To produce or reproduce text in essays? : A studie of five high school boys’ work with the writing process in a test situation.

Abstract Author: Annelie Johansson Year: Spring 2006 Swedish title: Att producera eller reproducera text? En studie av fem gymnasiepojkars arbete med skrivprocessen i en provsituation. English title: To produce or reproduce text in essays. A studie of five high school boys’ work with the writing process in a test situation. City, university: Växjö, Växjö Universitet, institutionen för humaniora [Växjö, Växjö University, School of the Humanities] Pages: 53 Content: The major aim of this study is to investigate how five male high school students in the ages seventeen to eighteen produce or reproduce in their texts during an essay examination. Focus is also put on the five students’ writing processes in a classroom situated writing task and on their own comments to their writing. The main theory used to investigating this problem combines socio-cultural theories and a cognitive approach on writing in the sense that the individual’s thoughts and activities are socially and culturally situated. The methods used to collect information are observations and qualitative individual interviews with five boys from the same class studying the social science program combined with sports at a high school in the south of Sweden. The method used to interpret the boys’ written texts is textual analysis of their writing processes and of behaviour while creating the texts. The main result is that the two boys who have higher grades plan their texts more carefully than the two boys with lower grades. The boy who got the highest grade on his task had experience from writing reviews, made a written mind map, relied on other texts to illustrate his opinions and did not follow the outline of the questions. The boys with lower or middle high grades on this specific writing task did not make a written text plan. Instead their planning prior to their writing of the text were mental or of an outline-and-develope-type. Two of the boys didn’t explicitly use other texts in their essays and their texts also had a more narrative than analytical approach and didn’t have any reproduction in them either. Typical for four of the boys are that they followed the outline made by the questions put in the task and that they didn’t revise their text in a broad meaning. The three boys who meet or try to meet the task demands also revise their texts at different stages of the writing process. Interesting is that the two boys who revise most in their texts also are the boys who reproduce the most and who lack the experience of this specific type of writing. The boys who reproduce, do it in a way called recreating which means that they use parts of other texts and change the words to synonyms or paraphrase them. The boys think that they are producing original texts when they use this tactic, but they are in fact reproducing. Swedish keywords: skrivprocess, avskrift, produktion, reproduction, gymnasieelever, textkomposition. English keywords: writing process, plagiarism, production, reproduction, high school students, writing compositio