WRITING “IN YOUR OWN WORDS”:

CHILDREN’S USE OF INFORMATION

SOURCES IN RESEARCH PROJECTS

This is revised version of a paper published in Effective Learning and Teaching of Writing: a Handbook of Writing in Education, eds. G. Rijlaarsdam, H. van den Bergh and M. Couzijn, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers (2005).

I am making this paper available online to enable access to it by teachers.

ROB OLIVER
Institute of Education, University of London

Summary

In this paper I examine how a group of primary school children used sources of information in individual research projects on the subject of alternative energy. The chapter focuses on some of the strategies adopted by the children to make use of reference sources, in both book and electronic formats, and the ensuing transformations of source material, both verbal and visual, observed in the children’s work. The study proposes that working with sources involves the project writer, here envisaged as a “text-maker”, in a range of semiotic and inter-textual relations with other texts. These material relations, it is suggested, cannot be fully understood by a view of research which emphasises the extraction and re-use of “information” as content detached from textual form. Moreover, the traditional distinction between “copying” and “your own words” obscures these inter-textual relations and, consequently, a full picture of children’s learning activity as composers of research genres. Instead, an understanding of how children both borrow material from existing texts and, at the same time, re-contextualise and innovate as a result of new communication may prove more helpful. The study points to the value of extended research projects in early literacy education, especially given the importance of independent research skills in later years.


1 INTRODUCTION

Doing an extended research project is a common learning experience for many children in the later years of primary school when working with multiple sources of information - reference books, encyclopaedias, CD-ROMs, the internet - begins to play a role in writing and oral presentations. Based on curriculum topics in, for example, science or history or on personal topics such as hobbies, projects typically involve children in the research of content information and its re-presentation in texts of their own. The resourceful moving-between-texts required in this activity, prefiguring the more complex research tasks faced in secondary school and beyond, becomes evident in the projects produced by children. They can be distinctive in terms of how diverse materials are brought together (Ormerod and Ivanic, 1997; 2001), how different genres are juxtaposed (Romano, 2000) and how semiotic modes such as writing and drawing are combined (Kress et al, 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).

Work on children’s research has tended to focus more on reading than on writing and how textual sources are used in projects (Wray, 1985; Wray and Lewis, 1993). As a result, it is not often acknowledged how reading and writing activities interact in research processes. In an attempt to reach some understanding of this interaction - how composition of a project text does not necessarily follow acts of reading for information, but is often closely integrated with them - I focus in this chapter on how a group of ten-year-old children used published sources of information while composing projects on alternative energy in an international school in the Netherlands.

The school in question had recently adopted a new curriculum which explicitly links “research skills”, “enquiry learning” and “communication” (1). Such a curriculum raises many questions about the role of research in children’s literacy learning and its possible outcomes. How, in particular, may already-composed sources of information, available in electronic as well as print media, be re-used in ways which enable the active re-presentation, as opposed to the mechanical reproduction, of forms of knowledge? The seemingly innocent request to write “in your own words” masks the complex material processes involved in such transformations, the work of project-ing from other texts. How does the genre of the research project facilitate this learning by creating links between the reading/viewing of information and the activity of producing a new text?

Dianna Bradley, the teacher of the group featured in this chapter, expressed similar questions about children’s research:

The term “research” can be broadly used. What does it effectively mean for children? It seems ludicrous for children to know where to find information and how to get it if they can’t interpret their information. When does information become their own and how can they use this skill to their own benefit? (Personal communication).

2 WRITING FROM SOURCES AND “YOUR OWN WORDS”

Wray and Lewis report a frustration commonly expressed by teachers about children’s research-based writing: “How can I stop my children copying from reference books?” (Wray and Lewis, 1997: 3). They claim that

most junior children are quite aware that they should not copy from reference books, and can usually give a cogent set of reasons why not, but when they are actually engaged in the practical tasks of locating and selecting information in books will revert to copying behaviour with little demur. (Wray and Lewis, 1997:3)

However, the term “copying” appears far from straightforward in the learning of source-based writing where writers are in the business of making texts from other texts. A sharp distinction between what is “copied” and what is “original” conceals not only the transitional challenges of learning to write from sources, but also the kinds and degrees of textual borrowing and appropriation which are a feature of research genres, where our own words and the words of others combine and interact in multiple ways. (2)

