Generally, online support groups are viewed as low-threshold services. We challenge this assumption with an investigation, based on Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, of contributions to an online support group on eating disorders. In this analysis we show how a new member interacts with existing members in order to display legitimacy for membership of the group. The group operates as a Community of Practice, since membership is organized as joined participation in a writing practice. It becomes clear that becoming a member involves subscribing to normative requirements, centrally, displaying the insight that you are ill. In the case we focus on, this involves the requirement to leave pro-anorexia as a membership category behind. The novice does not yet seem ready to subscribe to this norm and thus the threshold for seeking support is heightened.
In this study we explore how reflective practices function in the process of collaborative writing of primary school students, performing writing tasks in the context of inquiry learning. Previous research has established that reflecting on the writing process and use of metalanguage are significant for developing writing proficiency. The Conversation Analysis-informed exploration displayed different practices. First, students reflect on appropriateness, in terms of redundancy, relevance and style, when accounting for the rejection of a proposal. Second, students reflect on correctness of spelling, punctuation and grammar, which becomes observable in recruitments, instructions and corrections. The findings suggest that students share a strong orientation to certain writing norms that are merely made relevant in a responsive manner.
IntroductionCollaborative writing has shown to be beneficial for developing writing proficiency of individual students. Writing in small groups or dyads helps learners to emulate and learn from each other's writing and regulation processes, may stimulate conceptual learning, and encourages critical reflection and a heightened sense of audience awareness (Klein, 2014;Nykopp, Marttunen, & Laurinen, 2014; van Steendam, 2016). Hence, joint writing tasks may stimulate the progression from a novice to a skilled writer, which has been characterized by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) as the transition from a knowledge-telling to a knowledge-transforming approach to writing: "the development of the ability to write […] as involving moving the student from a natural oral conversationalist to a communicator who could generate a largely shared meaning in the absence of immediate audience" (Parr & Wilkinson, 2016, 217). The writing process of a skillful writer, can be characterized as a form of knowledge transforming, solving conceptual, metacognitive and rhetorical problems (
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