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Lexical analysis with concordancing software offers faculty a simple tool for analyzing reflective texts in first-year composition courses.
A central component of the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) approach to composition instruction involves systematic reflection throughout the first-year writing course, often culminating in a final piece in which students theorize writing and articulate "key terms, writing processes and practices, and their identity as a writer" (Yancey et al. 58). The reflective practices in a TFT course-along with the writing theories students generate-support students as they continue to write across curricula and courses. But student reflections can also support instructors in the practice of pedagogical reflection; as they review student reflections, faculty can identify patterns, points of confusion, unidentified assumptions, and trends in response to key course concepts. Faculty observations may thus contribute to ongoing classroom research or provide a postscript to the work of the semester. In the process of reviewing students' reflective work, instructors may also follow advice from Nancy DeJoy, who argues, "Exploring student assumptions about the concepts we use, and consider using, to ground our introductory writing courses is something we must do if we want to open new spaces for student subjectivity" (15).
When instructors explore a semester's worth of student reflections and apply insights to pedagogy, they are "responding forward," a phrase that Kathleen Blake Yancey used as the title of her closing chapter in the second volume of the edited collection What Is "College-Level" Writing? Yancey's chapter was designed to identify themes and "points of agreement" from the preceding chapters and to highlight "pragmatic advice for moving forward" (300). Yancey opens her chapter with a review of the processes and tools she employed to review the other sixteen chapters in the volume. To identify key themes and connect them with broader research in composition studies,Yancey first created a word cloud, or wordle, which shows key terms from the entire text in a visual format; the most frequent words appear in a larger font in the word cloud (301). She turned next to the search function in Microsoft Word to find occurrences of specific words (such as process, genre, digital, and rhetorical) across the chapters so that she could examine each in context. Based on these two analyses, she "responded forward"...