Behind the doors of the copying/original distinction lie important issues in writing education at all levels. In her study of university student writing, Angèlil-Carter found that often “the student learning a new discourse is unable to do anything other than use the words of the texts she is reading in her writing, as a way of ‘trying on’ the discourse” (Angèlil-Carter, 2000: 103). This “trying on” means reproducing chunks of source language by a form of mimicry or “ventriloquation” (Wertsch, 1991). Far from being “copying”, this adoption of already-phrased “voice types” (Wertsch, 1991:59) through the texts of others may function developmentally as part of a normal language learning process - an initial step towards more independent participation in disciplinary discourses, where one can make “one’s own voice speak through the voices of others” (Angèlil-Carter, 2000: 37). (3)

There is a link between these observations and the work studied in this chapter. Children’s research projects can be seen as an early encounter with the source-based, citation-rich, multi-layered composing which later becomes “academic writing”. At the same time, children’s projects typically draw on visual as well as verbal modes, a material feature which the appeal to write “in your own words” obscures.

3 CHILDREN’S WRITING AS SIGN-MAKING

The view of children’s composition adopted in this paper draws on that developed by Kress et al. (2001) and Kress (1997; 2003) which sees children’s texts as part of “a dynamic process of sign-making” (Kress et al.: 27, italics in original). In this social semiotic view, children are seen as active participants in the re-shaping and re-animation of knowledge rather than passive recorders of pre-established accounts. Their texts are one “sign” of this participation.

Sign-making, however, does not have a purely expressive or psychological bearing. It has a “double social motivation”, reflecting both “who the sign-maker is, and what her or his history has been” and “what the sign-maker assesses the communicational environment to be” (Kress, 1997: 93). The making of the sign depends on both orientations at once. The interests and motivations of sign-makers interact with the constraints and resources of contexts where signs are made in certain conventional ways. Though already culturally pre-formed, these resources are still “unstable” in that they are constantly re-shaped “through the interests of social actors engaged in interaction with others” (Kress et al, 2001: 19). Children compose as “active decision-makers”, drawing on the “semiotic affordances” of different genres and modes in their learning (Kress et al, 2001: 144). Writing can be understood as a prestigious but nevertheless changing mode which makes available designs for texts, for “conscious and creative communication with and through materials to achieve a human effect” (Sharples, 1999: 71; see also New London Group, 1996).

Close to this view of texts as sign-making is the idea of transformation as a normal feature of semiotic activity. A text (“sign”) can not emerge from nothing or take place against a blank backdrop. Signs come from (other) signs. All texts, to some extent, emerge from, respond to and anticipate other texts and in doing so enact different types of inter-textual relations (Kristeva, 1984; Bakhtin, 1986; Fairclough, 1992; New London Group, 1996). According to Kress, transformative activity is not a feature of specialised or elite creativity, but of everyday practice:

Against notions of copying, imitation, acquiring, however implicitly they may be held…..I would like to propose the idea that children, like adults, never copy. Instead…we transform the stuff that is around us – usually in entirely minute and barely noticeable ways. (Kress, 1997)

This transforming work can be further understood as negotiation or dialogue between our own sign-making and the signs we come into contact with. Our own discursive experience and history is unique and individual but it is nevertheless “shaped in continuous and constant interaction with others’ individual utterances” (Bakhtin, 1986: 89):

Our speech…..is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, re-work, and re-accentuate. (Bakhtin, 1986: 89)

This re-accentuation, which makes sign-making both indebted and responsive to prior signs, and yet constantly pulling away from them, geared to new expressions, does not always come easily. As Bakhtin reminds us, “not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation” (Bakhtin, 1981: 294). Many words “resist,…..sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them….as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker”:

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (Bakhtin, 1981: 294)

Bakhtin here recognises that our making of signs is a struggle of thought and action to work in increasingly independent but at the same time increasingly responsive ways, not to free us from the influence of other signs – for that is impossible – but to see and hear and experience “otherness” as a resource for meaning rather than a force of authority and imposition (Bakhtin, 1981).

In the context of children’s project-writing, information sources contribute to “the stuff that is around us”. Information does not arrive as fluid raw material but as already-shaped, designed texts, culturally-laden, often radiating an aura of authority or prestige. Transforming the already-shaped into new shapes is not a matter of assimilation and recall, nor a matter of complete innovation, but of learning to work with information-bearing texts in creative and transforming ways - to draw from them, but also to draw away from them in the light of new understanding and communication. It is to set up increasingly dialogic relations with sources as re-sources and to turn the act of research into a purposive, situated sign-making - a form of communication and interaction rather than location and storage.

4 CONTEXT AND METHOD OF RESEARCH

The research on which this paper is based took place over a four-week period in an English-medium international school in the Netherlands. I observed a group of twenty ten-year-old children engaged in research which culminated in individual written projects and oral presentations. The children come from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, with many speaking at least one other language apart from English. (4)

As part of a unit of work on energy the children were asked to research one alternative source of energy such as solar, wind or tidal power using resources available in the classroom (reference books, children’s encyclopaedias and CD-ROMs) and any other resources from home, including the internet.

Children carried out their research and project-writing in class and at home. They worked in pairs or small groups, typically for sessions of about one hour, often collaborating on the initial designs of projects and finding useful information together. At the outset of the project, the teacher used two plenary sessions to discuss what was already known about alternative energy and to model some outlines for projects. Useful resources on energy were also identified. Children were shown examples of basic bibliographies and asked to show evidence that they had used at least three different sources in their work.

These preparations included discussion of generic features of projects (title pages, contents, introductions, bibliographies) but little explicit demonstration of research techniques. The teacher, working closely with me as a researcher, wished to create a supportive but relatively free space for the production of the children’s projects precisely to see how children went about doing research on an individual basis and particularly to study how they used sources. The nature of the topic meant children engaged with predominantly non-narrative genres.

I carried out classroom observations of children doing their research and interviewed a number of children as they worked and after the completion of their projects. The children’s texts were analysed in terms of use of sources and how children had changed the material they had selected. Elements of the children’s texts, both visual and verbal, were traced to book, internet or CD-ROM sources wherever possible, and the different types and strategies of transformation were described.

The following account describes, firstly, some strategies of individual project design in relation to sources which emerged during observation and interviews; and, secondly, some more general types of source appropriation observed in the children’s texts.

5 CHILDREN TRANSFORMING INFORMATION

As with the projects studied by Ormerod and Ivanic, this sample gave evidence of “children’s intertextual processes” (Ormerod and Ivanic, 2001: 86). It confirmed that children make active semiotic choices about material resources, modes and technologies in making project texts. Through these choices they make the “otherness” of information their “own” whilst at the same time recognising, and sometimes struggling with, the already-made nature and referential authority of their sources. Interview responses illuminated some of this struggle (names of students have been changed in this account):

I found it hard to put things in my own words. Mostly the worst thing was….there’s a lot of in information right in front of you…but you know, I mean, just how easy it is to copy it out – done! – and nobody will know but……no……basically then it’s not your work. (Brandon)

It’s hard because once…..the internet usually says it in the good way of saying it, and you have to put it, like, even better….kinda hard. (David)

We have a lot of information down….this is from there [points to screen] but kind of in ourown words…but we look at something like [reads from CD-ROM screen] ‘The Kaplan turbine was designed by Viktor Kaplan in 1913’…..and we can’t really put ‘Viktor Kaplan’ in our own words. (Suny).

While drawing on and using sources of published information children were also trying to draw away from their sources, to get informed distance from existing formulations and designs in order to transform them within the context of a classroom event. Most children in the group expressed a desire to make information their own in some way, but at the same time felt the urge to “copy” word for word or to trace or import pictures unchanged from sources which appeared to have “the good way of saying it”. This sometimes led to excessive printing-out from the internet or blanket-highlighting of photocopied sections from reference books. In these cases, the already-composed, packaged, authoritative appeal of “good” sources tended to reduce the transformative work of children unless this overload was resisted in some way.

This resistance, by which children made space for their own thinking and action in relation to sources, took many forms. One child, Angelina, spoke of how she gained physical and compositional space from her sources:

I get all the information, but I can’t put it all together….I thought, I can’t put that in my own words, what should I do? Put the book away. Just like not seeing it….I just don’t look at it, and remember some of the information…..and write what I remember. It was tempting to copy….but I just put the papers down.

Other children described similar material strategies of leaving time-gaps between their reading and their writing or creating space by actually going to another room, switching off a computer or holding a conversation with a family member to see what they could remember from a source.

Several children used highlighters to indicate important points in sources, but as a consequence sometimes marked or saved unmanageably large sections. Strategies designed to overcome this overload included: highlighting or underlining only key words or phrases; “chunking down” sources by transferring words or phrases, not whole texts, by “cut and paste” or manual transcription to another site, such as an exercise book or a word-processing document, thus effectively leaving sources “behind”; and using notational forms such as flow diagrams to produce new versions of technical processes, such as how a turbine works, rather than printing out diagrams from source.

