Content area
Full Text
An experimental study shows that integrating instruction in writing strategies with support for self-regulation strategies in basic writing classes results in significant gains in both the quality of student writing and in student motivation.
I did not get confused or say the same things over again because it [the graphic organizer] allowed me to organize my thoughts, ideas, and points. Before, I would know what I wanted to say, but it would always go off into another topic. It was also overwhelming without the graphic organizer because I had so many ideas.
William [emphasis added]
William is a first-year college student who attended a developmental writing class at a state university in the fall of 2012. In this briefjournal reflection, he describes the challenges that he faced when putting together an essay for class. It is a journal entry that could have been written by many of the basic writing students in our classes, pointing to the all-too-common situation in which the affective experience of writing-here, being confused or overwhelmed-directly affects the student's ability to engage in the writing process.
The fact that affective factors for basic writers often present as a lack of control over the writing process is well documented, as shown in these examples (all emphases added):
> The basic writer "is aware that he leaves a trail of errors behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while he is writing. But he doesn't know what to do about it" (Shaughnessy 7)
> Basic writing students are "pressed by their language-learning faculties to increase the degree of predictability and efficiency in their use of language. This is less a choice they make than an urge they have to move across the territory of language as if they had a map and not as if they were being forced to make their way across a mine field." (Shaughnessy 10)
> Students are "not so much trapped in a private language as [...] shut out from one of the privileged languages of private life, a language [they are] aware of but cannot control. " (Bartholomae 609)
> "The problem with [basic writers'] thinking isn't that they aren't thinking at the highest levels but that they have trouble controlling...