Intertextuality as a conceptual tool for the teaching of writing: Designing professional development that will transfer

Abstract

Professional development of teachers in writing should lead to quality writing programmes in schools, resulting in accelerated student progress across a variety of communicative purposes for writing (genre). However, interventions commonly assess students in a single writing purpose at the beginning and end of each year. The aim of this study was to design professional development that would raise achievement for students across a variety of purposes for writing. To this end, two differing professional development interventions were designed in which teachers explicitly investigated relationships among written texts using theories of intertextuality. This mixed-methods intervention study employed a quasi-experimental design, which collected student achievement and classroom observation data to assess the relative effectiveness of the two professional development programmes in writing instruction in six schools in Auckland. While both programmes focused on the intertextual nature of writing, the first looked at a specific purpose for writing; the second offered a broader writing focus by comparing and contrasting texts written for differing purposes. To illuminate how teachers’ participation in each of these professional development types influenced classroom programmes, two teachers from each were observed in depth as case-studies. Student assessment information was analysed from schools in each of the groups to ascertain the relative effectiveness of each professional development type in ii accelerating student achievement in a targeted writing purpose and also in other purposes for writing. Repeated measures ANOVAs show differences in the achievement gains between the students of the two groups, not in the targeted purpose but in other purposes for writing. Classroom observations and case study results indicated that teachers in both professional development groups used intertextual links as a basis for their classroom programmes in similar ways. Thus, it is hypothesised that the difference in student achievement patterns between the two groups may be the result of differences in the depth of teacher learning provided by the professional development.