commen
tary as a natural consequence of a child’s
improved ability to internalize his listener,
to escape from the limitations of his own
view-point: egocentric speech is, according
to Piaget, gradually replaced by a more mature
form,.socialized speech.
It was Vygotsky who, in commenting upon
Piaget’s ideas pointed out that a child’s
first speech derives from conversations he has
! listened to and takes the form of social i
interchange . . . and that only later does the
speech thus acquired come to be used in mono-
] logue. He stressed the function of mono-
j logues, that of assisting activity, organizing
a child’s experience. (LL 59)
i
Britton goes on to discuss the importance of the inter
nalized monologue— inner speech--which, he says,
I
■ continues to support the child’s activities, "but in
accordance with the simple logic that if we talk to
ourselves and not a listener we do not need to talk
aloud" ( LJL 60 ) .
Inner speech can therefore be equated with inner
dialogue. James Wertsch, who has studied and written
about Vygotsky’s work extensively, contends that because
Vygotsky thought of inner speech as social, he therefore
i believed it was also dialogic. He quotes Vygotsky, from
the Development of Higher Mental Functions:
by applying the same mode of behavior [social
communication] to oneself, . . . humans de
velop inner speech. In this process, they, as.
it were, preserve the "function of social
interaction" in their individual behavior.
They apply the social mode of action to them
selves .
Under this condition, the individual
function becomes in essence a unique form of
internal collaboration with oneself. (Quoted
in Wertsch 153)
Moffett, in this way also reflects Vygotsky’s ideas
about inner speech because he sees the drama in solilo
quy and uses it as a metaphor for unvoiced dialogue,
98
, thus placing inner speech in a broad context. He calls
; it "a colloquy among one’s cultural, social, and famil-
j ial voices" (71). He pictures the person as the center
l
| of ever enlarging circles of contexts: family, social
i
1 sub-group, national or ethnic context, cultural context,
I
] and finally on the outside because it is the most encom-
i
1
passing, the biological context. Constructing the self
involves incorporating others into the self, or as
Moffett translates George Herbert Mead, "the constitu
ents of the self mirror the constituents of society"
(67).
In analyzing this self/other relationship, Moffett
' puts together a synthesis of Piaget and Vygotsky, but in
a different way than Britton does. His discussion of
the interrelationships between writing, inner speech,
and meditation shows how Piaget’s biological epistemol-
ogy and Vygotsky’s and Luria’s psychological and Marxist
: one can be complementary. He argues that when speech
' shifts inward, it "merges with universal inborn logical
' faculties, biologically given, and with idiosyncratic
penchants of mind to result in thinking that is at once
personal and cultural" ("Writing" 137). He understands
that Vygotsky and Luria believe that "human psychosocial
evolution ( 'historical dialectic’ ) determines individual
99
thinking more than the biological givens" (138). Then
he says:
Surely, we have here a serpent with its tail
in its mouth: mind and society feed in and
out of each other. Such biological givens as
the faculties of analyzing and synthesizing
can be neither given nor taken away by
society, and idiosyncrasy asserts itself very
powerfully not only among citizens sharing the
same sociohistorical conditions but also among
siblings sharing the same familial determi
nants . (138)
Moffett is arguing not for a solipsistic self, but
for a self constructed in relation to others. His
stance here is consistent with that of Mikhail Bakhtin,
although Bakhtin did not influence Moffett since his
work had not been published in English when Moffett
began writing. Clark and Holquist, in an excellent
biography of Bakhtin, note that for him,
[the] self is never whole, since it can exist
only dialogically. It is not a substance or
essence in its own right but exists only in a
tensile relationship with all that is other
and, more important, with other selves. (65)
-Moffett does not approach the self/other relationship in
exactly the same way that Bakhtin did, but with his
stress on dialogue as primary and the interweaving of
contexts in the forming of the self, Moffett’s view on
that relationship seems at least compatible with
Bakhtin’s, a point worth noting.
100
Britton’s work, too, contains Bakhtinian ideas of
the otherness necessary to the formation of self.
Earlier I showed that in forming his idea of the active
learner Britton drew from Kelly’s theory of constructs
and Buber’s philosophy regarding the way in which one
structures experience. That is, while the individual
seems to build her own world representation privately,
it is actually built in concert with others. These
others, according to Bakhtin’s thinking, are performers
and "the relationship between me and the other must be
shaped into a coherent performance" (Clark 64). In
keeping with this performance metaphor, Britton notes
that student to student interaction, will "in the end
establish the learner as the chief protagonist in his
own learning process" ("Language and the Nature of
Learning" 17). Further, as a dramatic situation "takes
hold" in the classroom, the participants in the drama
are propelled "more forcibly out of their own skins into
somebody else’s" (LL 143). He seems to say that self
and other are separable but formed together.
Returning once more to the concept of egocentrism,
if it is looked at as a part of the establishment of
self, it is not bad, not something that must be-~or even
can be--rooted out of a person. Piaget, in his comments
on Thought and Language, says that he could have used
101
the word centrism but chose to speak of cognitive ego
centrism because the "initial centering of perspective
is always relative to one’s own position and action
. " (quoted in Thought, rev.ed. 262). He further
insists that his meaning of egocentrism is not at all
related to the more common meaning, "the hypertrophy of
consciousness of self." Vygotsky misunderstood Piaget’s
use of the term (although he used the idea in his own
reformulation of it), and it is perhaps from that misun
derstanding that egocentrism as it relates to language
development is often regarded by compositionists
familiar with Vygotsky’s work as something that is wrong
with a student.
It is hard to deny that egocentrism of some sort
does not continue over life. Britton argues, from
Vygotsky’s premise, that when a child is confronted with
an unfamiliar experience he tends to talk about it
before he can think about it. This practice continues
into adulthood. Neither Moffett nor Britton, however,
uses the term pejoratively; in fact, Moffett considers
its opposite, decentering, as the stronger term, since
one decenters in the process of taking in the perspec
tive of others. Both theorists use egocentrism as a
plausible explanation for a speaker’s or writer’s in
ability to take the view of a listener or reader into
consideration, although Moffett seems to rely on the
concept more than Britton does, perhaps because he is
more strongly Piagetian in his thinking than is Britton.
The theoretical orientations which influence their work
will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
While dialogue explicitly and soliloquy implicitly
draw on the dynamic interaction of the person and
others, monologue, the third part of Moffett’s concep
tion of drama, requires the individual ”to relinquish
collaborative discourse, with its reciprocal prompting
and cognitive co-operation, and to go it alone" (TUP
87). The writer, for example, must develop both her own
logic and her own rhetoric and then sustain both of
these. Carrying out these operations is possible only
because action, or activity, moves inward as prior
dialogues are internalized. To compose by oneself, \
orally or on paper, requires a great deal of practice in j
dialoguing. Moffett views monologue as the bridge
between drama--the point at which written discourse
begins--and other types of discourse, such as narrative
and exposition.
Britton does not use monologue metaphorically as
Moffett does. His discussion of it follows fairly
closely Vygotsky’s interpretation of monologue as a form
of speech, a "running commentary" as Britton terms it,
103
which is the first stage in mental development. This
personal monologue helps orient the child to a task in
two ways: "first he interprets to himself the situation
that confronts him, clarifying and defining it;
secondly, he organizes his own activity within that
situation" ("The Speaker" 74).
However, like Moffett, Britton believes in the
efficacy of talk, especially its heuristic value, for
developing the ability to write, or monologue.
Britton’s phrase, "shaping at the point of utterance,"
captures the sense of what he means when he speaks of !
I
this heuristic function of language. The shaping begins |
with "expressive speech," which because of its context |
of easy give and take, Britton believes, allows us to
take risks, trying out "ideas we are not sure of, in a
way which we would not do in, say making a public
speech" ("Notes" 124). This talk provides experience
which ultimately the writer can shape once it is inte-
riorized, a shaping which involves two processes. The
first draws on -interpreted experience" which the in-
dividual assimilates, looking for patterns and coher
ence. The second process involves a growth in awareness
of the experience through the person’s conscious con
templation of it. The writing that is then produced
from these operations Britton terms "expressive," that
104
! is, it is closest to the self but has been molded with
■ the help of others. Writing therefore harvests connec
tions and relevancies that were explored originally in
, speech.
1
Before examining the interpretation Moffett and
Britton give to active learning in the classroom, let me
attempt to sort out why Moffett, who over and over
stresses the primacy of dialogue, would discuss solil
oquy as prior to dialogue. For one thing, he describes
soliloquy as a "kind of unvoiced conversation within
oneself" (TUP 64), an internalized conversation. Be
cause he believes that thought is "the internalization
of social processes" (65), then he must also believe
that soliloquy is a product of those processes.
What it seems Moffett is doing is equating solil
oquy with Vygotsky’s division of inner speech and outer
monologue, although Moffett adds to monologue the pos
sibility of its being spoken or written. His sequence
1 of writing assignments, which replicate in writing "the
whole shift from inner speech to outer speech that
i occurs continually as people verbalize their experience
: for others" (AV 29), begins with revising inner speech.
The second group of assignments, which are built around
dialogue and monologue, "put into w7riting the stage of
1 human development when we make the transition between
I
( 105
I _______
. the give-and-take of dialogue to the more difficult
sustained soloing of monologue" (AV 49). Moffett there
fore has constructed a logical progression for writing,
1 moving internal thought to the outside. While the
dramatic progression outlined in TUP works for written
discourse, I do not believe it works as well for a
progression of spoken discourse as he describes it
because Moffett seems to give the erroneous impression
that initial talk is self-oriented, and he does not
intend that interpretation of soliloquy.
For Britton and Moffett active learning means
active language. Using language requires active par
ticipation, whether one is listener or speaker, reader
or writer. Inevitably this conception of language leads
■ both of them to suggest better uses of language in the
classroom. In his chapter on drama, Moffett notes that
to a great extent, a child’s behavior is rhetorical in
that she acts on others. It follows that the continuing
drama of human actions is the best place to "begin the
: study of rhetoric" (116), and this drama does not stop
I
I once the child enters the classroom. Moffett suggests
that there the teacher should employ what he terms a
"dramatic pedagogy" rather than an expository one:
It seems terribly misguided to me to tell
about something to students when they are
using that something everyday of their lives.
106
As a school subject, language is unique in
this way. In fact, it is truly language only
when it is being used. It is not really a
something at all; it is an action going on in
somebody’s head or between people (118).
James Britton approaches the active use of language
in the classroom from a slightly different perspective
but argues as well that school learning should be based
on learning from experience. School experience with
language therefore needs to be as much as possible like
out-of-school learning, focusing on the uses of language
rather than on mechanical skills. This conception that
in-school learning should be similar to learning out of
school extends the notion of students learning from each
other, not just from their teacher. As noted earlier,
Britton sees the child as the "chief protagonist" in her j
own processes of learning.
Moffett’s final chapter in TUP concentrates on his
pedagogical theory for teaching writing, what he terms
the "action-response model of learning." The model
depends on the teacher’s assuming the role of a coach
and providing feedback as the student learns through
trial and error. He compares learning to write to
learning to ride a bicycle, although the former involves
acting on symbols and the latter, on an object. For
both activities the general processes of learning
through feedback are the same, since "in learning to use
107
language the only kind of feedback available to us is
human response" (189).
Feedback begins with talk, but carries over into
writing not just through teacher response, but through
the response of the student’s peers as well. The
teacher helps with the interpretation of a peer’s more
vague response to problems that exist in a piece of
writing: "This amounts to sharpening response while
keeping it paramount, and will help reading as well as
writing" (196). Moffett maintains that students must
plunge into the act of writing and heed the results of
the feedback on error, the point where the writing went
awry. He does not believe in "pre-teaching" in order to
avoid error. Since errors present the student with
valuable learning, they should be exploited for that
purpose.
Active learning in the broadest sense then is
highly social and individual. From Britton’s perspec
tive, it requires the interaction of the processes of
"learning from each other and learning with each other"
("Take It from--Where?" 155), and then of internalizing
that learning. Britton believes very strongly in pro
viding an "experience of community" in the classroom,
but an experience which allows for the interaction of
the learner and her environment so that "each new
108
r -
j experience reorganizes, however slightly, the structure
j of the mind and contributes to the child’s world pic-
I
! ture" ("How We Got Here" 173). As the facilitator for
i
' classroom activities, Britton calls upon the teacher to
change his role from one that is unidirectional to one
that is interactive. He notes that interactive learning
is a "joint undertaking," in that activities ("opera
tions" ) which are carried out overtly as a joint ac
tivity later become internalized. Language, he says, is
the primary means of this internalization.
Moffett, too, sees the teacher’s "art" as one that
allows "external, social operations [to] lead to inter-
' nal, cognitive operations" (TUP 93). In the drama of
*
the classroom, Moffett points out, a teacher should
capitalize on the fact that "his own intellectual pur
suits are framed by dramatic relations between him and
the world. . . . Since discourse is ultimately social in
origin and in function, it seems a shame to fight those
! forces that could be put to such excellent use in teach
ing the subject" (119).
I Psychological Theory: Piaget. Vygotsky, and Bruner
Moffett and Britton make two important points about
learning language, spoken or written: first, language
is an activity and is therefore learned through use.
