Original article: LINK
By Minkyung Cho, Young-Suk Grace Kim & Carol B. Olson
This research paper discusses how helping students consider their readers’ perspectives can improve the quality of their writing.
- Writing and thinking are linked: Writing isn’t just about putting words on paper – it involves thinking and reasoning. As we write, our thoughts and reasoning processes play a big role [LINK].
- Perspective taking: In the context of writing, this is the ability to consider your readers’ potential thoughts and feelings [LINK].
- Students and their writing: As students become more experienced with writing, their ability to consider different perspectives becomes more important. This allows them to focus on more complex thinking and reasoning in their writing.
- Study focus: This study looked at how well students aged 12-13 considered different perspectives in their writing. It examined whether their ability varied based on factors like gender or whether the students were English language learners. The study also explored how this skill affected the overall quality of students’ writing.
Perspective taking in writing
Perspective-taking plays a crucial role in effective writing, particularly when writers are dealing with source materials [LINK and LINK] or addressing an identified audience [LINK]. Writing is a way of communicating and interacting with others through text. It involves a back-and-forth process where writer and reader try to connect with each other in some way [LINK]. Perspective taking is the ability to understand and consider different viewpoints, which is essential for good writing [LINK]. This is because it helps writers achieve several important goals:
- Understanding the writing project: Writers need to grasp the purpose of what they’re writing to communicate effectively [LINK].
- Considering the audience: Writers must think about who will read their writing, what their readers want/need, and how to adjust their language and content to meet their wants/needs. Understanding their audiences’ perspective is what often separates beginner writers from more experienced ones [LINK].
- Interpreting source materials: When using sources, writers consider not only their own perspective but also the viewpoints of the authors of the source material [LINK and LINK]. This helps them use the material effectively and assess its credibility.
Why does this matter? Well, perspective-taking is important for making writing clear, coherent, and meaningful. It’s a skill that applies to both writing and reading, as it helps writers evaluate and integrate source materials into their manuscripts and in a way that supports their own ideas. In essence, being able to see things from multiple perspectives is key to successfully communicating ideas.
Importance of perspective taking in children’s writing
Perspective-taking is important for young writers for a number of reasons. These include:
- Developing complex thinking: As children become more experienced writers, they move from just telling what they know to transforming and crafting their knowledge in more sophisticated ways [LINK].
- The National Curriculum, the STA writing statements and perspective taking: The National Curriculum and STA writing statements emphasise the importance of perspective-taking in writing. For example, when writing narratives, students need to consider the viewpoints of different characters [LINK]. In argumentative and expository writing, they should acknowledge opposing viewpoints and use evidence to support their claims [LINK, LINK and LINK]. They must also show an ability to write successfully for a variety of audiences.
How perspective taking has been studied
- Theory of mind: This is the ability to understand others’ thoughts and emotions, which is linked to both writing quality and reading comprehension [LINK]. Research shows that students who are better at inferring others’ thoughts tend to write better.
- Audience awareness: This involves understanding the needs of their readers and adjusting their writing accordingly. Skilled young writers think about what their audience knows and needs, which helps them communicate more effectively [LINK].
- Subordination: Studies show that as students become more experienced writers, their writing becomes more sophisticated. For instance, when writing discussion texts, students who use words like ‘although’ and ‘however’ to show contrast tend to demonstrate a higher level of understanding and reasoning [LINK].
In summary, perspective-taking is vital for young writers to communicate complex ideas effectively. However, many face challenges in mastering this skill, which is linked to both their writing abilities and their overall cognitive development.
Findings and implications
- Demographic differences: The study found that girls generally did better at including different perspectives in their writing than boys. However, English language learners were not far behind their English-only peers when it came to representing multiple perspectives.
- Writing quality: Writing that considered multiple perspectives, especially those that considered both the writer’s own view and others’ views, were generally rated as higher quality. This suggests that being able to see and express different viewpoints is key to good writing.
- Own-side vs. dual perspective: Most students tended to focus more on their own perspective rather than incorporating others’ views, which is a common challenge for young writers. However, the study found that including dual perspectives – showing both the writer’s view and the views of others – was strongly linked to better writing quality [LINK].
- Plan quality nonfiction class writing projects: Teachers should provide class writing projects which invite students to discuss and write about various viewpoints. For example: science report [LINK], historical account [LINK], discussion [LINK], community activism [LINK], advocacy journalism [LINK] and social & political poetry [LINK]. Such projects encourage pupils to compose source-based analytical writing. During these projects, teachers can guide students to think about and discuss multiple perspectives.
- Publishing goals: Teachers might discuss the publishing goal for class writing projects [LINK] and how to address the needs of their future audience by reading as writers and establishing success criteria together [LINK].