These interventions tended to increase transformative work by “loosening up” the already-composed nature of published sources. They rendered information more fluid for re-use in texts. Inroads were made into source texts’ designs, fragmenting them into usable elements or “chunks”, both verbal and visual.

In this way children tended to think about the design and layout of their projects from the beginning of the research episode rather than at the end. At an early stage they drafted cover pages and illustrations, made provisional decisions about page design (borders, headings, use of colour), began to plan out where bits of verbal text and illustrations would go, or drafted possible chapter headings for their sections. Frequently they used questions as structuring prompts (“What is solar energy? Where do we get it from? Can we use it anywhere?”) which clearly drew on prior knowledge about energy. These prompts were often changed in later drafts.

In these cases, the act of research merged into the semiotic event of making a new text. Reading and composing were in constant interaction. Instead of amassing information and then doing something with it, children tended to work on their sources from the outset, looking for particular things by reference to the task or by activating existing knowledge. In her project on tidal energy, for example, Alison knew something about the influence of the moon on tides and used her initial search for information to improve this knowledge base, approaching the subject of tidal energy from that angle.

Another strategy adopted by children to open up a creative space from sources, whilst at the same time drawing on them materially, was to adopt particular communicative roles to filter the research process. Imagining themselves as writing for peers, or for a younger audience, or as an editor of a fact-sheet gave some children a platform to help them read sources dynamically, with an eye to their transformation. Their reading became a forward-looking, interpretative activity as decisions about how and where to use specific source elements took place against gradually unfolding designs for new texts. Such roles helped children to see that in terms of genre the classroom project is not the same as a web-site, a reference book or an encyclopaedia. Therefore the forms of “information” must undergo change.

Angelina’s decision to write her project “for younger children”, for example, gave her a role which shaped her whole research activity. She used her knowledge of story-writing to construct her project on hydro-electric power as “kind of like a story….in a story you make people’s hearts beat faster. In this one (the project) you have to make their brains beat faster, and make them understand”. Angelina gathered information, but found the sources at odds with the “child language” she wished to use in her project. She learned early on in her research that hydro-electric power originated in ancient water wheels. This became the “roots” of her story. She then added pages on water (“hydro”) and energy (“electricity”) to structure the narrative:

I had ‘water’ and ‘electricity’ – which makes ‘hydro-electricity’ – and I had the roots in water wheels, the past of it…I had the water, the electricity…all the ingredients needed to make hydro-electricity. The sugar, the flour, the milk.

She read and edited her reference book sources guided by these three projected elements or “chapters”. The cover page of her project indeed resembled a child’s picture story, showing a water wheel by a stream. The overall project design and the metaphors sustaining it guided her reading and her composition in a transforming way, loosening the hold and authority – the “composed-ness” - of source information. Her generic choice helped her to engage actively with the sources she had located.

The cooking metaphor is apt for the research-based writing process itself, where “other” texts are mixed and transformed into a “new” text. In this case the metaphor seemed to play a role in the whole project. Reading that the early water wheels were used to grind flour, Angelina decided to make some biscuits to give out during her presentation. This decision can be seen as part of her overall design to communicate the knowledge she had gained in a situated way, linking scientific information about energy to the daily business and pleasure of eating. Her pride and sense of achievement in this designing of a whole project is clear:

If you think about it. Wow! I made a book, nobody ever wrote it. I didn’t copy it. I did it by myself, with some help, books and things. You have that feeling…I really did it…..This was the first one, not really the first one, but the first one with those words.

A strong sense of the project as an event and the child’s text as a unique but at the same time inter-textual sign comes across strongly in her words.

In addition to these transformations through metaphor and genre, some children tapped their personal experiences in relation to the topic to motivate their projects and change the shape and phrasing of sources. On the first page of her project under the title “What is Tidal Power?”, Alison combined personal experience, additional knowledge and newly-acquired scientific knowledge to frame her work:

If you have ever been water rafting, then you have felt a little bit of the power of water. A tidal wave (tsunami) can destroy an entire city.

Tidal power is energy that is made by machines which get their energy from the movement of water with the tides.

