| This study examined talk about writing in two situations common to performance-based writing assessment. In the first situation, high-school seniors who were preparing for a university writing placement exam discussed practice essays with their teacher. In the second situation, a moderation session for raters scoring student essays, teachers and the session leader discussed student papers. While performance-based approaches are dependent on the activity of talking about writing to mediate knowledge about academic writing, the discourse resources used by teachers, students, and assessment specialists in such situations are still inadequately theorized.; The central aim of this study was to understand the roles that discourse resources played in the transmission of knowledge about academic writing. Of particular interest were the ways in which discourse resources contributed to or detracted from achievement of the goals of the discussion. From what available resources did participants draw to create a dialogic context in the process of talking about writing? What dilemmas arose from the discursive construction of academic writing within the contexts of schooling and testing? And how did participants differ in the ways they discussed their views of writing?; The foundation of this investigation was discourse analysis of key episodes in which participants---teachers and students, or raters and moderators---evaluated student work. The discourse analysis was supported by descriptive ethnographic field notes that contextualized the episodes in the larger framework of writing assessment.; Results showed how participants mobilized discourse resources such as images for mastery, formulaic language for describing writing, and voicing hypothetical figures to organize prevailing views of academic writing. Shared views provided clues to the ideology of text, or folk images of academic writing, that served as common horizons for evaluating writing. Participants also mobilized discourse resources to demonstrate their mastery of writing and thereby construct authoritative or non-authoritative identities. And finally, while all participants used discourse resources, they did not possess mastery of them in equal measure. Talk about text was a form of performance: a way of construing oneself and one's abilities in the presence of an audience. |
