A Study of Cognition in Context: The Composing Strategies of Advanced Writers in an Academic Context

This dissertation, "A Study of Cognition in Context: the Composing Strategies of Advanced Writers in an Academic Context" by Tai-yuen, Albert, Wong, 黃大元, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled A study of cognition in context: The composing strategies of advanced writers in an academic context submitted by Wong Tai Yuen, Albert for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in December 2000 Studies of the composing process have been undertaken over the past two or three decades mostly to investigate the process of writing along cognitive dimensions. Parallel to this, a number of investigations have also been carried out to study the social context in which the process of composing unfolds. It is, however, worth noting that most of these studies investigated composing either predominantly from a cognitive perspective or from a social one. Few studies have been carried out to investigate the composing process from a socio-cognitive dimension by giving a balanced focus to the cognitive process of composing as well as to the social context in which composing is embedded. The present study was, therefore, undertaken to investigate in depth the composing process of teachers who attended a professional education programme at postgraduate level from a socio-cognitive perspective. The composing process under investigation in the present study occurred naturally since no writing tasks were specifically devised for the study. In other words, all the writing assignments under investigation were part of the regular requirements of the teacher-education programme. The balanced emphasis of the current investigation upon the cognitive and social dimensions of composing made possible an in-depthstudy of the dialectic between cognition and context, i.e. how the context cues cognition and how cognition mediates the context in which it is situated. The four writers who participated in the current investigation were sampled from a group of nineteen teachers attending the teacher-education programme with English as their major subject. The study focussed upon their cognitive process of composing as reflected in the strategies that they employed when completing writing assignments over a range of contexts: composing in a school setting vis-a-vis composing in a home setting and composing in their major subject vis-a-vis composing in their minor subject. A methodological pluralist approach was adopted in the selection of research methods in the present investigation. The major methods of data collection comprised: questionnaire survey, concurrent think-aloud protocol, direct observation, stimulated- recall interview, key informant interview, coherence rating of texts, text analysis, analysis of process logs and time logs kept by the writers and analysis for institutional documentary information. In conclusion, a taxonomy of composing strategies was developed. This taxonomy comprised a broad range of cognitive, metacognitive, social and affective strategies employed by the writers when they produced academic texts in a range of composing settings. It was found that the writers displayed different levels of composing strategic awareness in evoking, selecting and applying strategies through recycling or making adaptations to 'old' strategies and adopting 'new' strategies in response to the contextual shifts. This strategic composing competence showed a correspondencewith the writers' ability to produce coherent texts. Finally, the findings also suggested that the evaluative climate of the courses in the programme had an infl