THE TEXT UNDER CONSTRUCTION: THE DECISIONS AND ARGUMENTS OF WRITERS AS THE TEXT’S FIRST READERS IN A COLLABORATIVE WRITING TASK

The general purpose of the study presented in this paper was to describe the writing process considering the decisions that the writers make during the activity of producing a text. A key factor considered by expert writers is the perspective of the intended readers: namely particular prior knowledge, specific spatiotemporal situation, sociocultural status, general reading goals, and even possible attitudes or reactions in face of particular content and wordings. These audience awareness factors influence text production and emerge during the writing process, guiding language choices and revision. The specific objectives of the present text aim to know to what extent young writers also mobilise the readers’ perspective while writing and what kind of aspects associated to audience awareness emerge, in the course of writing development. In order to grasp the writers’ decisions and among those that can be associated to the readers’ perspective, the present study adopted an internal approach to the writing process. We analysed the transcripts of verbal interaction exchanged between writers (96 participants from 2nd to 8th grade) during the collaborative writing of a text. The analysis focussed on the arguments that the participants presented, when defending, supporting, accepting or rejecting a particular proposal, which can be related to the structure, content or language aspects. After identifying the language segments that correspond to arguments we searched for those that can be associated to the readers’ perspective. The results showed that argumentation about proposals is a relevant dimension during collaborative writing. There is an increasing progression according to school level, with significant contrasts between the lowest and the highest grades, represented in the study. Moreover, when exchanging arguments concerning the text that they must construct collaboratively in a negotiated manner, the participants at these school levels do consider many issues associated to content and language decisions that can be related to the reader’s perspective. Among those we find the arguments related to the consequences for reading of formal aspects, mainly lack of clarity concerning handwriting, the amount of information or the level of explicitness that the text should afford, and stylistic choices, revealing an investment in the text, which will be out before the reader. Some occurrences of these arguments are accompanied by explicit references to the reader’s perspective. However, the occurrences of these types of arguments are larger and emerge during the interaction even if an external intended reader is not directly referred to. This suggests the possibility of exploring and valuing the double facet of the writer during the writing process, acting as the text author, but also as the text first reader. Collaborative writing promotes the mobilisation of this double facet.