109
Second, the act of learning language is done in a social
context and is therefore learned interactively. Their
ideas developed from their own experiences with students
in the classroom, although Britton’s are amplified
through his studies of his daughters’--and later his
granddaughter’s— experiences with developing language
skills. As scholars they are interested in the general
psychological aspects of learning, but they are most
particularly interested in the psycho-social linguistic
operations of language learning. In the mid-sixties
when Moffett and Britton began their theoretical inves
tigations, one major figure dominated the field of
psychology; that of course was Jean Piaget. As I noted
previously, Vygotsky was a relatively new figure to
language ischolars who were not familiar with Russian.
Both Moffett and Britton, with access to the first
translation of Thought and Language. found Vygotsky's
ideas very compatible with their ideas about language
development.
Britton even more than Moffett found the work of
Jerome Bruner useful as well, especially since it fit
compatibly with Vygotsky’s theories. Bruner serves as a
mediator between Piaget and Vygotsky because like
Piaget, he views learning as a constructive process,
posits three major periods of growth, and believes that
110
qualitative changes take place during growth rather than
only quantitative ones. On the other hand, like
Vygotsky he believes that language guides the child to
symbolic development and that culture is a powerful
agent during the course of development, helping to shape
mental structures:
Mental growth is in very considerable measure
dependent upon growth from the outside in— a
mastering of techniques that are embodied in
the culture and that are passed on in a con
tingent dialogue by agents of the culture.
(Toward a Theory 21)
I have already shown that Piaget’s theories about
egocentrism and its effect on an individual’s thinking
have been incorporated into Britton’s and Moffett’s
work. However, Piaget is the least "linguistic" of the
three developmental theorists. He believed that logical
structures develop from actions, but he also believed
that "the roots of logical operations lie deeper than
the linguistic connections, and that my early study of
thinking [in The Language and Thought of the Child] was
centered too much on its linguistic aspects" (quoted in
Thought. rev. ed. 263). Piaget later argued that lan
guage is only one particular instance of symbolic logic
and it is "a product of intelligence rather than intel
ligence being a product of language" (Language and
Learning: Debate 167).
Ill
Howard Gardner, in his study of multiple intel
ligences, argues that Piaget looked at only one kind of
intelligence, the development of logical-mathematical
thought, to the exclusion of other kinds, and ''errone
ously assumed that it pertains to other areas” (132).
While this is probably too broad a generalization,
Ginsberg and Opper make the point that Russian and
American psychologists view language as the social
factor which aids in developing thought and behavior.
Piaget, they say, "attributes a lesser role to language.
. . Representation takes many forms--mental imagery,
symbolic play, drawing— in addition to language. Thus
mental images are often non-verbal" (2115. In Piagetian
terms, language is simply one of many symbolic behaviors
which the person can use in order to structure her
thinking,
One has to think that Britton and Moffett under
stand and agree with Piaget’s concept of multiple repre
sentations of thought, despite their strong belief that
language also forges thought. Britton argues that a
person operates with non-verbal thought when, for ex
ample, she performs a ballet, for a ballerina "thinks"
with her feet; a mountain climber thinks with her whole
body. Serendipitously he says that "language without
thought is much easier to conceive of— we use so much of
112
I it in our daily routine exchanges, saying what we have
[ said so often that no thought goes into the production'1
i (LL 206). He is referring, of course, to phatic com-
l
munication.
Moffett argues for suspending verbal thought for a
j time to tap into other kinds of mental representations.
I
In his essay on the connections between writing and
meditation, which is quite dense and can only be dis
cussed in a general way here, he proposes meditation as
a way of harnessing inner speech. But he thinks of
meditation in the Eastern sense, as non-conceptualiza
tion, "that is, a bypassing of the whole cultural system
for filtering reality based on logic and langauge"
("Writing" 149). He contends that by releasing the mind
of discursive thought--by gazing on some object, for
example— the individual can get beyond conceptualization
( and is then able to return to discursive thought with
more to say. He suggests that sports, "monotonous craft
I
i movements like knitting and weaving," and arts are a
!
I kind of natural meditation which "hold inner speech in
I
|
' abeyance or mute it and thus help attune us beyond
I
discursive thought" (179). Moffett puts these other
forms to use later for verbal activities.
Bruner’s conception of the representation processes
posits the symbolic as taking many forms, not just
113
1 verbal ones, although Bruner, like Vygotsky, believes
! that language strongly influences mental representation.
t
’ In fact, language is the distinguishing feature of
f
symbolic representation. Also like Vygotsky, Bruner
' believes that representation is strongly influenced and
* reinforced by cultural technologies, such as ’ ’language,
myths and explanations, metrical and reckoning system,
tools, and [the culture’s] disciplines of knowledge"
("Representation" 318). Bruner’s specific forms of
representation will be discussed in more detail in the
next chapter in terms of symbolic growth.
| One of Piaget’s most important concepts, of course,
{ posits the child as an active construer of knowledge.
Gardner points out that Piaget believed that a child
■ derives all of her knowledge from her "actions upon the
, world," and over time those actions are internalized
into mental structures which allow the person to work
with words and other symbols. Bruner and others have
I
; noted further that Piaget was respectful of the "self-
1 sufficiency and dignity of the child’s mind" and studied
| that mind "in terms of its own logic" (Actual Minds 141;
‘ see also Ginsberg, Furth).
Importantly, Piaget observed children’s responses
i
: to problems and found that children worked out ways of
resolving the problems based on their abilities at a
114
particular time to understand the underlying concepts.
For this reason, Piaget’s theory has been called vari
ously constructivist (Furth) and structuralist (Miller).
While Piaget himself did not give his theories a collec
tive term, he did say that "knowledge is essentially
construction" ("Various Forms" 854).
The term constructivist is most relevant to
Moffett’s and Britton’s work because it best portrays
the active nature of the organism. Furth argues that
Piaget’s is a constructivist theory because "for Piaget,
a response is always the response of a living organism,
always something constructed in part according to deter
minants that are intrinsic to its own structure" (13).
Knowledge is never a state; it is an activity, or pro
cess, constructed through the dynamic interaction of the
organism with its environment. Commenting on Piaget’s
theory, Miller notes that Piaget posits that the person
has "an active part in the process of knowing and even
contributes to the form that knowledge takes. Cognitive
man actively selects and interprets information in the
environment" (37).
Piaget believed that the child’s constructing takes
place interactionally, that the organism, or person,
interacts with the environment through the dual pro
cesses of assimilation and accommodation. Through
115
assimilation the organism (or person) incorporates
environmental phenomena into its existing internal
structures, while the complementary process of accom
modation modifies those structures in response to the
new information. The continual balancing of these
processes is called equilibration, which Piaget explains
in this way:
There is always some production, that is, some
kind of transformation taking place. Simi
larly there is always some conservation,
something that remains unchanged throughout
the transformation. The two are absolutely
inseparable. {"Problems of Equilibration"
840 )
In other words, an organism never reaches perfect bal
ance because production and conservation are always
taking place. Furth describes this state as a dynamic
"active constructing-in-balance" (265).
It is easy to understand how Moffett and Britton
would find a theory like Piaget’s explanatory for what
they had been observing in children in the classroom,
especially since they argue that learning is fostered by
the interactive nature of talk. Moffett contends that
he developed his theories and then looked to Piaget and
Vygotsky to give them credibility (Interview). Britton,
who is an exceptionally fine translator of theory, finds
Piaget’s theory lends credence to his observations of
his daughters’ and students’ language growth, because he
116
! notes that children build on what they already know
i
about language in order to expand their use of it.
; Britton also indicates the influence on his work of
i
1 Vygotsky and Alexander Luria:
the Russian psychologists . . . believe that
the higher forms of human mental activity
begin their development as a process shared
between two people--a child and an adult:
that qualitative changes take place in a
child’s mental processes as a result of speech
and cooperation with his parents in infancy.
(LL 9 2)
Because Vygotsky studied the development of thought
1 processes as they relate to language, he looked into the
; child’s progress from the spoken word to written word.
: He argues that written language does not simply recapit
ulate the progress of learning to speak; that explana-
; tion, he says, is insufficient. Writing begins in
| gestures, which are "writing in air." Later when a
child draws she learns that "one can draw not only
things but also speech" ("Prehistory of Writing" 115),
i and Vygotsky contends, early drawings of speech are
■ actually gestures which the child transfers to paper.
Her fingers indicate the action of running, and the
child "regards the. resultant marks and dots on paper as
a representation of running" (107).
Vygotsky also notes that play is important in the
development of writing. In play children can indicate
117
' symbolic meanings through movements alone, through
! actions and speech, or entirely through speech. In
i
, fact, he says that "symbolic representation in play is
essentially a particular form of speech at an earlier
stage, one which leads directly to written language"
i ("Prehistory of Writing" 111). However, the interme-
i
diary here is inner speech, for "written speech follows
inner speech and presupposes its existence {the act of
; writing implying a translation from inner speech)"
(Thought 99). Conversation, Vygotsky notes, is moti
vated by give and take between speakers; writing must be
consciously directed because it lacks the dynamics of
i conversation.
‘ Current Theories of Development: Extending Moffett and
; Britton
In the 1920’s and ’30’s Piaget and Vygotsky were
■ writing about the child as an active learner based on
their experiments and observations. Forty years later
Moffett and Britton turned to Piaget and Vygotsky to
affirm and to expand their own observations and reflec-
. tive practices that the child is an active participant
■ in her own learning. Their choice of these two develop-
mentalists went against a strong view in psychological
' research at the time which construed the child in a much
more passive light. Their polemical stands against
118
behavioral objectives in the 1970’s, for example, indi
cates the influence which that perspective in psychology
still had on educational research.
Until about the early 1970’s, in fact, the prevail
ing model for the study of development was a mechanistic
one. From this perspective, the organism is viewed as
reactive: human beings are responsive organisms rather
than active ones, just as machines respond to acts done
to them rather than act on their own. Reese and Overton
characterize the mechanistic model in this way:
The epistemological position that derives from
-this model is that of naive realism, a copy
theory of knowledge according to which the
knower plays no active role in the known, and
inevitably apprehends the world in a predeter
mined way. (132)
In contrast, they note that when an organic metaphor
becomes the model for the study of development, the
organism is viewed as the "source of acts, rather than
as the collection of acts initiated by external (periph
eral) force" (133).
Those who use organicism as a theoretical framework
view the world holistically. Stephen Pepper proposed
that four root metaphors, or world views, guide philoso
phical systems, and argued that the "categories of
organicism consist on the one hand, in noting the steps
involved in the organic process, and, on the other hand,
119
1 in noting the principal features in the organic struc-
i
j ture ultimately achieved or realized" (238). This
| perspective acknowledges the existence of the parts of
, an organism, the parts always moving toward integration
J within the whole. While organicism implies that some
! end state is achieved, this idea is not requisite to the
theory (Overton). Most importantly, this theory of
. development holds that the organism both constructs and
is constructed by reality. James Moffett’s action-
response theory of language fits well into this frame
work as do Britton’s ideas about the social nature of
language.
Much contemporary developmental theory, while
strongly organicist, takes contextualism as a modifying
■ term. This second metaphor holds that the organism acts
within the frame of the historic event, the "event alive
i
' in its present, . . . the dynamic dramatic active event"
(Pepper 232). Sounding almost Burkean, Pepper describes
event as "an act in and with its setting, an act in its
! context" (232), rather than one that is conceived of as
i happening alone, or acontextually.
I
I
' The turn to contextual ism signals an important
change for the study of development because it places
■ the active person as an integral part of an ongoing
social context. Pepper argues that these two theories,
1 120
organicism and contextualism, seem much alike, "one
being dispersive and the other integrative" (280), but
because integration so strongly characterizes organi
cism, they must be considered as two separate theories.
However, some current developmental theories merge
the two views because these theories look at development
in terms of the dynamic relations between the organism
and the context. Lerner and Kauffman describe the
merging of these perspectives in this way:
The organism in contextualism is not merely
the host of the elements of a simplistic
environment. Instead, the organism is itself
a qualitatively distinct level within the
multiple, dynamically interacting levels
forming the context of life. As such, the
organism has a distinct influence on that
multilevel context that is influencing the
organism. As a consequence the organism is,
in short, not a host, but an active contri
butor to its own development. (324)
This last statement seems to fit well the practical
working out of Moffett’s concept of drama as well as
Britton’s notion of the "joint undertaking" of learning
between students and between student and teacher in the
classroom. Both of these ideas hinge on the interaction
of the child with others.
Yet not all contemporary developmental theories
agree with this blending of organicism and contextu
alism. As I pointed out in Chapter One, disciplines
change research views, but while some composition
121
scholars, for example, have begun to take a new research
direction for the study of composing, the process per
spective remains the dominant one in the field; other
views coexist with that. The same state is true for
psychology. Some developmental psychologists quarrel
with the lack of end state which results from an or
ganic/contextual theory, as well as the loss of concepts
like normative progression of stages of growth and
universal processes of development. Others contend that
all theories already presuppose context as integral to
development; a mechanistic approach, for example, sees
the environment as one that reinforces the acquisition
of behavior (Lerner and Busch-Rossnagel).
