A number of issues in the teaching of writing touch on the relationship between thinking and language: Are words just vehicles of thought? Is writing a form of thinking? Is forming verbalizations the essense of thinking? Pages upon pages of theories are concocted and quoted in scholarly texts. Names of purported Russian experts such as Vygotsky and Luria are splashed around like imported, heady, high-proof vodka. But in truth, available research offers not even a hint for answering these theoretical questions.

We do know that speed-reading programs give students bad advice in insisting that lip movement and subvocal speech should be suppressed while reading. Vocalizing can improve comprehension, contribute to appreciation of literary devices like alliteration, and help develop a student's ear for the language. Derelicts walking around city streets talking loudly into the air are as different from students moving their lips while reading science, drafting sentences, or solving math problems as lightning is from TV signals. Lip movements or other vocal activities while reading and thinking are often beneficial, not signs of mental derangement or deficiency. Furthermore, thinkingaloud problem solving seems to be useful for improving reasoning skills.

We know that words from the outside -- from other people -- give rise to and precede some of our thoughts, and it seems that often words from the inside do this as well. On the other hand, we have mental pictures, feelings, and tip-of-the-tongue experiences suggesting that at times thoughts precede words.

Viewing the puzzle as a chicken-and-egg phenomena has functional ramifications: Rather than worry, relentlessly hypothesize, and neurologically jargonize about the exact language-thinking connection, we should perfect and employ pedagogies which prove empirically effective for encouraging expertise in each, and depend on intrinsic relations for natural interactions. For example, instead of using WAC and the process approach because of their supposedly sophisticated underlying linguistic-theoretical pillars on mind, use sentence combining because it improves writing skills -- expressed in loose anapest:

Mutter and Farther Go Thoughts

or in pairs, often in view of some rhetorical context. For example, small groups wrote a composition about one or two seashells, then passed the writing and the shells to a second group. The second group identified the shell described by the first group and picked out vivid details in the writing as well as details they found confusing. In another exercise each student wrote a description of a shell. The teacher then placed all the shells on a table and delivered each composition to another student, who had to pick out the shell described. The reader then commented on effective detail and metaphor before returning the paper to the writer.

Compositions by students in the experimental groups were judged significantly superior to those by control-group students, who studied model paragraphs. A second panel of five judges, using their own criteria, rated a subset of pretests and postests from the same students for creativity. Their combined scores correlated highly with the earlier scale scores. . ., suggesting that creativity can be stimulated (if not taught) by such classroom experiences.

Hillocks points out several differences between the inquiry method and free writing of the type often used with the process approach described in Chapter 4.

While free writing avoids any specific topic suggestions, inquiry does not. While free writing requires students to recall more or less distant experience, inquiry tends to focus on immediate and concrete data of some kind during instruction and practice. While free writing implicitly requires students to use whatever strategies they have available, inquiry attempts to teach specific strategies.

The "specific strategies" are described by Hillocks as "strategies for dealing with data in order to say or write something about it." These develop through manipulating and discussing the material: Inquiry "activities are designed to enhance particular skills or strategies such as formalizing and testing explanatory generalizations, observing and reporting significant details to achieve an effect, or generating criteria for contrasting similar phenomena."

Finally, because students write about a specific, common topic, peer feedback can be more effective with inquiry than with the process approach. Note in the above example how students decide which of two shells other students depicted in writing, giving them a concrete basis for pointing out strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, with the process approach students have no objective criteria for evaluating papers, so their comments are subjective, vague, and sparse.

Another successful study of the inquiry approach was conducted by Troyka. Students prepared to write on topics by playing simulation games requiring them to make policy decisions about problems such as how to handle a community pollution problem, what action to take in a prison riot, and what automobile to purchase for a taxi fleet. Hillocks explains:

Each student received a role sheet along with whatever background information he or she might need. The games were set up so that students were associated with a subgroup: executives of a chemical plant responsible for polluting a town's beaches and recreational waters, operators of tourist services who believed that pollution harmed the town's prosperity, and so forth. Each role had built into it the task of persuading the other groups of the legitimacy of its position on the problem. As the game progressed, the action alternated between periods of group planning and periods of "cross subgroup public hearings, debates, and the like. . . ." Presumably, these "games" put students in the position of using strategies required by the associated writing assignments: marshalling and arranging facts, evaluating and using reasons, examining and generating examples, predicting objections and considering how to deal with them, and so forth.

These students improved significantly more in writing skill than a group that was taught to use facts, reasons, and comparisons conventionally but did not actively discuss and debate issues.

The inquiry method comes closer to duplicating the process effective writers use for most real-life writing than the activities described in Chapter 4 which parade as the "process approach." In inquiry students spend considerable time researching and discussing a subject before beginning to write. They gather content, patterns of explanation and organization, and topic-specific language to eventually cast into standard written English. The act of writing forces them to extend their thinking in organizing and verbalizing the information, and gives them an opportunity to experiment and become familiar with various syntactic forms.

The only bridle on thundering enthusiasm for inquiry is the need to see how it fares in large-scale usage -- whether any classroom management problems or other difficulties arise as the procedure is tried more widely with various class sizes, age levels, and ability groups. If big classes present management problems with elaborate inquiry tasks, simpler tasks might be tried which retain some of the essential characteristics of inquiry described by Hillocks:

Inquiry focuses the attention of students on strategies for dealing with sets of data, strategies which will be used in writing. For example, . . .

inquiry might involve students in the following: . . . examining sets of data to develop and support explanatory generalizations, or analyzing situations which present problems of various kinds and developing arguments about those situations.

Our workbook, Analytical Writing and Thinking, uses analogy exercises which are easy for a teacher to handle yet have inquiry characteristics. Students are asked to work in pairs thinking aloud as they solve analogy questions (ostensibly as practice to raise their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores):