Dialogic writing in the upper grades of primary school: How to support peer feedback conversations that promote meaningful revisions

Background

Upper-primary students struggle with writing, focusing on surface aspects when writing and rewriting. Dialogic talk between writers and readers may increase audience awareness and feedback engagement, which can lead to more meaningful comments and text revisions.

Aims

This quasi-experimental study investigates the effects of a dialogic writing intervention on the nature and focus of the dialogic peer conversations, and on students’ revision behavior.

Sample

Participants were 84 grade six students from four regular classrooms including monolingual (n = 59) and multilingual students (n = 25). Two classes were randomly assigned to the dialogic writing intervention and received support for dialogic talk by a conversation card for students and a practice-based professional development program for teachers. The other classes formed the control group.

Methods

All students wrote four argumentative texts by writing a first draft, discussing the text in groups of three, and revising the text. We collected all the drafts and revised versions of students’ texts, resulting in 204 texts in total. We also recorded peer feedback conversations in each class and for each writing task, resulting in 86 peer feedback recordings – 37 in the intervention condition and 49 in the control condition. We adopted a mixed-methods approach to the data, with discourse and conversation analysis to evaluate the nature and focus of the dialogic peer conversations and text analysis to examine text revisions.

Results

Students who received additional support for dialogic talk engaged in more exploratory peer conversations marked by open-ended questions and collaborative reasoning. Qualitative results showed that both the teacher and the conversation card have a crucial role in shaping meaningful dialogic peer conversations. These dialogues led to a shift in peer comments from a focus on lower to higher-order aspects of the text, resulting in higher-order text revisions.

Conclusions

This study suggests that a dialogic writing intervention with support for students and teachers enhances students' ability to engage in meaningful discussions about their writing. This promotes comments on higher-order aspects and effective text revisions.