The (non)effect of Joint Construction in a genre-based approach to teaching writing

Abstract

This quasi-experimental intervention study examines the effect of genre-based instructional practices on 90 primary students’ narrative writing achievements and is a result of six teachers’ action to meet the educational goals of the Swedish national curriculum. Specifically, the authors examine the effects of Joint Construction, the phase in the genre pedagogical model of the Sydney School known as the Teaching and Learning Cycle, in which teachers and students work together to co-construct texts. Joint Construction has been put forward as the most powerful part of the Teaching and Learning Cycle. The authors challenge this argument, presenting findings that are inconsistent with this widely held belief. Using a pretest-posttest control group design, the study shows that the Joint Construction stage did not significantly improve the quality of students’ narrative writing or increase the text length of their writings.

Keywords:

• Genre-based approach
• joint construction
• narrative text
• primary school
• writing

Notes

1 Another obvious example is modernist literature, which consciously broke with inherited literary norms, such as a traditional plot and instead followed a character’s inner train of thoughts and subjective impressions, using what came to be called the stream-of-consciousness technique.

2 “The story face strategy” (Staal, 2000) is a strategy for students’ retelling of a narrative where a face is used. The eyes represent the structure of the narrative (with one eye standing for time and place and the other for main characters), the nose represents the problem, and the mouth represents the number of events. The students are also instructed to reflect on whether the mouth should be happy or sad and to motivate their choice.

Additional information

Funding

Literacy research at Umeå University.