The turn to a contextualist orientation, however,
signals an important change in the study of development
because it sees the person and the context as active,
reciprocal influences. Theodore Sarbin notes that
George Kelly’s metaphor of the person as scientist--the
metaphor Britton has found useful to describe the active
nature of learning--broke through the constraints of
mechanistic psychology because it "declared that cogni
tive activity was a doing, and that construals were not
mere happenings of inert beings" (12). However, Sarbin
contends that Kelly should have carried the metaphor
beyond that of the person as scientist to the person as
actor: "Man as actor implies a social context and
directs the psychologist to a consideration of, for
example, political structures, ideology, cultural forms,
i and the symbolic world" ( 1 2 ) . Britton himself amplified
J Kelly’s ideas with those of Martin Buber, thus placing
one person’s activity in concert with activities of
others.
Sarbin contends that a true contextual stance
requires one to adopt the model of person as actor
because this model implies that activity goes on in a
social context rather than only on an individual level.
Sarbin suggests a "dramaturgical model" of contextualism
which has these characteristics: meaning is social; the
self is constructed through social interactions; par
ticipants in social interactions are considered to be
actors; interactions define the situation; and finally,
"as episodes begin and end, human beings continually
construct and reconstruct meanings to make sense of
their observations of the performances of others and of
self" (16).
This dramaturgical model is also suggested by two
other developmental psychologists, Joseph Glick and
Klaus Riegel. Glick’s ideas reflect and reinforce
Sarbin’s model, for he notes that there exists what he
calls the "dramatic moment" of language. This is "the
123
moment of its use, i 1 ^ the moment when it~is shaped as
the bearer of an intended meaning in a medium that can
display that meaning in public. It is language alive,
in an actor" (48).
Riegel» who proposes a "Manifesto for Dialectical
Psychology," centers on "the concrete actions of the
individual in a concrete social world" (690). He is one
of the few psychologists who focuses on dialogue as the
prototypical example of interactive changes that take
place, thus emphasizing language as one of the social
bases of human organisms. Dialogue, he says, has a
temporal structure, its progression depending on each
successive statement; in the beginning of language
development it relies on 1 intuitive ’understanding
between speaker and listener, in particular between
mother and child" (692). Through mother-child dialogues
the child learns about society and its values. However
Riegel includes as dialogue, not just the, coordination
and synchronization which exists between speaker and
listener but that which must also exist between a writer
and the writer’s readers. I will have more to say about
Riegel’s ideas as they bear on growth and development in
the following chapter.
The contextualist slant to developmental research
is also an ecological one; Urie Bronfenbrenner is
124
well-known for that perspective on development. He
envisions context as a set of "nested structures, each
inside the next" (3). Bronfenbrenner places the or
ganism at the innermost part of the contextual structure
as part of a dyad, or two-person system, most easily
thought of as mother and child; he argues that when
change takes place in one member of this pair, it also
takes place in the other. This initial system influ
ences and is influenced by other complex interrelation
ships that make up a microsystem of the immediate
environment. That system in turn becomes part of inter
connected mesosystems, then exosystems which are remote
enough from the person that she may never actually take
part in them. Ultimately he posits a macrosystem which
he describes as a "manifestation of overarching patterns
of ideology and organization of the social institutions
common to a particular culture or subculture" (8).
Moffett’s circles of contexts, each one larger than, but
still part of, the other is a similar idea.
Richard Lerner, Robert Cairns, and other psycholo
gists who orient their work to an organicist/context-
ualist framework argue that there is an active
interpenetration between the organism and the environ
ment. Lerner, for example, maintains that because the
individual acts on the environment and produces novel
outcomes in behavior, she reflects the importance of
both the active and the selective disposition of human
beings. He also argues, as do Bronfenbrenner and
Riegel, that reciprocal relations take place "across
life between an organized and active organism and an
organized and active context" (Human Plasticity 26).
Here Lerner points to a current view of active learning
and development, that both processes take place not
simply from birth through about the age of 18 or 20, but
continuously throughout life, a perspective that will be
discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
Active learning and all that concept implies— the
interactive social nature of learning language through
play, feedback from family, peers, and teachers, and
risk-taking--is a strand woven throughout the writing of
James Moffett and James Britton, although it seems far
less novel now than it did eighteen or twenty years ago.
In fact, it is a bit surprising that the theme of
learning as a social enterprise was not a topic of
discussion regarding TUP. LL, or DWA when they were
published, for it was such a strong element in Moffett’s
and Britton’s discourse theories. As I indicated in the
introduction, these theories were understood largely by
126
scholars as categories of text and by practitioners as
types of writing to assign students.
In an implicit way the arguments which Moffett and
Britton have been making about language learning as both
an active process and a social one seem to be very
compatible with current research perspectives in !
psychology. However, their ideas are more intuitively ,
tuned to the organicist/contextuai perspective than
explicitly grounded in it. Moffett and Britton have
confirmed and strenghtened their own ideas through the
theoretical assumptions of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner.
The ways in which those orientations work themselves out
in the developmental features of discourse posited by
Moffett and Britton is the topic I will address next.
j
I
I
127
Chapter 4
Stages in Growth: Perspectives from
Moffett and Britton
In Chapter Three I argued that James Moffett and
James Britton implicitly defined active learning as
active language, that is, language in use. Their obser
vations on this process lead them to argue that growth
in the ability to use language successfully takes place
in the same way that other mental growth does, in the
active construction of ianguage structures developed
through using language. The active process of oral
language use is a major means which paves the way for
the development of written discourse.
Although I am discussing the concept of active
learning separately from stages in growth, I indicated
earlier that this separation is for convenience only.
Each idea is integral to the other. Taking psychology
as an example, the experiments of Piaget and his as
sociates involved observing children acting physically
on objects and discussing with the older children how
they arrived at solutions to the problems presented to
them; these activities then provided the researchers
with insights into the growth of the children’s mental
structures. Jerome Bruner’s notion of the language
128
scaffolding built by mother and child as the child
begins to talk shows the interactive nature of oral
language use, but it also illustrates that language
growth cannot take place unless the child acts with and
! through language itself.
In Chapter Two I argued that compositionists who
have taken concepts from the field of developmental
psychology, particularly concepts like stages and ego
centrism, often applied them to writing and writers
without a strong sense of the context in which the ideas
were originally set out. Translating these terms to
another field can be risky, since even in psychology
they are controversial, and when used they are carefully
defined. In some of the composition studies I cited in
Chapter Two, I noted that the terms are often oversim
plified in composition studies so that when they are
applied, age and stage, for example, appear to be inter
changeable. This situation arises in a field like
*
composition because it is not simply "one discipline";
it is an applied discipline that is necessarily gener-
i
i alist. Its theorists therefore tend to work often from
S
summaries of research in other fields, or they lack the
breadth necessary to place concepts borrowed from other
fields in their proper frameworks.
129
Among the first who discussed composition from a
perspective that draws on theoretical sources in devel
opmental psychology, James Moffett and James Britton
have studied primary sources on human development,
synthesized these, and then adapted them to form their
own theories about discourse development. Their concep
tions of stages in growth represent two intersecting
directions of thought: first, Moffett and Britton are
interested in the child as an individual human being and
therefore are concerned to learn what lies behind the
child’s general physical and mental growth. Second,
drawing on this insight, they have investigated their
own special interests about language generally and
written discourse development, particularly as it is
manifested during the years of a person’s most obvious
physical and mental growth. They take an holistic view
I
of the growth of the child, even while they study his j
particular growth in composing abilities. |
In my discussion here I will argue that the inter
pretations of psychological development made by Moffett
and Britton have led them to theoretical views of
writing development which have not yet been fully as
similated into the field of composition. Their work is
undervalued in this respect. Further, I also want to
underscore the fact, brought out in the previous
130
chapter, that they do not only emphasize the psycholog
ical aspects of growth; rather, they view development
itself as a social phenomenon.
Metaphors for Growth and Development: The Perspectives
of Moffett and Britton
The theories of written language development
posited by James Moffett and James Britton can be dis
tinguished from one another, not because they are
diametrically different— and they do differ— but because
they reflect the bent each took when he sought out
theory which would explain his own observations and
intuitions. Although both are interested in the general
growth of the child as an organism, Moffett’s theory and
his metaphor for it have been strongly influenced by the
work of Piaget. Britton’s theory, on the other hand,
shows his particular interests in linguistics and, in
psychology, the strong influence of Jerome Bruner, whose
work builds on and reinterprets Piaget’s, is enriched by
Russian psychology, and has a much stronger language
bias. Both Moffett and Britton have also found
Vygotsky’s theories about the interrelation of thought
and language useful in forming their own. Each offers a
theoretically sound rationale for a person’s growth in
the ability to use language, written language in
131
particular, although their individual approaches to it
> have different emphases.
While his theory about discourse growth is based in
large part on the theories of Piaget, Moffett contends
; that he has
always worked more intuitively than that.
. . . I cite these figures [Piaget, Vygotsky,
and Mead] to gain credibility with a society
that believes only authorities in white lab
jackets. Piaget was the most useful for
getting a curriculum across because his con
cept of egocentricity, logical development,
and inner speech all certified, and extended
perceptions I was operating on. ("Going with
Growth" 62)
The terms which Moffett employs are based largely on
concepts found in Piaget’s theories of human growth, and
come from biology, the field in which Piaget began his
studies. Moffett says that growth can best be explained
by using the metaphor of embryology: "a simple cell
becomes a complex organism by differentiating itself
into specialized parts at the same time that it main-
, tains integrity by continually interrelating these
’ parts” (TUP 29).
In other words, Moffett seems to be basing his
1 theory of language growth--the ability to abstract
increasingly well, especially in reference to written
discourse--on the premise Piaget put forth that growth
takes place through the mutual processes of assimilation
132
and accommodation, that is, the internalizing of events
outside the organism and the complementary internal
restructuring of the organism to adapt to those events.
Piaget associates these functions with both the biologi
cal functioning of the organism and its intellectual
functioning. These terms are not exactly parallel to
Moffett’s differentiation and integration; in fact,
Piaget does not use differentiation and integration as
specialized terms for his theory of growth. However,
both sets of terms posit dynamic change as a given state
for the organism, or individual, while the wholeness of
the person is maintained.
Moffett notes the paradox that the individual needs
to grow "simultaneously in opposite directions, toward
differentiation and integration— to elaborate special
ized parts within the whole, and to interrelate parts
throughout the whole" (TUP 73). To illustrate this
paradox, Moffett contrasts the mechanical model of
development, the one he believes often defines the
approach taken in traditional schooling, to the organic
model of growth. A mechanical model pictures the or
ganism as an assemblage of parts which are put together
to form some end product. This metaphor implies that
growth is linear; hence, as the child grows he is depic
ted as climbing a ladder or walking over stepping stones
133
to reach some end point. Moffett argues that a growth
sequence should be represented not as additive, but as
cumulative: it can be imagined as "a circle that be
comes filled with more and more detailed and interfused
figures" (SCLAR 524). Rather than old learning being
set aside, it is transformed into other, more advanced
knowledge and skills. "In reality," Moffett says, "a
child is more maker than made. . . . The beauty of
embryonic— and mental--development lies in the great
biological principle of simultaneous differentiation and
integration" (524).
Moffett exploits this paradox of organic growth in
his discussion of how growth in ability to use language
may be detected. His series of "growth sequences," for
example, illustrate his view7 that language development
moves in two opposing directions at the same time to
create finer and finer abstraction. Through analysis we
discover particulars; through synthesis, generalities.
Both processes, Moffett argues, must work in conjunction
with one another, although the process of abstraction
itself actually creates a tension between the two. This
tension is like that which Piaget posits for his growth
model: the processes of assimilation and accommodation
are never in perfect balance, but relate to one another
in a dynamic way to keep the organism whole.
134
Moffett contends that general intellectual growth,
while "more important" than language, is measured
through language, for thought is invisible until it is
changed into words. Thought can be expressed in ways
other than through language--through actions, for
example--although language is the easiest way for us to
understand thought. However, thought and language
cannot be "matched off" in predictable ways, something
which, he observes, teachers often forget when they
attempt to focus on language forms as a gauge of intel
lectual growth. This argument is also made by Harste et
al. in their study of children’s literacy. They contend
that growth too often is calculated "by marking surface
level features of conventional form" (12).
Moffett argues that the mind can conceive of more
than can be put into language, although through poetry
language and mind can come close to matching. Further,
language does more than convey thought; it also has
rhetorical force and is therefore used for effect on
others. Moffett considers as well that language, like
other art forms, involves aesthetic choices: the
ability to play with words effectively is as much a sign
of growth as is effective expository communication.
Like Moffett, James Britton also sees a mismatch
between intellectual growth and a child’s ability to
135
linguistically represent that growth. A young child’s
actions provide evidence that mental activity is taking
place and indicate that perception and movement are used
by him to make sense of the world. Britton argues more
pointedly than Moffett that the individual grows and
develops through his interactive experience with the
world and with words, and like Moffett, he sees growth
as both transformational and cumulative. He uses as his
theoretical framework his belief that "the human indi
vidual builds a cumulative representation of his inter
actions with his environment: this representation is a
predictive apparatus--a store of expectations concerning
what may happen to him next” (LL 193).