Here she answers her title question on two levels, the first based on personal experience, the second on scientific knowledge (establishing “Tidal power” as a subject). The combination of two contrasting “voice types” (Wertsch, 1991) shows her designing her project to make the “new” scientific information accessible in relation to more everyday experience. Below the piece of text given above, she manually pasted a colour aerial photograph of a tidal power station, giving the reader an initial panoramic orientation to the topic before the more technical drawing of a generating system later in the project. She ended her project on tidal power with a paragraph beginning “I love water” and giving details of a marine biology camp she had attended. She also used prior knowledge of the Japanese tsunami to illustrate the natural power of tides, and in interview explained how a disaster movie had roused her interest in the topic.

Similarly, some children made links between source material and other areas of knowledge. Working on geothermal energy, one student imported into his project a painting by Frederick Church of the volcano Cotopaxi which he had found on the internet. Brandon introduced the volcano alongside more topic-specific material because volcanoes exist in countries where the earth’s crust is thin, and these are also the countries which can use geothermal energy. In designing this page of his project he combined the painting with a map taken from the NASA web-site showing the “ring of fire” of volcanoes. A scientific and an artistic source from different locations were here brought together to make a single new text.

A final feature of this “loosening” of source information to enable transformation was the role of talk in re-formulation. Two children, Suny and Angelina, were using a CD-ROM to find out how turbines work. At one point they were making use of two diagrams and a piece of written information. One sentence caused them particular trouble:

A nozzle converts the kinetic energy of high-pressure water into a powerful jet, and the buckets extract the momentum. (‘Hydraulic Turbines’, Encarta, 1994)

Using the diagram and their own talk, the children worked towards an understanding of this process:

Suny: We’ll try to put it into our words….a nozzle is….um….something like..pressure or something…like pressure…
Rob: Why not just use the diagram? The water comes in…..
Suny: ..the water comes in, it’s pushing itself in with the nozzle…//...it hasn’t become a jet yet, this is just going round good,…so...these are the wheels with buckets, so they carry the water…
Angelina: ..and when it turns, that’s when they’re heavy…it makes energy...that’s in the olden days they had a wood stick or something, a really big one, attached to (inaudible)….and they made cookies that way.
Suny: ….so it goes in…the water pushes itself in, with the nozzle…into the buckets, and then it goes, it’s flushing itself….so it has to go faster so it can keep going into the buckets, so now it becomes a jet…//..it’s gonna move…..the pressure of the water is quite high…//...so it turns the wheel faster for electricity to come out.

By jointly narrating the events depicted in the diagram the two children moved towards their own formulation of the turbine process. Their understanding of words like “converts”, “extracts” and “momentum” unfolded the densely-packed source in a new way. The order of grammatical subjects, with “high-pressure water” recast in a subject role firstly as “water” and then “the pressure of water”, mirrored the temporal sequence of events in the diagram. Two sentences from Suny’s final project echo this sequencing, first rehearsed in this conversation, with active process verbs replacing many of the passive forms used in the original source whilst retaining some of the technical vocabulary:

High pressure water forces itself through a sluice and makes the blades on the turbine spin faster. A nozzle is like a force of high-pressure water or kinetic energy into a powerful turbine jet.

Her first sentence projected the passive construction of the source sentence (“Broad, swivelling blades on the turbine are spun by high pressure water as it is released through a sluice”) into a more active formulation. Her second sentence was, similarly, an attempt to explain the process in order of temporal occurrence. In a small but significant way, the researcher was here making sense of what she had read “in her own words”, trying to re-shape the information for a new purpose. She was also “trying on” a new discourse by using technical vocabulary and phrases (“high-pressure water”, “sluice”, “turbine”, “nozzle”, “kinetic energy”) probably for the first time.

Her final description was accompanied by a simplified version of the turbine picture, placed at the head of her text. The design concept of the page appears to have taken root with the conversation above. The two children were engaged in an active dialogue with their source, not a passive reproduction of it. The sign in the original published source was refracted, through reading and speech, into a new sign in the child’s text.

These examples give some idea of how children were becoming aware of the need to both exploit and resist information sources in their own research projects. In no case did children depart completely from source representation. Indeed, the projects gave many examples of directly imported material. However, in most cases the children’s projects showed various kinds of blends: imported formulations blended with newly-composed ones. As signs, children’s projects bear multiple traces – of personal decisions and interests, of other texts, of classroom events and interactions, and of broader generic designs.

