WRITE CENTER
  • Home
  • Webinars
    • Access Webinar Replays
  • UCLAIMS
    • Research Basis
    • Exploratory Research
    • Research Measures
    • Digital Tools
    • Field Trial Materials for Participating Teachers
  • Blog
  • Research
    • Research Categories
    • WRITE Research
    • WRITE Presentations
  • About
    • Meet the Team >
      • Leadership Team
      • Advisory Board
    • Newsroom
    • Contact Us

Does Perspective Taking Matter in Writing? How? So What?

6/9/2021

 
Guest Blogger: Minkyung Cho
Writing is an interactive social act and a form of communication that involves negotiation between readers and writers. According to Direct and Indirect Effects model of Writing (Kim, 2020), perspective taking, one’s knowledge of their own mental and emotional states and inference about others’ mental and emotional states, is one of the skills that contributes to the meaning-making or negotiation process in multiple ways. Perspective taking is hypothesized to be important to establishing depth and coherence in writing via understanding the goal of the writing task, considering the needs of the audience, and developing a deep understanding of the source texts (Cho et al., 2021). In fact, the skills to express such complex thinking in writing becomes more crucial in the developmental stage of early adolescence, as transcription skills (e.g., spelling, handwriting) become increasingly automatized, allowing for one’s mental resources (e.g., working memory and attention) to be readily available for higher order thinking. Thus, for the majority of adolescents who developed fluent transcription skills, their cognitive resources become more accessible for complex reasoning processes such as perspective taking.
Picture
Does perspective taking matter in text-based analytical writing, a common genre taught in secondary schools? 
In our study based on data from 195 seventh grade students’ text-based analytical essays, we examined how various perspectives were portrayed in their writing. We found differences in the extent of perspectives taken in writing by gender and English Language Learner (ELL) status. We observed that female students were more likely to incorporate different agents’ perspectives than their male counterparts. We also found that ELLs had comparable performance with their non-ELL counterparts in writing from others’ perspectives, although ELLs showed fewer instances of writing from their own points of view. Most importantly, we confirmed that, even after accounting for demographic differences in perspective taking, an essay written from multiple perspectives was more likely to be rated as high-quality writing than those written solely from the writer’s own-side perspective. 
What does it mean to take no perspective, own-side perspective, dual perspective, and integrative perspective in a text-based analytical essay? 
Based on prior literature, perspective taking can be seen as existing on a spectrum from no perspective to integrative perspective. We determined students’ perspective taking in text-based analytical writing by 1) breaking down an essay into T-units and 2) identifying whose mental and emotional states each T-unit was presenting. Here are the criteria we used for coding the T-units:
No perspective
  • T-units were coded as “no perspective” if they did not portray a perspective. 
  • Many of these units included repetitive, linguistically uninterpretable, substantively irrelevant, or descriptive statements (e.g., direct quotes or paraphrases from the source text).

​Own-side perspective
  • T-units were coded as students’ own-side perspective if they portrayed the writer’s personal perspective. 
  • For example, “In my opinion, the author wrote this article to tell people to be grateful for all we have.” was considered a student writer’s own-side perspective. 

Dual perspective
  • T-units were coded as dual perspective if they exhibited a perspective beyond the student writer’s own, including that of the source-text author’s or character’s or readers’ perspective. 
  • Examples of dual perspective include T-units portraying the perspective of the author of the article by stating, “The author wants you to keep in mind how Haiti gets up and keeps living,” or those showing the perspective of the characters in the article that is not the student writer’s or the author of the source-text (e.g., “He [the character in the story] then realized if he kept passing the ring he would die.”). T-units that situated the readers or audience in a different context such as “Imagine yourself as a homeless person, no help and no hope, barely survive 7.0 magnitude earthquake” were also coded as dual perspective. 

