The processes in the activity of writing: evidence from collaborative writing

Abstract

In this study, we adopt a functional perspective, based on the context conceptualisation and on the experiential structure of the transitivity system proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). According to this perspective, we consider the various contextual spheres that involve the writing process, from the immediate context of situation to the extended context of culture, and the unit of analysis is the process, expressed by the verb, which organises the clause as a configuration of experience. The aim of the study is to verify the change in the experiential configuration of the writing process of students from Portuguese basic education, as revealed by the processes emerging in participants’ discourse during collaborative writing. Transcriptions of group discourse interaction in different school levels (from second to eighth grade) were analysed. The analysis focused on the frequency and relative weight of the distribution of the processes by the different context spheres and by the different types of processes according to the SFL categorisation (material, relational, mental, verbal, behavioural and existential). The results do not show differences between school levels as to the weight of the different types of processes but reveal an increasing weight of the processes associated to the wider context, from which students will draw the content knowledge to be included in the text and the features of the text genre, and also an increasing weight of processes associated to the text genesis. This progression points to the pedagogical potential for strategies aiming to broaden the content and the language under consideration in the writing process.