Britton, however, approaches the idea of growth
from a different perspective than Moffett, who exploits
the physical properties of the organic model for the
purposes of constructing his theory about abstraction.
Because his work reflects interests in what he terms
expressive, transactional, and poetic language, Britton
focuses on symbolic growth as his metaphor for develop
ment. For this model he refers mainly to the theories
of Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky, both strongly lan
guage-based. Yet he himself says that George Kelly’s
personal construct theory most influenced his own work.
With a certain irony, Britton states that Kelly’s
136
framework is consistent with his own views "about the
role of language for the user--all the more valuable,
perhaps,’ because it is framed without language in mind"
("Language" 9). Still, it is to the psychologists who
discuss language and thought whom Britton turns when he
discusses development, as the following discussion will
show.
Britton sets his study in the stream of general
language development. This perspective is particularly
evident in Language and Learning, the book in which he
sets out his ideas about language most fully. In this,
he looks at the growth of language not in just the
school setting, but prior to the child’s entering school
as well. He includes language use representative of
slices of life both in and out of school, often analyz
ing growth through excerpts drawn from children’s
recorded speech and samples of their writing. Among
these are also some examples of the speech and writing
of his daughters. He shows how children and young
adults behave linguistically, while taking into account
other psychological and affective signs of growth as
they influence language use.
Experience and its representation are important
aspects of language growth for Britton. However, like
Moffett, he notes that language is not the only way
137
individuals have of symbolizing, and he defines the
individual through Cassirer’s term, animal symbolicum.
In building up images and symbols of experience, the
individual constructs a world representation so that, as
Britton argues, "Every encounter with the actual is an
experimental committal of all I have learned from ex
perience" (15). Further, he says that in terms of
behavior, living becomes very much like learning, for
humans build up and test hypotheses about current exper
iences based on past experiences.
Language, or talk, Britton notes, is the means by
wr hich we can live more than just moment-to-moment, for
we use it to interpret past events:
[Talk] . . . work[s] upon our representation
of the particular experience and our world
representation in order to incorporate the one
into the other more fully. . . . We habitually
use talk also as a means of modifying each
other’s representations of experience. (LL
19)
Britton looks to Suzanne Langer’s philosophy of symbol
ization for his argument here, for he notes that she
"sees man as a proliferator of symbols" (21); this
symbolization is most often expressed overtly, through
spoken language. Following Langer and Bruner, he makes
a case for representations of many different kinds which
come to us from images we glean through the senses,
through "pre-verbal patterns reflecting feeling
138
responses and elementary value judgments: post-verbal
patterns, our ideas and reasoned beliefs about the
world: images derived from myth, religion and the arts"
(LL 29). Britton views growth in language as a move
from non-linguistic perceptions, what Bruner terms an
enactive system of thought, in which the child acts on
objects, to an iconic system in which the child repre
sents the world to himself through perception rather
than action. Through the physical and mental actions
required to build these two systems, the child is able
to develop his symbolic, or linguistic, system.
Britton, however, says that he will take a "broader
sense of the word ’symbol’ than Bruner does, a sense by
which all three systems are symbolic" (193). Britton
gives as his rationale for this change Cassirer’s notion
of symbol embodied in this quotation: "Reason is a very
inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of
man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety.
But all these forms are symbolic forms" (quoted in LL
13). Britton generally takes the terms representation
and symbolization as equivalent and argues that he will
follow with that definition for Bruner’s system since
Bruner himself calls his system modes of representation,
(LL 193fn).
139
As a complement to Bruner’s model, Britton poses
Vygotsky’s theory of concept development, which confirms
Bruner’s theory about how the symbolic systems work in
relation to language. The operations on blocks which
Vygotsky had children perform show that conceptually
children move from random guesses about how to group
objects to a more systematic understanding about how to
group them by similarity. The child progresses from the
enactive stage to the iconic when he is able to use
factual criteria to decide how to sort the blocks. With
language, the child can group by name, but the categor
ies are based on surface appearances only. Britton
explains that these "functional collections" eventually
lead the child to
functional grouping in which the criterion, "I
can use it for . . .," becomes the more ab
stract basis for a more theoretical category.
The operation of such a principle leads in
turn to the ability to form fully abstract
categories, categories capable of dividing
phenomena into the "x" and "not x" at succes
sive stages of generality. . . . (LL 213)
The process of abstracting which Britton describes here
agrees with Moffett’s contention that language growth is
evidenced through an increasing ability to abstract.
Moffett and Britton both find parallels to language
development in systems of mental development, although
each uses a different metaphor to express this
140
relationship. These metaphors reflect their emphases
and indicate the differences in their purposes for
writing. Moffett, in his own words quoted earlier,
states that he was trying to get "a curriculum across,"
and Piaget’s concepts regarding the development of logic
helped him do that. Britton indicates in his Foreword
to Language and Learning that he wants to provide
teachers and others (he implies parents) with a better
understanding of the interrelationships of language and
learning. Naturally, he often refers to language use in
the classroom, but he is not concerned with suggesting a
curriculum to teachers except in a very general way.
Let me now turn to the curriculum Moffett offers,
which will lead into a discussion of two problematical
areas: stages, or sequences, and egocentrism. Moffett
sets out a sequence which he believes follows the way in
which students naturally develop the ability to handle
different kinds of discourse, a sequence based on grow
ing abilities to abstract. Over time he has modified
and expanded this, but, as evidenced in his most recent
work, he still holds firm to his belief in the sequence,
although he interprets it more liberally. I want to
explicate and interpret that sequence, drawing on the
original proposal in TUP. and elaborating on it through
its subsequent refinements in AV and Moffett’s most
141
recent publication, Active Voices, his series of essay
collections drawn from student writing.
Moffett presents his theory of abstraction in what
he terms "The Spectrum of Discourse," which is also a
hierarchical array of the levels of abstraction. How
ever, this hierarchy actually represents two progres
sions, or dimensions of abstraction— one, the I-You
dimension; the other, the I-It dimension. The first
progression is an array of activities in their order of
increasing remoteness of the speaker from his audience.
Thus, the continuum moves from reflection, "intra-
personal communication between two parts of one nervous
system," to conversation, to correspondence, and finally
to publication, which Moffett characterizes as "imper
sonal communication to a large anonymous group extended
over space and/or time" (TUP 33). The second, inter
secting progression, the I-It, arrays activities in
their order of increasing distance between the speaker
and his subject. One moves from recording what is
happening, to reporting what happened, to generalizing
about v?hat happens, to theorizing about what may happen.
The spectrum includes literary discourse as well: plays
("the drama of what is happening"), fiction ("the narra
tive of what happened"), and poetry, which Moffett shows
as a part of the whole range of the spectrum (TUP 47).
142
In this original statement about his sequence,
; Moffett seems to stay close to a literal interpretation
i of mental growth--that growth moves steadily forward--
and applies that interpretation to growth in ability to
[ use discourse forms. For example, in TUP he states that
i growth takes place in stages and that ”[o]ne stage
cannot take place until the ones before it have taken
place" (35). In an article published prior to TUP
entitled "I, You, and It," Moffett suggests that
teachers assign students the forms of writing which his
spectrum lays out, and since the forms are ordered from
lower to higher levels of abstraction, the assignments
are "structural and sequential" (AV 146). One moves
forward through them. However, at this point in devel
oping his theory, Moffett indicates in a less explicit
way than in AV that the spectrum does not simply argue
for starting with the simple and moving to the complex:
In either inchoate or vestigial form, some
thing of every level is found at every other
level. The majpr movement of drama-narrative-
exposition-argumentation is contained already
in interior dialogue— in streams of percep
tion, memory, and ratiocination. . . . Frag
ments of generalization and theory . . . are
embedded in narrative as implicit classes and
propositions upon which selection and emphasis
are based. (TUP 48)
The sense missing here is the concept that Moffett
states more precisely in AV, that we return to earlier
143
forms in writing later ones. However, this idea is
implicit in the program as he works it out in SCLAR.
Moffett proposes this sequence and the two "pro
gressions" through it and then seemingly denies it:
"This whole theory of discourse is essentially an hal
lucination. . . . [T]he theory is far too schematic to
be true" (TUP 54). He points to the problem with such a
sequence: if one believes in it too strongly the se
quence itself becomes the curriculum. Moffett does not
advocate that his theory be turned into a series of
classroom practices and states that unequivocally.
However, not everyone understands or notes Moffett’s
cautionary stand.
For example, in his review of SCLAC. John Rouse
equates Moffett’s growth sequence with the more conven
tional and less well-conceived sort in which drama might
be taught in the seventh grade, short stories in the
eight, and essays in the ninth. Rouse reminds the
reader of that and then poses a parallel he believes is
suggested by Moffett’s program: "dialogue in the
seventh grade, dramatic monologue in the eighth grade,
and interior monologue in the ninth" (330). Further,
Rouse contends that Moffett’s sequence of discourse is
not based on meaning in that students are rarely asked
"to explore significant issues of thought and feeling,"
144
although Rouse is not specific about what those issues
are. SCLAC. the original version of the text intended
specifically for teacher education courses, does follow
a grade by grade sequence of suggested work: grades
K - 3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10 - 13. (It is the only one
of the three editions which does.) However, Moffett in
no way suggests that certain parts of the spectrum
should be taught in a specific grade. Moffett’s
disclaimer that "though framed within a general pro
gression, the chapters themselves are expository and do
not follow consecutively as regards learning sequence"
(SCLAC 29) seems to have been overlooked by Rouse.
The problem with Rouse’s critique is that he does
, . ’A
not seem to call into question more substantive issues
about Moffett’s discourse theory because he does not
understand very well the developmental research on which
the work is based; he argues about peripheral issues.
As I noted in the previous chapter, Moffett addresses
the sequencing problem in AV because he discovered that
teachers have often misconstrued his idea of sequence
and attempted to do exactly what Rouse accuses him of
proposing.
In AV Moffett sets out a program for writing across
the curriculum which presents a series of assignments,
not specific topics, that require students to draw on
145
their own resources--their observations, memories, and
so on— and then to abstract from that material in more
and more sophisticated ways. These assignments have as
their base Moffett’s attempt to match writing experi
ences to the individual’s mental growth. Further, and
this is the point either overlooked or misconstrued by
practitioners (and some critics), the sequence is not
intended to describe a rigid curriculum but a fluid one
in which students in the same class have a choice of
ways into writing. First, Moffett believes that writing
must be individualized, a fact strongly echoed later in
the research findings of Donald Graves; and secondly, he
believes that "most assignments here may be usefully
repeated cyclically over the years because increasing
maturity and experience naturally make something new out
of it each time" (AV 10).
Before discussing the implications of these ideas
which inhere in Moffett’s progressions, let me mention
that Moffett himself brings up these points precisely
because his work has been misinterpreted by teachers. I
have already argued for calling Moffett and Britton
translators in the first sense that they bring theory
from other disciplines into the field of composition.
But using that term as a designation for the kind of
research they do does not indicate how their further
146
translation of theory to practice is then actually
interpreted by practitioners. Again, North’s comments
regarding the ways in which practitioners play out their
role in composition comes to mind: they are more inter
ested in the practical aspects of knowledge and less in
the theory behind it. Moffett refers to teacher criti
cism of his sequence of assignments, noting that it
often arose from their inability to complete all of the
assignments with a class over a year’s time:
The predictable result was that hardly anyone
ever reached the later assignments, which
featured exposition and argumentation, and the
program acquired the reputation . . . of not
treating "ideas." What a painful irony for
me, since thinking processes formed the very
basis of the whole sequence from first assign
ment to last. . . . But so few teachers ever
got beyond informal, dramatic, and first-
person writing that this intellectual develop
ment was lost, and my work sometimes became
inappropriately identified only with informal,
"personal” writing. (AV 4)
Further, when teachers found that a particular assign
ment in his original dittoed version did not work, they
tended to criticize the assignment rather than viewing
the failure as a way to discover what went vrrong.
Looking only at the practical applications of the se
quence, teachers failed to be sensitive to the thinking
behind it.
The implications of what Moffett has continued to
do over a period of twenty years, from the publication
14 7
of TUP and SCLAC in 1968, to the second and third
editions of SCLAR in 1976 and 1983, to AV in 1981, and
to Active Voices I - IV in 1986-87, show the refinement
of his thinking during that time about his writing
sequence. He interprets his own sequence differently,
viewing it less strictly as a series of assignments
which ought to be followed in ascending, linear order-
interior monologue, for example, coming before dialogue
writing— to viewing it as a spiral, in which the order
can be reversed:
All this does not mean that formal or more
impersonal or more abstract writing is better.
