The textual composition tasks as a window to the writing teaching in primary school

Abstract

We explore which aspects teachers prioritize in the textual composition tasks. A specially designed questionnaire was answered by 27 teachers from the Argentinian North Patagonia. Teachers’ descriptions of such tasks were coded according to the cognitive processes, attitudes and characteristics of the text written by the students. Multivariate statistics techniques were applied to study associations among the cognitive processes, attitudes and text’s characteristics that we were able to identify when we were informed by the teachers of the purposes, the tasks and their evaluation. Results show two main families of tasks: textual composition as a means to influence students’ knowledge and attitudes or restricted to textualizing canonical knowledge about written language. The combinations of the tasks proposed by each teacher enables us to infer four profiles of conceptions concerning the teaching of composition. The interpretive and inter-constructive profiles encompass the vast majority of teachers.