Cognitive and metacognitive processes in writing composition by gypsy pupils with socio-educational disadvantages

This paper is aimed at analyzing the writing expression of gypsy pupils with socio-educational disadvantages attending primary school in Granada (Spain). Specifically, this research relies on Flower and Hayes' (1981) and Hayes' (1996) socio-cognitive framework to unveil the processes that gypsy children undergo when they write a text. This qualitative research entails a "case study" of eighteen gypsy pupils with socio-educational disadvantages. Both 'cognitive interviews' and 'mistake-spotting tasks' are used to gather data, while 'content analysis' is used to interpret them. This form of data interpretation permitted identifying the operations that these pupils follow in the process of writing a text (e.g. planning, transcribing and structuring, as well as the metacognitive processes), the way in which pupils perform such operations and the difficulties they encounter when producing a text. The results of this research have been interpreted by cross-reading sets of data (namely), taking into account data obtained from several sources or from different sections within the same source) and identifying differences and similarities across sets of data, bearing in mind differential characteristics of the research subject. Finally teachers and trainers are provided with some teaching guidelines aimed at overcoming and/or correcting the difficulties experienced by gypsy children (as described above) and which interfere with the development of pupils' writing skills. Further research implications are discussed.