6 SIGNS OF TRANSFORMATION IN CHILDREN’S PROJECTS

This section briefly summarises five different kinds of transformation of published sources observed in the children’s projects. This is not presented as a hierarchy of skills but as an open inventory of the semiotic moves used by children as text-makers in this sample. These descriptions are not designed to typecast research behaviour in a closed typology but to outline practices of appropriation through which individual pathways of composition were seen to emerge in this particular genre.

· Direct Importation
The text-maker imports wholesale a chunk of text or an image from a source using a replicating technology (“cut and paste”, manual verbatim transcription, scanning). The transformation involves acts of selection and importation, but also a certain amount of composition in that the imported chunk or image becomes part of a new text and is, therefore, re-contextualised. This may involve, for example, inserting the imported element into a sequence. One child in the sample produced a project made up entirely of pages printed from different internet sites. He had, however, selected the pages from a potentially vast source and arranged material in a chapter sequence which showed at least some degree of transformative design. Most children in the group imported at least some material, mostly images, directly from the internet or electronic picture libraries into their project texts.

· Selective Importation and Arrangement
The text-maker imports a chunk of text or an image, but changes the spatial or compositional arrangement of the source material in the light of a new design. This may involve, for example, putting two imported passages of (written) text from different sources side by side, cropping a section of imported text, or placing an image in a new relation to writing. In these kinds of transformation the material and modal design decisions of the text-maker begin to play a part. For example, choice of fonts and typefaces as well as decisions about borders and colour may all influence the ways in which imported material is rearranged.

· Amended Importation
The text-maker imports pieces of text and image, but intervenes in them in editorial ways. This may involve, for example, altering particular words. In this sample, a number of children appropriated chunks of source material directly but made lexical changes. One child, for example, changed the word “incandescent” to the word “fiery” in an otherwise transcribed short passage from a reference book about volcanoes. Other examples included: removing subordinate clauses from sentences to simplify them or to distribute clauses across a number of sentences; editing out sentences completely or changing their order; using italics or colour to highlight key words for a glossary; reducing or enlarging images; producing a simplified version of a drawing; changing the font of a label on an imported image.

· Re-shaping of a Source
The text-maker draws on a dominant focal source but reshapes it in significant ways. Transformations of this kind include some of those featured in the previous section where metaphorical, generic and experiential perspectives re-cast source material in selective ways. Children in the sample often took words or phrases from their sources, but did not take whole sentences or paragraphs. Sometimes they re-shaped information by applying other styles of language, for example by changing a scientific account of a process into a dialogue. In this kind of work with sources skills of editing, note-taking and paraphrase play an important role, but also the transfer of information from one mode to another, for example from a diagram to a verbal account, or vice versa. Three children, for example, made three-dimensional models to accompany their texts. Other examples of this kind of transformation involve the re-casting of source material in new genres. In a similar research episode observed in the same school factual information from encyclopaedias was transformed into quizzes, mock interviews, cartoons and narratives.

· Synthesis and Re-shaping of Multiple Sources
The text-maker draws on a range of sources and absorbs them, with different degrees of explicitness, into a single, designed text. Phrases and images may still recall specific sources but there is no dependence on a single or dominant source. One child, for example, combined material from four different sources on one page of her project, bringing together scientific information in different modes on hydro-electric power and linking it to geographical information on Niagara Falls. These complex, allusive transformations are characterised by a strong sense of overall design, with highlighted, saved or imported source texts used as a spur at the beginning of the research episode but soon abandoned or back-grounded in favour of the researcher’s own notes or drafts. Sources become grafted onto other sources. Children who transformed information in this synthesising way tended to visualise and constantly update their project designs while researching. They also introduced material and ideas from their own experience and made textually-supported links with other topics.

Together, these transformative moves could be seen as a repertoire of semiotic activity, resources for action in relation to other texts in this particular genre, the information research project. It is likely that other genres of children’s school writing, such as narrative or report writing, will draw on different ways of using and transforming other texts. A project writer may make creative use of all of the above resources in a single project. He or she may compose, for example, a piece of verbal text by synthesising chunks of information from two different sources and combining the resulting text with an image imported directly from an internet site, but with the latter given amended annotation, a new frame or a new caption. In the projects in this sample, these operations were performed in both electronic and manual ways. Indeed, one striking feature of several of the projects was the integration, frequently on the same page, of electronically-generated material (for example, a written passage imported from an internet site, and then edited) with hand-drawn or hand-written material (for example, a labelled, colour-pencil diagram adapted from a more complex original in a reference book).