Integrative perspective
  • Integrative perspective would be when a T-unit accounts for two or more agents’ points of view and the writer chooses one perspective over the other or offers a third option by providing a rationale.
  • We did not find any T-units with integrative perspectives in our sample of essays. ​
After identifying each T-unit in their level of perspective taking, a total perspective taking score was calculated. Akin to a widely used approach in a short constructed response where different weights are assigned as a function of precision of the response (e.g., 0 for an incorrect response, 1 for a partially correct response, and 2 for a precise response), we generated the perspective taking score by adding the number of own-side perspectives multiplied by 1, the number of dual perspectives multiplied by 2, and the number of integrative perspectives multiplied by 3. This way, the score reflected a greater weight for the higher or more complex perspectives and was used as an index to represent students’ perspective taking skills in writing. 
Picture
What are some instructional practices that are helpful for enhancing perspective taking in writing? 
Students in secondary schools may benefit from instructional attention paid to perspective taking in writing. Teachers can provide opportunities more explicitly and systematically for students to understand multiple perspectives and incorporate them into writing. For example, when teaching text-based analytical writing (read more on reading and writing connections), teachers can engage in quality discussion on different agents’ mental and emotional states (e.g., perspective of the author of the source material, perspectives of the different characters) represented in the source text. Teachers can also explicitly discuss the goals of a specific writing task (Nussbaum et al., 2005) and the needs of the intended audience (Midgette et al., 2007) and associated strategies to address them, such as providing background knowledge, defining key concepts or terms. Read more on Strategies for writing and Strategy Instruction in the WRITE Center blogs. 
Interested in the behind-the-scenes theory? Here are the three proposed mechanisms through which perspective taking is portrayed in writing. 

How are you supporting students’ growth in perspective taking in your writing instruction? 

Theory of Mind
Perspective taking draws on the concept of Theory of mind, which is the ability to understand others’ mental and emotional states and predict their behaviors. Theory of Mind has been shown to be related to reading comprehension and written composition (Wollman-Bonilla, 2001). 
Epistemological Understanding
Perspective taking is associated with one’s development of epistemological understanding (read more on Three Levels of Reasoning). This developmental progression reflects how people consider their own as well as others’ perspectives when constructing their knowledge base. The three developmental stages served as the basis for the three levels of perspective taking we identified. 
Audience Awareness
Perspective taking is also related to how writers consider their audience in their writing. Experienced writers set goals and continually evaluate their writing to communicate better with their anticipated readers. In a way, audience awareness is one form of perspective taking, as writers adjust their language and content according to their expectations of their readers.

Picture
​Minkyung Cho is a Ph.D. student specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement (TLEI). She received her bachelor’s degree in English Education from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea and earned her master’s degree in Education specializing in TESOL from University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Before coming to UC Irvine, Minkyung was an English teacher at foreign language high school and middle school in Daegu, South Korea

References

​
Cho, M., Kim, Y. S. G., & Olson, C. B. (2021). Does perspective taking matter for writing? Perspective taking in source-based analytical writing of secondary students. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1-21. 

Kim, Y. S. G. (2020). Structural relations of language and cognitive skills, and topic knowledge to written composition: A test of the direct and indirect effects model of writing. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(4), 910-932.

Midgette, E., Haria, P., & MacArthur, C. (2008). The effects of content and audience awareness goals for revision on the persuasive essays of fifth- and eighth-grade students. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21(1/2), 131–151.

Nussbaum, E. M., & Kardash, C. M. (2005). The effects of goal instructions and text on the generation of counterarguments during writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 157–169.

Wollman-Bonilla, J. E. (2001). Can first-grade writers demonstrate audience awareness? Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 184–201. 

Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here. ​
Collete link
9/8/2021 04:18:32 pm

This is interesting stuff to read. Fantasy is an essential fixing in living, it's a perspective on through some unacceptable finish of a telescope.


Comments are closed.

    Archives

    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019

    Categories

    All
    Academic Language
    Argumentative Writing
    Civic Literacy
    Culturally Responsive Literacy
    Disciplinary Literacy
    Key Practices
    Partner Resources
    Reading Instruction
    Research To Practice
    Strategy Instruction
    Tech Tools
    WRITE Center Resources
    Writing Instruction

WRITE Center:  Writing Research to Improve Teaching and Evaluation

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C190007 to University of California, Irvine. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
Picture
© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • Webinars
    • Access Webinar Replays
  • UCLAIMS
    • Research Basis
    • Exploratory Research
    • Research Measures
    • Digital Tools
    • Field Trial Materials for Participating Teachers
  • Blog
  • Research
    • Research Categories
    • WRITE Research
    • WRITE Presentations
  • About
    • Meet the Team >
      • Leadership Team
      • Advisory Board
    • Newsroom
    • Contact Us