TY - JOUR AB - The aim of the present study is to bring new momentum into research on students’ understanding of academic writing. Drawing on the idea that metaphors give insight into implicit conceptions of abstract entities and processes, we developed a detailed and differentiated set of conceptual metaphors that can be used to study student ideas about writing in research, teaching, and interventions. A large sample of undergraduates produced their everyday understanding of writing in short texts beginning with a self-generated metaphor. Based on theories from cognitive linguistics, the conceptual metaphors in their texts were analyzed in terms of their action quality (transitivity) and spatiality (spatial primitives). The undergraduates’ conceptualizations were very heterogeneous. Most metaphors depart strongly from scientific approaches to academic writing within cognitive psychology and sociocultural theory. Roughly half of the metaphors could be collated to one of four metaphor systems. Depending on the desired degree of abstraction or concreteness, conceptual metaphors or metaphor systems can be employed in further studies to illuminate thinking about writing. AU - Scharlau, Ingrid AU - Karsten, Andrea AU - Rohlfing, Katharina ID - 28696 IS - 3 JF - Journal of Writing Research KW - metaphor analysis KW - academic writing KW - transitivity KW - spatial primitives SN - 2030-1006 TI - Building, emptying out, or dreaming? Action structures and space in undergraduates’ metaphors of academic writing VL - 12 ER - TY - JOUR AU - Nguyen Quang Do, Lisa AU - Krüger, Stefan AU - Hill, Patrick AU - Ali, Karim AU - Bodden, Eric ID - 20543 JF - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering KW - Debugging KW - Static analysis KW - Tools KW - Computer bugs KW - Standards KW - Writing KW - Encoding KW - Testing and Debugging KW - Program analysis KW - Development tools KW - Integrated environments KW - Graphical environments KW - Usability testing SN - 2326-3881 TI - Debugging Static Analysis ER - TY - JOUR AB - Many problems student writers are faced with can be understood as writer’s overload, the inability to tackle the high and complex concurrent demands of the writing process. In the present paper, we spell out multiple notions of writer’s overload from the perspectives of cognitive, educational, and sociocultural psychology in order to provide faculty from all disciplines with some background to understand their students’ writing problems. Starting from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning approach, our aim is to provide teachers with ideas on how they can change crucial aspects of learning activities in their classes and of their teaching practice and study how this affects learning and writing in order to advance the teaching of writing. AU - Scharlau, Ingrid AU - Karsten, Andrea AU - Klingsieck, Katrin B. ID - 6098 JF - die hochschullehre KW - SoTL KW - student writing KW - writer's overload KW - writing block SN - 2199-8825 TI - Writer’s overload: A multifaceted concept and its clarification. VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR AB - This article presents analyses of excerpts from a study on writing conducted in a dialogical perspective. The study’s material was collected by the auto-confrontation method: writers were videotaped during their work and afterwards confronted with their writing activities. Microanalysis of the material attends to how inner dialogues during writing are “refracted” (Voloshinov) in auto-confrontation. Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope (time-and-space) as the main tool of analysis helps to discern the changing contexts and position constellations utterances are valid for. It thus sheds light on the positioning movements performed by the writing selves through language. The analyses show various utterance movements traversing the chronotopes involved, ranging from refractions of movements between the writers’ inner dialogues and their texts to retrospective imperatives with a developmental potential. This “dialogical volume” of speech activity presenting itself in writing can contribute to our understanding of the interplay of language and the self. AU - Karsten, Andrea ID - 32165 IS - 4 JF - Theory & Psychology KW - auto-confrontation KW - chronotope KW - inner dialogue KW - microanalysis KW - positioning KW - writing SN - 0959-3543 TI - Writing: Movements of the self VL - 24 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Based on a cultural-historical and dialogical conceptualization of thinking and speech as formulated in Soviet psychology and linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s, this article seeks to reflect upon a congruent way of investigating writing as a cognitive and communicative activity. What has to be taken into account when developing a methodology for writing research from a cultural-historical and dialogical perspective? Firstly, writing is not separated from other forms of speech activity like interpersonal and intrapersonal speech. Thus, inner dialogue and the addressed character of writing become crucial notions to be methodologically considered. Secondly, contrary to current writing research traditions such as literacy studies and studies of the writing process in cognitive psychology, both individual writing processes and socio-cultural writing practices as well as their relationship must be considered. These reflections lead towards the conclusion that writing is not fully accessible to external observation or to introspection. In consequence, a suggestion of a methodological approach is given, inspired by the activity theoretically informed method of auto-confrontation. The proposed method consists of two phases: a) videotaping of a writing episode and b) co-analysis of the videotaped writing episode in dialogue between writer and researcher. The second phase transfers the writing activity into a new context where understanding it becomes possible. The co-analysis makes involved positions audible: positions of the writer and of the researcher, of real and imagined readers as well as intersubjective and community-related positions. Finally, implications of the proposed research setting are discussed and evaluated with regard to the theoretical grounding. An instance of the methodology to be sketched in this article was developed in the context of the author’s dissertation project in preparation at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany with the working title «Writing processes and writing practices. A conceptualization from a dialogical perspective». The project is funded by scholarships of Universität Bayern e.V. and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. AU - Karsten, Andrea ID - 32168 JF - Cultural-Historical Psychology KW - writing KW - writing research KW - dialogue KW - dialogical perspective KW - auto-confrontation TI - Towards Cultural-Historical and Dialogical Writing Research – Some Methodological Considerations VL - 4 ER -