ORDENAMIENTOS FISCALES

Example 5.2: Creating a revision analysis matrix (master spreadsheet) In the above example, revision 131 is extracted from JD1's dynamic text and entered into a 'Revision analysis matrix': The 1^st column of the matrix lists the revision number, the 2^nd column lists the T-unit where the revision took place, the 3^rd column contains the revision's content, the 4^th column the linguistic description (qualitative analysis), and so on. This matrix took the form of an excel spreadsheet, and was the basis from which revision data was quantified and further explored as part of an MS Excel Workbook entitled 'Revision Table (JD1)' for this particular dataset (cf. Appendix CD).

Identically laid out Workbooks were created for each of the three remaining datasets and labelled 'Revision Table (JD2)', 'Revision Table (JD3)', and 'Revision Table (BB)'. These Workbooks contained the analysis, findings, and graphs that informed the three discussion chapters that follow this chapter. For example, to explore metafunctional choice in revision activity, a spreadsheet called 'Metafunction matrix' was created in each Workbook. This spreadsheet isolated revision activity in terms of its functional contribution to each text (column 8 of the Revision analysis matrix above, labelled 'Function'), and looked at the overall number of functions added or removed (explored in §7.1), as well as the unfolding of functions (a running total, as explored in §8.1).

5.8 Researcher bias and assumptions

The desired perspective of the researcher is inductive and emic, in that I believe understandings should emerge from the field of study (Tracy, 2013, p.21). However, there are a number of personal factors that not only drove me to conduct this research, but also impacted on my understanding of undergraduate writing. These are as follows:

96 Firstly, being a recent undergraduate³¹, I had a number of preconceptions regarding academic writing. These included:

1. Essay writing is solitary and altruistic—students do not typically share how or what they write.

2. To get a good grade you must:

i. Show evidence of targeted, wide, reading (primarily reflected in a references list).

ii. Use clear signposting throughout, making your ideas visible and easy to follow.

iii. Identify weakness in your work and justify why they were not addressed.

Secondly, because linguistics was not my first degree³², I am acutely aware of the differing expectations (most of them implicit) across disciplinary fields, leading to the following assumptions:

1. Academic writing primarily develops through a pedagogy of osmosis.

2. This osmosis is primarily engendered through textual borrowing, discourse synthesis, and exposure to 'model' texts.

3. Practice makes perfect—the more you write disciplinary texts, the better you get at it.

Summary

This methodology chapter outlined how this thesis examined an underlying 'Research Problem' (cf. Chapter 1). It did so using Tracy's (2013) eight 'big tent' criteria of excellence in qualitative research as guiding tenets, so as to increase the study's resonance, contribution, richness, transparency, credibility, as well as its procedural, situational, and relational ethics. Accordingly, the chapter introduced the underlying assumptions, decisions, and theoretical framework that informed the research design, sampling selection, and the collection, handling, and analysis of the data. The results of which are presented and discussed in the following three chapters.

Chapter 6 moves us away from theory (Chapters 2-4) and design (this chapter), and begins our investigation of the 'Research Problem'. More specifically, it investigates the first set of RQs, which centre on the theme of 'how students write'. It is here that we begin the presentation and discussion of the data by contextualizing and quantifying it in terms of the mechanics of writing.

I.e. we will examine these students' writing 'practices', the when and where of their revisions, and the types of revisions they used.

31 I graduated in 2012 with a degree in Language studies and TEFL.

32 I spent 10 yrs. working as an engineer.

97

Chapter 6 How students write Introduction

The broad theme underlying this chapter is 'how the two students in this study wrote their essays'. It is here that we will explore the first set of research questions set out in Chapter 1, which were:

1(a). What 'practices' do students use when digitally composing text?

1(b). When (sequentially) and where (within the clause) are these practices employed?

1(c). Which practices (if any) are relatively stable, and which appear to change over time?

1(d). Do 'good' writers converge on similar practices?

These four questions are addressed separately in the following four sections: section 6.1 focuses on what 'practices' the two students used when digitally composing text. The term 'practices' refers to how text was added or removed from a document, and includes both normal typing (non-interrupted bursts of activity) and revision activity (movement away from the leading edge).

It is in this section that we will see how the writing process of these two writers was spread out over a number of sessions/days, where revision types (FPs, CPs, INSAs, etc.) were used in varying frequencies. Section 6.2 focuses on when and where revisions occurred. The discussion(s) in this second section, then, revolves around the sequencing (temporal placement) and location (spatial placement) of revisions. It is here that we will see how certain revisions types are more likely to occur at the start of composing (FPs), whilst others exhibit little patterning (INSBs and CPs). We will also see how the majority of revisions came toward the end of clauses, within the functional slot of N-Rheme. Section 6.3 explores if certain revision types are more likely to be employed at the start/middle/finish of composing and, if so, why? This section, then, builds on the findings of

§6.2 by examining stability and instability in each dataset and each writer in an effort to address RQ 1(c). The final section (6.4) considers if any of the 'practices' discussed so far (i.e. normal production and revision activity) show any signs of 'stability' across writing sessions, across writers, or across texts, and, if so, what are the implications of such 'stability'? This section confirms the findings of the previous sections by providing more evidence that the two writers go about writing in two fundamentally different ways.

6.1 The evolution of digital text

In this section we examine JD and BB's writing practices in terms of normal production practices (i.e. where typing was uninterrupted and no movement away from the leading edge occurred), and revision types (as outline in Chapter 5, §5.7.2). This section, then, attempts to answer RQ

98 1(a): What practices (e.g., revision types) do students use when digitally composing text? And it is organised as follows: each dataset is given its own sub-section, which begins with a general overview of compositional activity (e.g., duration of each writing episode, time spent typing, no.

of words typed, revisions made, etc.). Each sub-section then moves on to consider the frequency of revision types, and explores why some types are more frequent than others.

6.1.1 JD's first essay

Table 6.1. General overview of document construction (JD1) Table 6.1 shows that this essay was constructed (or written) in 8hrs 29 mins (total time spent on computer), with 1hr 58 mins spent typing in MS Word. These figures represent only the time the student spent on the computer, and does not reflect time they may have spent researching the subject matter, looking for material sources (e.g. books), etc.

We can see from table 6.1 that the majority of text (2068 words, 81% of the total word count) was added in the first three writing sessions, which amounted to 71.6% of the total time spent working on the essay. During these first three sessions, 158 functional revisions were made (functional revisions are changes made to the text at the morpheme level or above).

Compositional activity then tapered off, with JD typing just 474 more words and making 74 functional revisions in the remaining 4 sessions. The majority of this essay's content, then, appears to have been added over the first two days (four writing sessions).

Moving away from text production, figure 6.1 below is a network graph of how JD's time was distributed amongst different activities, or 'focus events'. The circles represent events (windows/programs) and the lines connecting them represent movement between them. The size of the circles is relative, and represents the time spent within each focus event—the larger