| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 課程與教學研究所 === 93 === The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher-led discussion and peer-led discussion during the planning phase of writing, and their relationship with the actual writing performance in the lower grades. The subjects were 32 second graders divided into six discussion groups for six writing events.
In the first phase of the study, students wrote three short essays. First, the teacher led a class discussion, then two of the groups (discussion groups) had peed-led discussions before writing, while the other four groups (control groups) started to write immediately, and shared their writing afterwards. Chi square tests showed that the discussion groups differed from the controls groups – fewer essays from the discussion group contained content from the teacher-led discussions. Further analysis showed that the difference came from one essay alone.
In the second phases of the study, after the teacher-led discussions, all groups had peer-led discussions before they started to write. All discussions were transcribed, and their contents were categorized into whether they were related to “form”, “details”, follow up questions or directions”, and “unrelated discourse.” The categories were matched up with the students’ essays to obtain the percentage of matching content between teacher-led discussion, peer-led discussion, and the essays.
The results indicated that the way the teacher led the class discussions greatly affected the content of the peer discussions, and the ways the students interacted in the peer-led discussions. When the teacher focused on stimulating imagination and talked about “what to write”, peer-led discussions focused on details of the writing, and the students’ essays had more individual content different from both discussions. In contrast, when the teacher focused on “how to write”, the peer-led discussions had higher levels of unrelated discourse, and most discourse, as well as the subsequent essays, were merely filling in details of the categories of content indicated by the teacher.
The theme of the essay influenced how the teacher led the discussion, which led to differences in peer-led discussion, and therefore, the essays themselves. When the theme was narrow, the teacher focused on “what to write,” but when the theme was broad, the teacher focused more on showing students how to organize the contents, and “how to write.”
The results of this study suggests that teachers consider how discussions should be led prior to writing practice, and to balance the teaching of “form” and “content.” Teachers should also consider helping students engage in more fruitful discussions by changing the way teacher-led discussions are conducted. It is also suggested that further research on discussions in the planning stages of writing should analyze the rich data from the discourse during discussions.
Keywords: lower elementary students, teacher-led discussion,
peer-led discussion, teaching of writing, writing performance
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