The goal of writing through such a spectrum is
not to "come out on top" but to be able to
play the whole range. As applied to abstrac
tion, "higher" and "lower" are not value terms
but refer, rather to stages of symbolizing
that people progress through as they become
able. but not obiiged to discourse at further
removes from the here-and-now. (AV 12)
In his "Rationale and Teaching Guide" to Active
Voices IV. Moffett continues to refine the reasoning
behind the array of assignments, which further illus
trate his basic theory of discourse. He argues that the
progression from recording to theorizing corresponds to
the ways in which a person grows in the ability to
abstract over a long range of time as well as the way in
which an idea grows "at any time in a person’s life"
(8). Further he arranges varieties of assignments by
148
juxtaposing and overlapping several types to show
natural writing progressions: cases are presented
before profiles, for example, because "case histories
tend to be basically organized as stories, whereas
profiles are organized more by traits than events" (13).
This evolution does not exactly reflect Piaget’s
intent regarding stages, or levels of development,
although it has some affinity to Piaget’s idea that one
phase of development is built on the preceding one and
will help build the coming one. Moffett’s sequence also
seems to have in it the idea of the recursiveness of
development which Vygotsky discusses briefly in relation
to concept formation:
the adult constantly shifts from conceptual to
concrete, complexlike thinking. The transi
tional, pseudo concept form of thought is not
confined to child thinking; we too resort to
it very often in our daily life. (Thought 75)
In other words, all human beings need at times to return
to earlier abilities as part of the process of tackling
more difficult tasks.
I noted previously that the work of Vygotsky and
Bruner has strongly influenced James Britton’s formula
tions about writing development. However, with the
exception of his study concerning developing writing
abilities carried out with colleagues at the University
of London, Britton is more interested in the development
149
of general language abilities than in the specific
development of written language. While Britton and
Moffett share some basic assumptions about language
growth, their interests have led them to different ways
of approaching the theory and practice of language in
the schools, the ultimate interest of both.
I want to look more specifically at the major
framework concerning writing development which Britton
sets out in several of his publications following LL
because they echo his basic philosophy and the theore
tical underpinnings found in that book. Britton has far
less to say about writing in LL than he does about
speaking, although he applies his basic premise, that
expressive language is the matrix for all other forms,
to both spoken and written discourse.
This premise, which formed one of the foundations
for the Schools Council Project on Written Language of
11 - 18 Year Olds, follows Britton’s philosophy that all
language starts close to the self and is therefore
expressive of the self. Britton defines expressive as
"utterance at its most relaxed and intimate, as free as
possible from outside demands, whether those of a task
or of an audience" (DWA 82). He hypothesizes that the
expressive is the point at which children should begin
their writing: "what they write in the early stages
150
should be a form of written-down expressive speech, and
what they read should also be, generally speaking,
expressive" (82). Further, he maintains that as chil
dren progress in writing and reading, they will move
from the expressive as a starting point into three
broadly differentiated kinds of writing: transactional,
expressive, and poetic.
Britton defines these language functions in the
following way. Expressive language, in addition to
being close to the self and "relaxed," is "relatively
unstructured" and highly dependent for its meaning on
context. Transactional writing uses language "to get
things done" (DWA 88), primarily to inform, instruct, or
persuade, and therefore calls attention to its message
rather than to its form. In contrast, poetic writing
calls attention to itself as a verbal object and "con
stitutes language that exists for its own sake and not
as a means of achieving something else" (91).
The way in which Britton arrays these types can be
seen in the diagram below. He defines the matrix term
as an immature form of language use, which provides "a
’natural’ starting point for beginning writers, assis
ting them at a time when they have rich language re
sources recruited through speech ..." ("Spectator
Role" 63). His second use of the term includes writing
151
close to the self, but it takes forms like "thinking
aloud on paper," diary entries, and personal letters.
Since he contends that even the mature forms are rela
tively unstructured, his definitions do not differen
tiate well between the two. Britton seems to drop the
double use of the term in his subsequent work, although
he continues to consider the expressive as the matrix:
"Expressive writing is . . . a matrix from which will
develop transactional and poetic writing, as well as the
more mature forms of the expressive" (64). However, I
do not think this distinction clears up the problem of
the two terms.
Mature
writer
A
Learner
This diagram also posits a learner and a mature
writer and thus creates a further problem because the
distinction between the two is never spelled out. These
may be age-related categories, although given Britton’s
theoretical framework that is doubtful, or they may be
152
[participant] [spectator]
TRANSACTIONAL --- EXPRESSIVE POETIC
EXPRESSIVE
(DWA 83)
based on some unspecified sense of what constitutes
mature writing. Again the two uses of the term expres
sive add to the difficulty of determining what is meant
by a "mature writer."
The "multidimensional model" of writing development
which Britton and his colleagues attempted to set out is
less a theoretical model of development than it is a
useful description of the kinds of writing that are
required of children in school. John Warnock, in his
review of the study, argues that Britton is actually
describing a taxonomy of discourse, not a theory of
discourse development: "[w]hen we have a showing that a
particular scheme does not simply describe events in a
domain but explains them, then we have . . . not a
taxonomy but a theory” ("Brittonism" 12). He goes on to
say that what the researchers offer in DWA is not proof
of a "necessary course of language development" but a
heuristic of "possible modes of writerly action, without
which students are unlikely to develop whatever language
abilities such performance permits" (13).
Britton adapted Moffett’s abstractive scale to one
of the transactional function categories, the informa
tive. Using the spectrum of discourse, in this case the
I - It progression, in this way, does a disservice to
Moffett’s intentions. Whereas the scale represents a
153
conceptualization about growth in ability to abstract,
the adaptation of it as part of informative writing
turns it into a descriptive device. However, in fair
ness to Britton, he does state later that the title of
the study is not entirely accurate since the purpose of
DWA was to describe the function categories, rather than
to suggest a theory of growth ("No, No, Jeanette" 34).
The Schools Council model of writing also posits
roles which writers assume when they speak, listen,
write, or read in the three categories. Britton des
cribes these as participant and spectator roles. The
writer in the spectator role uses language to "recount
or recreate real or imagined experience for no other
reason than to enjoy it or present it for enjoyment,"
while the writer in the participant role uses language
to "get things done" (DWA 91-2). Spectator role lan
guage moves between the expressive and poetic, whereas
participant role language moves between the expressive
and transactional. In terms of audience, the move is
always from the intimate to the more public, no matter
at which end of the model the language ultimately falls.
Over time, Britton has used the model to further
refine his ideas about the form early writing takes. In
his article, "Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writ
ing,” he draws on the audience and function categories
154
set out in DWA to argue that when children start to
write, they begin writing stories or narratives. He
notes that young children who have taught themselves to
write write first in the spectator role and use narra
tive form. The children often draw pictures to go along
with the stories, a feature of young children's writing
described by Graves, Harste et al., and others. Graves
says that the young, beginning writer usually draws a
picture of her idea before she writes it down since "the
child needs to see and hear meaning through drawing"
i
("Writing Research" 200).
Britton turns to Vygotsky’s theory about the pre
history of writing, which shows there is a pattern to
the history of sign development, to explain this phenom
enon of drawing as pre-writing. Briefly, Vygotsky
argues that speech and writing develop in different
ways: "the development of writing does not repeat the
developmental history of speaking. Written speech is a
separate linguistic function, differing from oral speech
in both structure and mode of functioning" (Thought 98).
The history of writing begins with gestures; develops
through games children play and toys they play with;
continues with "graphic speech," or drawing which sym
bolizes verbal speech; and finally emerges when drawing
objects shifts to drawing words. As Britton summarizes
155
i it, the direction in symbolizing is a "move from in-
I
' timacy and immediacy of meaning towards constancy of
meaning" ("Writing and the Story World" 14).
■ Stories, Britton argues, are important sources for
the ways in which children begin to construct connec-
1 tions between events and categories of experiences:
[Vjerbal narrative form presents an organized
representation of the kinds of experiences a
child has hitherto participated in or observed
or heard talked about. . . . [Through narra
tive, a] vast range of new and unfamiliar
participants in events is brought on to the
scene. Their novelty and strangeness no doubt
tend to put events into a more distant per
spective, so helping a child to perceive the
forms or patterns that events can take.
("Writing and the Story World" 5)
Children write in narrative form because they get satis
faction from stories, and they know narrative structure
and conventions. Britton is making a further case here
for his argument that writing begins in the expressive
mode since he believes it is the natural starting point
for children just beginning to write. He says that
expressive writing assists children in using the rich
1 language resources they have already at hand from speech
1 because they have few internalized written language
forms. Children increasingly develop internal language
forms through being read to.
Britton’s argument seems too narrowly focused on
one kind of writing. Perhaps by allowing Vygotsky’s
156
theory of the prehistory of writing to explain them,
Britton omits samples of some of the intermediate phases
which children pass through on their way to writing
stories. Glenda Bissex, studying her son Paul’s growing
abilities to write and read from the age of five, gives
examples which indicate that a great deal of what
Britton would term expressive-transactional writing
precedes story writing. Before he wrote stories, Paul
made signs (PAULSKRWSH, OWTUVORDR), wrote a letter (DER
JENCHAL I M EN KIDRGARDEN AD I KAN RIT), and wrote
directions for doing things such as performing an Indian
war dance and running a radio which he had built. He
also created a newspaper.
Harste, Woodward and Burke, in their study of pre
school children’s literacy, contend that "the surface
texts which children create include a wide variety of
organizational structures which clearly mark their genre
to literate adult members of the child’s interpretive
community" (84). The children they studied composed in
a variety of genres: lists, letters, stories, maps,
notes. Intention, as Britton himself notes, is impor
tant to a child’s performance, and because children have
the opportunity to observe many kinds of writing in
their environment, they create forms they know about
which meet their intentions in the same ways that adults
157
do. Narratives, while a familiar form to most children,
cannot adequately meet all intentions children might
have for writing. Britton’s basic concept, that chil
dren begin with expressive language because it is both
intimate and immediate, is probably correct, but gener
alizing this to narrative writing excludes too many
other literate, if transactional, forms.
There is a reason, however, for Britton’s stress on
the kinds of spectator writing which one finds in
written narratives. The Schools Council research dis
covered that most of the writing done in school between
the ages 11 to 18 was analogic (one of the divisions of
the informative category) and the audience for this was
primarily the teacher as examiner. Not only was there
little expressive writing going on in schools, but,
Britton writes, "attention was directed towards clas-
sificatory writing which reflects information in the
form in which both teacher and textbook traditionally
present it" (DWA 197). Students were asked to do little
speculative writing. Britton concludes that this fact
reflects a lack of interest by teachers in having stu
dents do independent thinking.
In his introduction to the collection of Britton’s
essays and speeches, Prospect and Retrospect. Gordon
Pradl notes that a central concern in Britton’s writing
158
is "for literature as a fundamental way of knowing, of
creating and organizing meaning in our lives" (3).
Britton is not, however, arguing for children to write
Literature. Instead, given his strong conviction that
children must begin with writing from their own experi
ence, he continues to stress that they tap into their
evolving abilities with poetic forms rather than be
funneled into one type of transactional writing all
during the upper grades. One might plausibly argue here
that to some extent Britton’s practical intentions are
shaping his theory.
Moffett also subscribes to the idea of the impor
tance of literature in the schools, although that may
appear to be overlooked in this study which concentrates
on theories about writing development. (In the latest
edition of CC Moffett includes his recent essay entitled
"The Teaching of Literature.") Moffett’s texts deal
primarily with writing (SCLAC and SCLAR, however, ad
dress each of the four aspects of literacy), although
his first book, Points of View, was in fact an edition
of short stories in which he set out his original ideas
about the spectrum of discourse, but as it applied to
narrative. In the Afterword to that collection he
explains that his array of the narrative techniques
illustrated by the short stories "recapitulate the
159
i course followed by the child in developing his powers of
speech" (569) and correspond to "Piaget’s description of
j the evolution of the learning process in the child"
(572).
That learning process is strongly influenced,
Moffett contends, by one’s point of view, more specifi
cally by one’s ability to decenter, to become less
egocentric. Although I discussed this concept in the
preceding chapter, I will deal with it here again
briefly as it relates to stages in growth specifically.
Moffett does not slavishly adhere to Piaget’s ideas, but
his choice of Piaget as a primary theoretical source
does set the stage for how he approaches egocentrism.
Piaget argues that mental growrth involves a process
of decentering. In fact, in his book The Language and
Thought of the Child, published in 1923, Piaget organ
ized his study around the concept of egocentrism in
relation to children’s language, but the idea also runs
through other of Piaget’s writings. After about 1940,
when Piaget moved away from relying on language to study
| and illustrate behavior, he began to use methods which
would elicit other, nonverbal ways of thinking (Ginsberg
and Opper). His analysis of the growth of logical
thinking beyond childhood shows an evolution in Piaget’s
160
own ideas about egocentrism, and he introduces the idea
of decentering. Piaget argues that a move
from egocentrism toward decentering [which
occurs in all developmental stages] constantly
subjects increases in knowledge to a refocus
ing of perspective. . . . [The hypothesis of
egocentrism] means that learning is not a
purely additive process and that to pile one
(newly) learned piece of behavior or informa
tion on top of another is not in itself ade
quate to structure an objective attitude.