7 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING

The research confirms the material diversity of young children’s projects found by Ivanic and Ormerod (2001) and their typically “multi-modal” composition (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). It also reveals a diversity in the resourceful ways in which children use published sources of information and employ strategies to appropriate them. The research suggests that these strategies are artisanal and individual, but also draw on shared practices of textual transformation.

The appeal to write “in your own words” is in many ways misleading. It masks the materiality of research-based writing and its inter-textual and multi-modal qualities. From the evidence of this study, children work on source material in multiple ways, all of which involve some degree of re-contextualisation and some degree of preservation. They work with information as it is textually articulated through modes and genres rather than as a neutral essence of fact which is extracted (through reading) and then reproduced (through writing).

Seeing children’s composition in this way implies an interactive and contingent view of authorship in the midst of textual practices, a view based on transformation rather than origination. This emphasis on practices does not, however, annul individual creativity, engagement and imagination.

The most transformative work on sources seems to take place when children understand and share the communicative aims of a task and use this understanding to motivate, jointly, their research and their text-making. “Writing” and “reading” both then entail “sign-making”, with much productive shuttling between them. There is evidence from this research episode that engagement with the overall visual design of a project, however sketchy, at early stages of research encourages children to use sources with more transformative agency.

Further research could look at how interaction, for example spoken dialogue between peers at a computer, plays a role in the research process by contributing to the “loosening up”, the making-available, of source texts by switching between semiotic modes. With some children this switching activity may also involve multiple languages.

One limitation of this study is that I have concentrated on textual sources and transformations by individuals, as if they are working alone but nevertheless projecting a communicative strategy. In reality, research activity and design might draw on a wide range of “sources” arising from different genres – a class discussion, a TV programme or magazine, a family discussion or outing. Such “sources” might range from a single word or phrase to a whole passage of written text or a series of images. Transformative activity on these appropriated elements might work across modes (for example, extracts from a classroom conversation about volcanoes might be visualised in a drawing) or across genres (the scenes, images and voice-over of a video about volcanoes might be imaginatively re-worked as the written account of someone visiting an active volcano). Future research could take these broader communicative transactions into account by considering the school project not as a solitary textual activity but as a situated, interactive and multi-modal event of learning in which text-making plays one part.

Research projects, I suggest, have a role in the teaching of content knowledge, but also a role in children’s textual education. Through active work on sources children can become aware of the multiple constructions of knowledge and their own involvement in those constructions. Through their own texts they can come to participate in knowledge-making and, in small ways, break down assumptions that information is fixed, corporate, author-less, and “already-said”.

A teacher could model approaches to the transformation of sources, and thus show design as materially changeable and not just a surface feature, by showing how a sentence in a reference book can be re-shaped in alternative grammatical forms, or how an image can be re-presented in alternative formats. In these changes “information” does not remain neutral or static but takes on new meanings. Critical literacy can take shape in such hands-on experiments with texts, as well as open up ways of evaluating the usefulness of sources.

Research projects require space and time, often a luxury in literacy environments dominated by testing and the need for short-term results. Taking the longer view, independent research skills are in demand and highly valued in later phases of education. These skills must begin somewhere, in early acts of reading, viewing, appropriation and design.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the children and staff at the Haagsche Schoolvereeniging, the Hague, especially Dianna Bradley and Dave Porter. I am also grateful to Mary Scott, Gunther Kress and Helen Martin for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Footnotes

[1] The International Primary Curriculum (IPC) was founded in 2001 and is currently followed by a number of schools in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The curriculum is based on a series of topic units through which “learning goals”, broken down into “subject, personal and international goals”, are pursued. See http://www.internationalprimarycurriculum.com.
[2] I am aware here of recent research from sociocultural and sociohistoric perspectives which has pointed to powerful myths of originality and individualism underlying western views of language. Such myths, it is argued, serve to obscure the social, cultural and institutional contexts in which different kinds of authorship and text production are shaped and mediated (Scollon, 1995; Pennycook, 1996; Prior, 1998).
[3] Taking this a step further, Sherman (1992), Pennycook (1996) and Price (2002) give examples of how textual borrowing in language learning also varies according to cultural factors and traditions.
[4] This multi-lingual factor was not studied in this investigation but could become a focus of future research. There was evidence that some children switched between languages during their research, even though projects were finally written in English.