The specific areas of inquiry for this study were:
•Automaticity in navigating and creating text
Automaticity refers to “the ability to perform complex skills with minimal attention and conscious effort” (Flor and Samuels 1). Drawing from William James’ discussion of habit in Principles of Psychology, Richard Flor and Jay Samuels explain that the essence of automaticity is that “with practice, improvements take place that allow one to move beyond control of basic tasks” (1). Achieving a certain level of automaticity fairly quickly is essential to developing proficiency in computer-mediated oral composing.
•Translating, planning, and reviewing
Flower and Hayes introduced three elements of any writing situation: “task environment,” “writing processes,” and “the writer’s long-term memory” (369). The researchers also focus on the elements of the writing process known as planning, translating, and reviewing. Planning involves the processes of generating, organizing, and goal setting. Translating occurs when a writer puts her/his thoughts into a text format (drafting), and reviewing covers the processes of revising.
•Interaction with errors
With C-MOC, computer generated errors become a part of the composing process. Here, I was interested in how the student writers dealt with the interruptions of these errors (ex. whether they stopped constantly to fix them or adjusted to composing fluidly and waited until a later time to correct them).
•Adjustment to verbal commands
For this area, I observed how comfortable the students were with integrating the commands into their oral composing (commands involving not only puncutation but also navigation of the text).
•Production of genres
I chose to have the students produce a variety of genres to observe how/if the oral medium interefered with or changed the features of the genre being produced.
•Informants’ discussion of medium
Feedback from the students was crucial in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of C-MOC on several levels (such as what types of writing they felt the medium could be most useful for). Therefore, I found their informal comments and a written survey helpful in collaborating with these writers.