Objectivity presupposes a decentering--i.e., a
continual refocusing of perspective. Egocen
trism, on the other hand, is the undifferen
tiated state prior to multiple perspectives,
whereas objectivity implies both differentia
tion and coordination of the points of view
which have been differentiated. (Growth of
Logical Thinking 345)
This statement is an indication that Piaget later placed
less importance on egocentrism as a factor in develop
ment. He believes that growth of all kinds involves the
process of decentering as the individual moves toward an
objectivity that comes from being able to take in mul
tiple perspectives (a highly contextualist idea).
Moffett uses this concept of decentering as one of
the theoretical bases for his discourse spectrum. He
argues that discursive growth requires growth outward
from the self: "Differentiating among modes of dis
course, registers of speech, kinds of audiences is
essentially a matter of decentering, of seeing alterna
tives" (TUP 57). He uses his spectrum of types of
narrative as an illustration of decentering because it
161
begins with the "most subjective and personal" and moves
out to the "most objective and impersonal" (TUP 122).
Thus, he places an example of interior monologue at the
beginning and anonymous narration, the most impersonal
way an author has of communicating with a reader, at the
end. He stresses that egocentrism is not a bad thing;
it results simply from a writer’s not considering his
audience.
Britton looks at egocentrism as a part of a
person’s broader development, not just linguistic devel
opment, in his discussion of adolescents in LL. Much of
what he says in this section derives from Piaget’s book
on logical development during adolescence, especially
the final chapter which deals with the ways in *?hich
adolescents think about the world. Britton argues that
this point of development occurs most particularly
through social interaction but "has within it the germ
of the further notion of ’development of differences,’
that is to say, of becoming an individual” (224). On
the other hand, younger children overcome egocentricity
by learning "the language of cooperation" (138) and move
toward greater and greater reciprocity in their dealings
with others.
The adolescent enters a new phase of egocentrism
as he becomes a theorizer. His theories of how society
162
should change in order for him to fit into it in an
adult role do not take into consideration that others
have equal claims on these idealizations. Piaget argues
that
the adolescent’s egocentrism comes out in a
sort of Messianic form such that the theories
used to represent the world center on the role
of reformer that the adolescent feels himself
called upon to play in the future. (Growth of
Logical Thinking 343-4 )
Further, adolescence is the time when intellectual
operations correlate strongly and crucially with affec
tive aspects of personality and tap into ideals which
the person is beginning to realize. Britton stresses
the importance of talk at this time in development,
because in order for adolescents to decenter their ideas
and test their strong ideals against reality, they need
to discuss them with their peers and discover the weak
nesses in the theories. The decentering continues when
they either take up an adult role through work or pre
pare for that role through further schooling.
Very little has been said here so far about stages
of discourse acquisition, although quite a lot has been
said about how Moffett and Britton view the ways in
which individuals progress in their abilities to use
spoken and written discourse. They draw on notions of
stages primarily when they are translating ideas about
163
intellectual growth from their major sources, Piaget,
Vygotsky, and Bruner, who employ the term, but spar
ingly. The psychologists themselves are more interested
in the processes that foster growth than in absolute
orders of acquisition. Bruner, for example, uses stages
only to refer to the successive establishment of dif
ferent symbol systems (which then all continue simul
taneously). Although Piaget believed that all human
beings pass through universal stages of development
similar to those he described--and it is hard to deny
that generally that is true--he is less interested in
stages than in what a child can do with what he already
knows. Writing about the application of Piaget’s work
to education, Eleanor Duckworth contends that it is the
interplay of perceptual and conceptual energies, in
addition to recalling what he has done before, that
determines a person’s understanding of a new problem.
These "lines of access" are more important than concep
tual knowledge by itself or logical structures. In
other words, attempting to apply a formulaic idea of
stages is not useful.
One might liken the general use of the term stages
in composition right now to a developmental progression
like that Vygotsky suggests. The first phase, which is
similar to initial, scattered reading in a new field,
164
does not fit here. But the second phase, thinking in
complexes, describes the way in which the person unites
objects based on bonds which actually exist between
them. These bonds are concrete and factual rather than
abstract and logical. Most compositionists who think
about stages in relation to writing development are at
this point in their knowledge of the term. Like
Lindemann, they simply take the idea of stages at its
face value and apply it to ages, often turning the
concept into a deficit term if performance does not meet
age expectations. The third phase Vygotsky describes,
concept formation, requires the dual abilities of syn
thesizing and analyzing. Whereas complex thinking
overproduces connections, making it weak in abstraction,
conceptual thinking results in an "abstract synthesis
[which] becomes the main instrument of thought" (Thought
78). Moffett and Britton and a few others, one might
say, have reached the conceptual stage in their under
standing of developmental theories, for they are capable
of doing more than just applying Piaget, Vygotsky, and
Bruner. They have used their theories to forge a new-
conceptual izat ion of growth in discourse.
Current Developmental Theory: Rethinking Development
Piaget looms still as the major figure in develop
ment. His theories are used as a point of comparison
and argument for any others which are put forth concern
ing development. It is not surprising then that when
compositionists look to psychology to find ways of
explaining and enhancing concepts about the growth they
observe in composing skills they often turn to Piaget’s
model. I have shown two ways in which his ideas have
been taken into the field: one, through translation and
reinterpretation of human growth in the light of lan
guage growth, building on his ideas of general mental
growth; the other, through a literal interpretation of
stages applied directly to language and writing growth
with little understanding of the original theoretical
grounding of the term.
To demonstrate the differences between current
theories of development and those like Piaget’s, which
seem to be waning in influence or more frequently now
coming under attack, I want to review the concept of
stages as Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky have described
it. Then I will discuss how the notion of development
is changing through a review1 of recent work in develop
mental psychology and point out how these ideas are
implicit in a limited way in the work of Moffett and
Britton.
Piaget posits three major stages of intellectual
development: the sensori-motor, in which the child acts
166
on objects in order to know them; the concrete opera
tional, in which he uses symbols to represent objects;
and the formal operational, in which he can perform
abstract thought operations. This last is more depen
dent on language for its development than the others.
Piaget defines stages as having these characteristics:
the order in which they are acquired, but not their
timing, must be constant; earlier structures become
integrated into later ones; the structures that make up
a stage are viewed holistically rather than as separate,
unrelated schemes; there is a phase of preparation for a
stage as well as one of completion; finally, some pro
cesses which appear at one stage reappear and are
refined at a later stage ("Stages of Intellectual Devel
opment" 815-817). Even in this condensed version, it is
evident that stage cannot be defined very simply; it is
a complex term.
Instead of stages, Jerome Bruner posits three modes
of representation; these are understood in the sense of
translating "experience into a model of the world"
(Toward a Theory 10). The first he calls the enactive
and is a knowing through doing. (He compares this kind
of knowing to the ability to ride a bicycle but the
inability to use words to describe the act itself. ) The
second system of representation is the iconic, knowing
167
something through an image or picture of it. The third
mode, the symbolic, is representation in words. Bruner
proposes these systems as ones which human beings ac
quire over time, but once acquired, they can be used
when individuals wish to represent ideas in different
forms. These modes become a repertoire to draw on when
the need arises, rather than being acquired and then
later discarded or grown out of.
Vygotsky also sets out three phases in the develop
ment of concepts, the first beginning in very early
childhood and reaching fruition in adolescence. Like
Piaget and Bruner, he argues that this process is not
quantitative, but qualitative, and that it is "mediated
by signs." In the first phase, the child groups objects
together but without establishing any intrinsic bonds
among them. This is syncretic thinking. In the second
stage, which Vygotsky calls "thinking in complexes," the
child groups objects together by discovering true rela
tionships the objects have to each other. Prior to true
conceptual thinking, the child develops pseudo-concepts,
which Vygotsky defines as the child’s ready acceptance
of the adult’s meaning of a given word. Genuine concept
formation comes with the person’s ability to synthesize
and analyze: "to abstract, to single out elements, and
to view the abstracted elements apart from the totality
168
of the concrete experience in which they are embedded"
(Thought, rev.ed. 135). Vygotsky’s phases of develop
ment are very much like those of another developmental
psychologist, Heinz Werner, who proposed an orthogenetic
principle of development. He said: "Wherever develop
ment occurs, it proceeds from a state of relative lack
of differentiation to a state of increasing differentia
tion, articulation, and hierarchic integration" ("Devel
opmental Approach" 86 ) .
I have greatly simplified the thinking of these
theorists, but for the purpose of painting a general
picture to indicate that ages at which one enters par
ticular stages is not much of an issue. The possible
exception here is Piaget whose theory, while it is
certainly not simply maturationist, to some extent tends
to tie acquisition of stages to certain points in a
child’s life. Bruner’s modes of representation and
implicitly Vygotsky’s phases of development are applic
able in a more general sense, but to a particular person
in a particular environment as he experiences certain
events.
A more recent and innovative way of viewing stages
has been put forth by David Feldman. He suggests remov
ing stages from inside the person and thinking of them
instead as part of particular domains of knowledge. In
169
other words, the term developmental can be applied to
realms of activity which are not universal. Feldman
argues that
many bodies of knowledge (including probably
plumbing) are organized into distinctive and
conceptually discrete developmental stages or
levels. . . . Essentially I am proposing that
the term developmental have its meaning ex
tended to all domains where change can be
conceptualized in terms of a series of ever
more advanced stages achieved through a pro
cess of constructive transformation. (xiv-xv)
Feldman regards as non-universal domains those
which are cultural, discipline-based, idiosyncratic, and
unique. Each has its own basis for cognitive achieve
ment and is acquired through some kind of intervention
or mediation, such as direct teaching or apprenticeship.
Cultural domains include bodies of knowledge which all
persons within a culture are expected to acquire--
reading, writing, mathematics, understanding one’s
political system, for example— although which domains
are considered important will vary, of course, by cul
ture. While composing skills, as a part of general
literacy skills, belong to the American cultural domain,
not everyone necessarily achieves the same level of
mastery of writing, a given built into Feldman’s theory.
It can be argued that Moffett and Britton have posited
developmental progressions for the cultural domain of
writ ing.
170
Feldman’s ideas are compatible with other current
developmental theories, which I described in Chapter
Three, although these theories have far less a stake in
stages than they do in general growth and its embedded
ness in the social context. Some researchers take a
rather skeptical view of stages, calling them an idea
listic notion that a person moves along some "nomolog-
ical path toward an ideal end state of mature adult
cognition" (Labouvie-Vief 184). The stages preceding
this ideal end state are often seen as imperfect and
merely aimed toward that end, rather than being useful
in themselves. This would be similar to denying a value
to concrete operations, or iconic thinking, or thinking
in complexes. This idealistic notion can also lead to
thinking of stages in purely maturational terms, one of
the problems I believe has happened in some composition
research.
Jerome Kagan questions some of the idealistic
assumptions behind the concept of stages, especially the
notion that there is "connectedness" between stages
"which assumes not only interdependence but, in addi
tion, the belief that a particular structure is pre
served through succeeding stages (80-1). While he does
not deny that the individual works toward preservation
of the self, he points to the fact that even the embryo
171
i
' "contains frequent discontinuities in which some struc-
i
tures disappear after their mission has been accom-
, plished, leaving no structural residue" (90). Behavior
is much the same: it is preserved if there is an urgent
need for it, but it disappears if it is no longer use
ful .
Rather than picturing development as a gradual
accumulation of behaviors and internal structures, Kagan
argues that there are both continuities and discontinui
ties to development. Bruner also notes that development
is made up of "spurts and rests" which can be slowed
down or halted, or moved along more quickly through the
environment in which the organism finds itself (Toward a
Theory 27). Development is not simply like climbing a
ladder to reach the upper rungs; instead there is "a
system of culturally imposed prods and brakes"
(Labouvie-Vief 192) which also figure into it. Develop
ment, abrupt or gradual, also takes place in an histor
ical and cultural context.
Cairns argues that social acts direct the processes
; of development "from fertilization to death." The
effects of social acts that individuals create on one
' another "may be behavioral or biological, direct or
indirect, intended or unintended, benign or destructive,
normal or neurotic" (5). This view agrees with Klaus
172
Riegel’s which he terms a dialectal theory of develop
ment. Riegel argues that there are simultaneous inter
actions that go on at multiple levels of development.
The four he singles out are the inner-biological, the
individual-psychological, the cultural-sociological, and
the outer-physical, all of which interact with one
another. When any two of these are "out of step" a
crisis takes place. Riegel uses marriage as an example.
Many people marry when they are mature enough to do so,
when they are psychologically ready, and when the social
conditions are appropriate. In this situation synchrony
among levels occurs. However, synchronization is not
always achieved:
Individuals marry without having reached a
sufficient level of maturity; others may have
attained the proper level but fail to find the
right partner. Thus, the inner-biological and
individual-psychological progressions are not
always synchronized with the cultural socio
logical or outer-physical conditions, for
example, v?ith . . . the reduced availability
of marriage partners after wars. (693-4)
A crisis generated by asynchronies between levels
is not always negative since often it leads to new
development and to a meaningful phase in a person’s
life. However, this development takes place not just in
the individual nor only in the social group, but, Riegel
argues, "in the dialectical interactions of both" (694).
While all levels aspire to synchrony, none of them is at
173
rest; because of this "restlessness" they are never in
perfect harmony. Riegel takes this state of flux as a
fact, but not as a negative condition, for it leads to
growth.
