Explaining and improving revision skills in writers

[Clara Romero]

S .I.G. Writing Conference 2006
Proposal for a symposium entitled 
“Explaining and improving revision skills in writers”
organised by 
Lucile Chanquoy (University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France) and
Isabelle Negro (University of Antilles-Guyane, France)

   
  Aim of the symposium:
              Revision is conceived as one of the main writing process. It is generally described by three sub-processes: 1) reading in order to define eventual problems; 2) developing a strategy; 3) transforming the text, if necessary. These activities are particularly high resource consuming (Kellogg, 1996) and experience in writing is not sufficient to increase revising skills. Recently, research has progressed in the conception of the revision process (for a review, see Hayes, 2004).  First, revision may intervene at any time of the writing process, from the text to be written to the final draft (external vs. internal text). Second, if most of the models limit the revision process to the discovery of a dissonance between the desired text and actual written text, (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983), revision may occur when the writer finds new links, new ideas for expressing what he or she has previously thought or written (Hayes, 2004). The critical skills used during the scanning of external or internal text are thus essential. Hayes (2004) noticed that “current methods for teaching text evaluation skills are unsuccessful” (p. 17). What has currently been offered for teaching beginning writers to detect an error (spelling errors or deep incoherence) in the text? How is it possible to help beginning or experienced writers to discover opportunities for improving their text? Which processes are involved during revision? How are evaluation, detection and correction skills activated? Since writers are unable to modify from 25% (Hacker, Plum, Butterfield, Quathamer & Heineken, 1994) to 42% (Bartlett, 1982) of the errors that they have already detected, how is it possible to improve revision? Which methods are used to analyse revision on the text being created and on the already transcribed text? 
  The purpose of this symposium is to investigate how revision research may affect our understanding of the whole writing process, and help education professionals to teach revision skills. 
  If you would like to submit a proposal for this symposium, please send an e-mail with your title, abstract (350 words) and address (academic + e-mail) to Lucile Chanquoy (lucile.chanquoy at unice.fr) before December, 31st (as the final deadline is January, 15th 2006). Thank you very much!


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