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Chapter VI: Teachers as Readers of Students’ Writing

The red pen that signals the writing teacher at work should probably be on the endangered symbols list. Process approaches to teaching writing, with their focus on the teacher as facilitator of students' writing and thinking processes, have rendered all but obsolete the errorcentered teacher whose primary role is to "read with her pen." Yet the red pen as a symbol of the teacher's approach to reading students' writing is tenacious in school culture and, despite approaches to writing instruction that discount such behaviorist-influenced images, continues to reflect some strongly held assumptions about what it means to read as a teacher ("mark papers"), what the teacher's role is in the process ("prescriptive"), and how much students learn about writing when teachers as readers focus on the errors of their written ways ("much"). Assuming for the sake of argument a less odious image of the teacher-reader, assuming, say, that instead of a red pen the teacher were seen to wield something like an orchestral baton, possibilities for perceiving not only the aims and functions but also the processes of reading students' writing expand enormously. Bestowed with a baton (at once sturdy and delicate), the teacher-reader can be seen as a sensitive interpreter of text, filtering as well as animating the range of sensibilities that are reflected in the reading of a single composition. As fanciful as the orchestral image may be, the fact is that two to three decades of writing research focusing on the teacher as reader and responder to students' writing, as well as the evolving theories of writer-reader relationships that have both shaped and reflected this