One notes in Riegel’s argument the active nature of
the individual internally and externally as well as the
active nature of the world around the individual. There
exists an interpenetration between the person and the
context; development in this sense becomes bidirectional
and reciprocal. Lerner extends Riegel’s argument,
pointing toward a life-span perspective on development
through the notion of plasticity, that is, change at one
level inducing change at all levels. Life-span develop
ment assumes that change is constant and that there is
an "embeddedness of each level with all others, that
changes in one promote changes in all. . . . [Further],
change will constantly continue as a consequence of this
embeddedness" (Lerner and Busch-Rossnagel 8).
Psychologists whose work is oriented toward studies
of development over the life-span argue that no one
level of development should be studied in isolation from
others. They consider child development an interesting
aspect of larger developmental issues. Because life
span studies posit a dynamic interaction between and
among levels of possible growth, the person is viewed as
a producer as well as a product of his own development
• (Lerner 30). While Moffett and Britton do not profess a
I life-span perspective, this last concept of the person
as producer of his own development is certainly implicit
in their ideas, especially as they apply to classroom
interactions.
Actually this broader focus of study is not new;
Paul Baltes traces an interest in it back to the 1700’s,
but it has only recently sparked serious research and
led to further theoretical elaboration. In turning away
from continued studies of child development, some re
searchers have begun to study adult behaviors specifi
cally. In The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Daniel J.
Levinson argues that "a developmental approach is needed
in the study of adulthood" (3). His purpose is to
conceive the life cycle as a whole and to study in depth
the adult years. George Vaillant has carried out a
longitudinal study of graduates of Harvard University
over a thirty-year period. As the title Adaptation to
Life suggests, Vaillant studied how those he interviewed
I did or did not adjust to the problems which they faced
in their private and public lives. Colarusso and
Nemiroff have considered adult development from what
they term a psychodynamic perspective. They argue that
the adult is no more a finished product than is the
175
I child and "like the child, [the adult] is in a state of
; dynamic tension which continually affects and changes
I him" (63). The field of gerontology further extends the
; possibility for life-span studies.
This summary of research seems to open a Pandora’s
i
box regarding development, for it is conceivably pos
sible to say that any change is developmental. That is
not what life-span research intends. This research,
however, does allow one to view changes in behavior very
differently by looking at them in terms of when pro
cesses of change begin, how long they last, and when
they end. Stages in growth can be understood in a much
1 broader perspective, tied less to particular ages than
to zones of development.
What Moffett and Britton have proposed about growth
in the use of language does not tap into this more
current research in development. Yet their work is not
incompatible with a life-span perspective. Concepts
discussed here--the dynamics of development, social
interaction as a necessary part of growth, embeddedness
of the person in the environment, crises in develop-
Dient--are not specifically a part of their notions about
the ways in which individuals learn and learn to com
pose, but they often are implicit, especially in the
practical working out of their ideas in the classroom.
176
Viewing growth over a long span of time, though not
necessarily over the life-span, may also explain their
lack of interest in dealing with the composing process
in the way it is usually conceived because they see it
as a molar, rather than a molecular activity. The
single (short) composing process is less interesting to
them than is what Phelps calls a composing life ("Rhythm
and Pattern"). This idea is implicit, for example, in
Moffett’s conception of the spectrum of discourse, not
as a simple progression by levels but as a multidimen
sional model which writers can use in some form depend
ing on their proficiency at writing and their purpose.
Britton, positing expressive, transactional and poetic
forms of writing, does not limit these to the student in
school but views them as types available to all writers.
Conceiving of discourse development in these ways,
Moffett and Britton provide a repertoire of possibili
ties for any writer to draw on.
Chapter Five
Conclusion
In the introduction I set forth a framework in
order to examine one of the alternate scholarly tradi
tions which makes up the narrative composition has been
constructing about its history. I chose as representa
tive of this particular story two emblematic figures,
James Moffett and James Britton, whose work can be read
through their role as scholar/practitioners and through
their articulation and application of a developmental
paradigm for English studies.
Having examined their work in the developmental
framework, looking particularly at growth in written
discourse as it is practiced in the schools, I now want
in closing to focus more directly on the role of Moffett
and Britton as scholar/practitioners, a buried theme
here which is closely related to development. This
function is not recognized in any formal way by the
field, except perhaps tacitly, nor is it a name which
Moffett or Britton have applied to themselves. Its
duality has been implicit in my analysis of their work
in the preceding two chapters, but I want to bring out
its productive character for the discipline, especially
178
now that practitioners are being reassessed as know-
iedge-makers and viewed once again as valued members of
the professional composition community.
As I noted in the introduction, scholars and prac
titioners classify Britton and Moffett in different
ways, for they seem to fit different roles depending who
is reading their work. Because of his empirical re
search with the Schools Council Project, Britton is
often characterized as a researcher, as North positions
him in the field, more finely specifying Britton as an
Experimentalist. But this distinguishes only one aspect
of his influence. Both Britton and Moffett are most
often described as discourse theorists by other
scholars, primarily through a comparison of their work
to James Kinneavy’s. For example, in the opening essay
i
of Rhetoric and Change. Tanner and Bishop place
Britton’s research in DWA as parallel in importance to
Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse because of its impact
on rhetorical studies (15). In the same collection of
essays, Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse is
viewed, again along with Kinneavy’s study, as having
provided "some astute rethinking about the modes of
discourse" (Corbett 31).
Kinneavy himself has synthesized four rhetorical
theories--his own, Moffett’s, Britton’s and D’Angelo’s--
179
to indicate compatibilities among them. Kinneavy treats
the theories as models for teaching composition, al
though he focuses his discussion on their more general
features of comprehensiveness, on their theoretical
integrity, and on their semiotic and conceptual quali
ties. He recognizes to a certain extent the develop
mental dimensions of Britton’s and Moffett’s models, but
links development mainly to a consideration of audience
and to the fact that the models suggest levels of
schooling at which different kinds of discourse might be
used. Kinneavy is one of the few who does not isolate
Britton’s and Moffett’s discourse theories from the
classroom— their source, motive, and context.
Kinneavy notes that Moffett’s theory is used in
elementary and secondary schools and Britton’s, in
secondary schools. What he misses here is the broader
f
intention of their work, although given the time of his
essay (1979), this is understandable. I refer to the
writing-across-the-curriculum movement, which in this
country is a fairly recent phenomenon, but which cor
responds to the way in which Moffett and Britton thought
about language. Moffett’s scheme of discourse in TUP is
intended for "English teaching," as the cover declares
(this description does not appear on the 1983 reissue);
but the kinds of writing that come from the scheme,
180
formally described in AV and SCLAR. are intended for ''a
writing program across the curriculum," the subtitle of
AV. Moffett has always argued that the assignments are
"just directions for producing common kinds of wTriting
actually practiced all the time outside of school. . . .
[They] combine the realities of inner functioning with
the realities of society" (AV 15). The "real world"
assignments he proposes in AV are exemplified in his
series, Active Voices, which contains essays written by-
students at different levels of schooling, from fourth
graders through college freshmen. Included are pieces
ranging from reportage, history, and cases to plays,
fiction, and poetry.
Britton set his research in DWA in this across-the-
curriculum frame, for the samples of student writing
examined there were taken from subject areas besides
English, including biology, art, chemistry, and "prac
tical subjects." However, the frame is not "writing"
but "language" across the curriculum and signals a
crucial difference between the British and the American
conceptions of what constitutes language study in
school. The second half of the Schools Council Project
(the research in DWA reports on only part of the study)
is written up in the book Writing and Learning Across
the Curriculum. 11-16. In the Foreword Britton states
181
that the "theme of the book is not ’the teaching of
English’ but the role of language in learning in all
parts of the curriculum" (9). Robert Parker, giving an
overview of the language across the curriculum movement
in England, notes that it began when a group of secon
dary teachers met to discuss the role of talk (not
writing) in the English classroom and soon teachers in
other subjects became involved in the discussion and
research. In the United States this language-across-
the-curriculum evolved into an emphasis on writing
which, Parker argues, has served to isolate the use of
language for writing from its other uses. This isola
tion is not consistent with either Britton’s philosophy
or Moffett’s. They look at language in the broader
spectrum of its use during all the school years, situa
ting the teaching of language arts throughout the educa
tional system, not just in writing courses in college.
The term scholar/practitioner draws together two
kinds of inquiry which North portrays in his study of
the field of composition. It implies a tension between
scholarly pursuits and practical ones, a tension which
North senses when he presents James Moffett as an "un
easy" exemplar of philosophical inquiry. North argues
that Moffett, in characterizing his own essays as "one
teacher’s efforts to theorize" (TUP xi), is "at pains to
182
maintain Practitioner status . . . and to restrict the
range of the inquiry" to the objectives of teaching
(101). North contends that Moffett’s purpose is however
clearly Philosophical: an argument in
response to the question "How should discourse
in English be taught in the schools to native
speakers?" that considers not what should be
done . . . but the preconditions of those
understandings w7 hich might allow us to decide
what to do. It is, in other words, an argu
ment founded on a set of premises about the
nature of discourse and development, designed
to be tested not against execution, but in
dialectic. (101)
North here seems to want to deny Moffett his ul
timately practical purpose (and Moffett’s philosophy
always returns him to praxis), a position which points
to the division that exists between the scholarly and
the practitioner functions in the way they have been
traditionally viewed by the field. North realizes,
however, that "inquiry and practice [are] bound together
in an academically untraditional way" (374). I would
argue further that Moffett and Britton have managed to
smoothly integrate the two roles. The separation of the
philosophical, or scholarly, from the practical strands
of Moffett’s work (and Britton’s as well) is generally
imposed on it by others, for Moffett and Britton see no
problem in a blending of the two. This distinction is
useful, however, as long as we recognize that it serves
to underline the attitudes which exist about the
relative value given to theory and to practice. Theory
and theory-making certainly have more cachet in the
field than does practice.
This division between the practical and the schol
arly highlights an anti-theoretical reaction on the part
of many practitioners, who look on research as something
which has "less and less to say that [they] find useful"
(Schon 10). Donald Schon is commenting here not about
composition, but about fields such as architectural
design and clinical practice in psychology, for the bias
against theory exists as well in other disciplines which
have a strong practical element to them. In composi
tion, Phelps speaks of this attitude in terms of two
"guilty secrets" which weigh on the conscience of the
field. The first is that practitioners "fear, resent,
and obstinately resist the claims of theory," and the
second is that theory, for all its promises for applica
tion, cannot actually dictate decisions about how it
might be applied ("Praxis as Wisdom" 1).
The tension also points to the view scholars often
have had of themselves as knowledge makers who pass
theoretical insight on (or, more accurately, down) to
practitioners. This is a one-way street: the lessons
and insights of practice rarely return to inform theory.
184
North and Phelps bring out the fact that practitioners,
who make up the majority of the composition community,
have been in a sense "disenfranchised" by scholars
because their knowledge, gained through practice, is
given less value than is Theory. Realizing this incon
gruity and the handmaiden role practitioners are often
asked to play in relation to research, some scholars and
researchers (e.g., Berthoff, Goswami, Graves) have
encouraged and helped practitioners to rejoin the com
position community in its scholarly inquiry as teacher-
researchers. This research has been given legitimacy in
the last few years by NCTE through financial grants to
elementary and secondary teachers who are carrying out
research projects in their classrooms and through the
summer program for teachers at the Breadloaf School. It
is also a topic of book-length studies (Goswami, Meyers,
Mohr and Maclean) and has become a recurring theme for
discussion in the journal Language Arts.
Taking this integration of the scholarly and prac
titioner roles a step further, Phelps calls not just for
teachers to be classroom researchers, but for the forma
tion of a "dialogic relation between classroom practices
and organized inquiry, such that they reciprocally
motivate, interpret, and limit one another” ("Toward a
Human Science" 208). This relationship overcomes the
185
problem of theory’s attempting to dominate teaching
practice, or conversely of practice’s attempting to
dominate theory, since both are practices in their own
right.
The tension further underscores the need for re
flective practice, something which Moffett and Britton
have brought to their own work and which they recognize
as a necessary part of good praxis. However, they can
be characterized more precisely as scholar/practitioners
because they both generate theory and engage in
practice. Moffett explains the significance of integra
ting these two activities in the opening chapter of
SCLAR, his textbook for teachers: theory has value
because "good theory" can serve as "a blueprint for
action. . . . It gives you a comprehensive and inte
grated perspective within which all problems can be
placed, a consistent way of thinking so that you can
think what to do as you go" (3). This ability to think
"as you go" sounds very much like what Schon terms
"reflection-in-action," a "problematic diagnosis in
which practitioners not only follow rules of inquiry but
also sometimes respond to surprising findings by inven
ting new rules, on the spot" (35).
