Putting meaning into words: Non-discursive meaning-making processes in students\u27 writing about personal experience

This dissertation provides a rationale for the need to study students\u27 meaning-making processes in order for composition instructors to understand better what students are actually thinking and doing when they write papers based on their personal experiences. Especially in light of current theory about teaching writing as a process of coming to own one\u27s texts and discovering one\u27s intentions, teachers need to know more about the often hidden thought processes which students use to make sense of and to explain their incompletely verbalized or partly unarticulated experiences. This project focuses on the particular stage of meaning-making which involves the transformation from non-discursive meaning (meaning in the language of unarticulated, felt symbols) to discursive meaning (meaning in the language of spoken and written texts). Susanne Langer\u27s and Mark Johnson\u27s theories of embodied symbolic transformation and a description of students\u27 own accounts of their meaning-making processes provide two ways to begin understanding the nature of the transformation from non-discursive meaning to discursive meaning. Emotion and experience (feeling and action) are the most important ways students themselves describe how they structure and translate their understanding into written text, but students also use the full range of cognitive forms such as categories and metaphors. Students work within and against these non-discursive meaning-making processes as they write observation journals and essays for a composition class. The implications for classroom research and pedagogy, if the transformation of non-discursive meaning-making is to be considered an important part of the writing process for students, include a less simplistic view of the relationship between writing and thinking, which can lead composition instructors to see writing and thinking as two fundamentally symbolic, yet profoundly different, processes