For Moffett and Britton teaching has been a prac
tice of reflection-in-action, but their reflection has
186
led them further than it does most practitioners. They
not only became aware of the theories by which they
operated; they then tested their own theories against
more formal ones. These broader theories have in turn
served to inform the hypotheses they have arrived at
through praxis, those which I have discussed in Chapters
Three and Four. Britton, for example, views teachers as
theorizers and explains practitioner theory-making in
this way:
[Teachers] theorise from their own experience,
and build their own rationale and their own
body of convictions. For it is when they are
actively theorising from their own experience
that they can, selectively, take and use other
people’s experiences and other people’s theo
ries. ("English Teaching" 214)
Britton is no doubt describing here his own processes of
theorizing, which eliminate the usual tension between
the scholarly community and practitioner community over
the relative values of theory and practice. Each is
integral to the other.
Britton conceives of theorizing as a developmental
process, and as such he argues that formal theory cannot
simply be applied directly to practice. The discoveries
of research are matters which teachers know could have
bearing on what they do in the classroom, but there is a
developmental aspect to "bringing this kind of knowing
into relationship with this kind of doing":
18 7
For development is a two-way process: the
practitioner does not merely apply: he must
reformulate from the general starting points
supplied by the research and arrive at new
ends--new not only to him, but new in the
sense that they are not a part of the research
findings, being a discovery of a different
order. ("A Note" 150)
He has suggested here what Phelps also suggests, that
there must be a dialogue between scholars and practi
tioners. The process in Britton’s terms involves the
expert’s knowledge speaking to practitioners by answer
ing questions "they have already asked themselves," and
then the scholars’ reformulating their own work in light
of what they learn from practitioners. Of note here and
elsewhere in Britton’s writing is the idea that teachers
go through processes of growTth just as their students
do. This is also an argument made recently by Lester
and Mayher, who call for teachers to recognize that the
activity of teaching is continually subject to modifica
tion and improvement; one learns through teaching and
grows professionally as a result.
For James Moffett and James Britton it was their
practice which led them to theorize about the learning
processes taking place in the schools, more specifically
in English classrooms, and to seek information about
those processes primarily in studies of human develop
ment, but also in sociology, linguistics, education,
188
literature, and anthropology. They are not simply
practitioners who reflect on their praxis; they carry
that reflection a step further to scholarly inquiry.
This is a point North brings out more generally about
practitioners. He is one of the few scholars (Berthoff,
Emig, and Phelps are others) who is willing to suggest
that inquiry of a philosophical nature arises from
practice: an "inquirer sets out to answer a practical
question, but discovers how the question gets answered
depends on one’s presuppositions, and ends up consider
ing those— and thus philosophizing--instead" (North
101). I would change North’s "instead" to "in addition"
because often "philosophizing" of this kind returns to
inform praxis.
This reverberation in practice leads me back to my
earlier characterization of James Moffett and James
Britton as translators. I view this aspect of their
work as intimately bound up in both their scholarly and
practical inquiry which has led them to study other
fields. North senses this translator element in philo
sophical inquiry but applies the term "forager" rather
than translator to Moffett, although North attributes
this foraging strategy to the philosophical process
"mostly without disparagement." His description of a
forager fits fairly well what translators actually do:
189
the [forager] makes a foray into some field
outside Composition itself, works to reach
some degree of expertise in it, then returns
ready to work out an argument about the nature
of doing, learning, or teaching writing on the
basis of the foraged premises. (102)
Let me elaborate on North’s definition of forager
to draw out a finer picture of the translator in com
position. A translator can function in at least two
ways. The first involves a process of recreating one
scholarly community’s thinking for a different commu
nity. The translator turns to theory outside her own
field (as compositionists have turned to human develop
ment or linguistics, for example), reads widely in that
theory, and comes to know it well enough to be able to
speak to that community of inquiry in its own terms.
Then she presents the outside theory, or her own devel
oped from it, to scholars in her field. In effect, she
creates a new community within her own discipline which
can talk to one another about the new ideas. Finally,
but not necessarily, she can also translate these theo
ries for application by practitioners (who may or may
not be scholars). This is the process Moffett and
Britton carried out as they translated premises from
developmental psychology (and other fields) to English
studies. They have selected very rich theorists and have
drawn more intelligently than most on that richness,
190
although I would contend that the intradisciplinary
community in composition to whom they speak about devel
opment is still relatively small. Others doing this
sort of translation are Faigley and Witte and
de Beaugrande, who have gone to text linguistics, trans
lated and applied that theory to empirical studies in
composition, and suggested some practical applications
for the theory.
The other way in which a translator functions is to
translate composition scholarship into practice. Here
one thinks of scholars such as Winterowd, Lauer,
Bartholomae and others who have explained practice
through theory and also developed textbooks in line with
their theories about writing. In sum, there are dif
ferent kinds of translation and each differs depending'
on the source or sources the translator refers to, the
kind of use she makes of the source(s), the audience she
is addressing, and even the way in which the translator
textually handles the source.
Not all translating is equally successful.
Britton’s understanding of Piaget’s or Vygotsky’s com
plex meaning of the term stages is quite different from
the reductive meaning given to it by others. Moffett
grasps that egocentrism in Piaget’s terms is not in
herently bad; rather, it is something which all writers
(or learners in any endeavor) must overcome at various
times. Britton and Moffett did not just repeat what
their sources said; they reinterpreted its possibilities
for their own field to use as a theoretical construct
for its research, and they made developmental theory
more widely accessible by reinterpreting it as practice.
From this second process of translation their develop
mental ideas were taken up by teachers, although some
times those ideas were popularized and conceived of in
ways contradictory to their intent. Britton’s theore
tical work, for example, has been transmuted by some
practitioners into assignments in expressive, transfor
mational, and poetic writing, at times with little sense
of the developmental matrix which these terms fit into.
Moffett himself, as I noted earlier, recognizes that
teachers have often turned his discourse schema into a
year’s sequence of writing assignments when his purpose
was to deal with "the whole span of school years.”
In other instances their "translations" have been
credited with providing insights that have directed
thinking about language arts in significant ways. Janet
Emig cites Britton as the person who introduced George
Kelly’s theory of constructs to composition through LL
and made his work a part of its "tacit tradition.”
Richard Bailey, discussing the language policy set out
in the Bullock Report in Great Britain, notes that the
assumptions which underlie the recommendations made in
that policy statement derive from "among other sources,
the work of L. S. Vygotsky as interpreted by Britton,
particularly in Language and Learning" (26). Moffett’s
impact is most apparent in the practices which result
from his translation, practices such as writing work
shops and peer groups. Most recently Language Arts took
his concept of "student-centered language arts" as a
theme for one of its issues.
Let me give some specific examples of how trans
lators use sources when they bring knowledge from other
fields into composition. I want to return again to
James Britton, who is an especially fine and very skill
ful translator. In his essay "Spectator Role and the
Beginnings of Writing," Britton begins by distinguishing
between literary and nonliterary discourse, explaining
the differences through the work of stylistic theorists
Sebeok, Widdowson, and Jakobson; the philosopher Langer;
and literary theorists Rosenblatt and Harding, this last
theorist being one who has greatly influenced Britton’s
own theories about the roles readers and writers assume
in discourse. Britton translates these theories to
writing in order to further his own argument regarding
the importance of expressive writing in the spectator
193
role for fostering growth in composing abilities, and
draws in additional ideas from Sapir, Vygotsky, Bruner,
Polanyi, and Hymes. However, one does not come away
from the essay feeling that the ideas of these theorists
are used only to give credibility to Britton’s argument,
but that his translation of their ideas is part of a
process integral to his own theorizing. Over time one
reads in his work a continuing use of these sources and
others which are the means for him to deepen his ideas.
In this sense, he is probably more of a scholar than is
Moffett, although Moffett has a stronger feel for con
crete practice.
Moffett takes a somewhat different tack regarding
translation. He is less inclined to orchestrate sources
within his argument as Britton does. In fact, in a
headnote to his essay "Going with Growth" he contends
that while his "English comperes often say that I base
my work on Piaget, . . . I have always worked much more
intuitively than that" (62). He says that he had ar
rived at ideas about inner speech before reading Piaget
or Vygotsky, and that he cites these figures "to gain
credibility with a society that believes only authori
ties in white lab jackets." But this statement, which
appears contentious on the surface, seems less so when
viewed in terms of when it was written (1978), a time
194
when calls were being made for more empirical research
into composing, often conducted as if researchers were
carrying out controlled experiments in the sciences. It
also shows the ways in which his knowledge and concep
tion about growth and development have themselves grown
over time: his original intuitions led him to general
theories of growth, and he has internalized the original
sources he referred to in TUP♦ Thereafter he does not
generally feel the need to specify where his continuing
ideas on that topic come from. (Sources, of course,
help formalize one’s theories, and Moffett carefully
cites them when he is posing new ideas.) His statement
regarding his use of sources does not make my argument
about what a translator does invalid, for I believe
Moffett’s attitude here illustrates what happens to a
reflective practitioner like himself, the type Moffett
has described in SCLAR: his process of theorizing has
become such a "consistent way of thinking" that for him
it is also a consistent way of acting.
Janice Hays is another translator who has brought a
developmental view to composition, but she differs from
Moffett and Britton in that she is less eclectic and
less critical in her research. Her ideas about growth
stem from one source, William Perry’s study of intellec
tual and ethical development in the college years. A
195
network of researchers has formed, based on their mutual
interest in Perry’s work, and much of what she says
about development is a synthesis drawn from this group’s
studies. Her translation primarily draws on the Perry
scheme to interpret students’ growth in thinking through
an investigation of writing that examines their ability
to take an audience into consideration.
Ann Berthoff is a different sort of translator in
that she believes that teachers must be philosophers,
and she therefore draws from philosophical sources to
put together philosophy and pedagogy for the "making of
meaning." She is most influenced by I. A. Richards, but
she is an eclectic reader, whose sources also include,
among others, Langer, Peirce, Kenneth Burke, Vygotsky,
Geertz, and Freire. She often does not translate so
much as present excerpts from these and other writers
with brief notes on her reasons for putting them to
gether as she has. In her book Reclaiming the Imagina
tion she says that she is attempting to "demystify the
practice of philosophy" and, through the readings she
has selected, to guide the reader in that practice. But
much like Moffett, her purpose is ultimately to put
theory and practice together (they both need one
another, she says) to make "our classrooms real philo
sophic laboratories" ("Preface" n.pg.)
196
In this work I have not attempted a full portrait
of James Moffett and James Britton. Their work encom
passes more topics and is much richer than would be
possible to bring out here. For example, I have only-
noted that their discourse theories say a great deal
about teaching and learning literature, because I
limited my discussion of those theories to their rela
tion to writing, and skimmed over their relation to
reading. I have chosen to emphasize the developmental
implications of their discourse theories for composition
in order to reveal them as scholar/practitioners and
translators in that area of language arts. I have
presented them as emblematic figures in that they enrich
the field’s view of these roles: they have found ways
to mediate between theory and practice. They are not,
however, valued as developmentalists, and that dimension
of their work deserves more attention.
Their work provides a point of departure for ex
amining the work of others like them, such as Janet
Emig, Ann Berthoff, and James Kinneavy. These figures
have had an impact on scholarship and praxis and deserve
to be studied as well for their contributions. The work
of Moffett and Britton, and of these other scholars,
came about in response to a particular historical
197
context in the field, which needs to be understood more
clearly than it is now. The last comprehensive history
of language arts, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching
of English, covers the period only to about 1970, and
much has happened since then. The role of the scholar/
practitioner set in an historical framework deserves
attention, as does the translator role whose importance
is now being recognized (Phelps, "Toward a Human
Science"; Tirrell and Phelps, in progress). Hermeneu
tical criticism may offer a way to discover fuller
possibilities of this work for the field.
I have only touched on some of the contrasts be
tween British and American thinking about language
studies. Very little research has been done in this
area, although every few years scholars from English-
speaking countries come together at international con
ferences to share ideas. The field as a whole does not
know about or recognize much of this work, although
proceedings from it are published and occasionally
articles appear in Language Arts by scholar/practi
tioners from other English-speaking countries. Parker’s
work on language across the curriculum indicates a
beginning for other historical and ethnographic studies
with a more global perspective on English studies.
198
The importance of reflective practice and its
ramifications for making theory and practice more com
patible is a fruitful area for study. Moffett and
Britton are first practitioners and then scholars, and
they insist that teachers become aware of the theory
from which they carry out their practice. Their ideas,
in conjunction with those of others who are considering
changes in the way that teachers are trained, can have a
powerful impact on teaching from kindergarten through
college.
Finally, I believe that the work of James Moffett
and James Britton indicates that more research remains
to be done to bring a broader developmental synthesis to
language studies. A great deal of innovative rethinking
and many new ideas are currently coming out of develop
mental psychology, which I have only been able to
roughly gloss here. Other translators need to become
familiar with it and examine its possibilities for
enriching composition theory. The developmental work of
Moffett and Britton and its interpretation shows some of
the limits of practitioner thinking, but it also indi
cates that there is value in joining with practitioners
in research.
With the search for better ways of carrying out
composition research and praxis that do away with
199
unproductive dichotomies, it is worthwhile to look again
at the value of some scholarly work for what it can tell
the field now. That James Moffett and James Britton
have for many years influenced theory-making and praxis
in composition points to the enduring quality of their
work, which has helped give shape to an emerging field
and should continue to assist that field in realizing
its possibilities.
200
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