Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy
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over into much that he did. With his straight hair falling in front of his glasses, Chatri spoke quickly and excitedly in our meetings, often laughing as he disparaged his writing and research. As a participant in my study, he eagerly provided me with a great deal of his written work, completed both before and during the time of my research.
A second-year doctoral student in ECE, Chatri was working toward a degree in computer engineering. He had begun studying computer engineering during his master’s program in Thailand, though he was unable to pinpoint any particular influences that led him to the field. After completing his master’s degree, Chatri worked for four years as a research assistant at a research center in Thailand. He described this work as having different goals than the academic work he was currently involved in:
At here, the research is about the academic research. I mean, academic research is we don’t want our research to be the product, to be the patent. But the job that I worked in Thailand, in that research, we want the product, we want something that people can use, people can see. Not the paper. (September 13, 2002)
In our first meeting, Chatri was beginning his fourth semester of doctoral work. At that time, he joked about not being able to pass his qualifier exam the first time he had taken it, and he was studying to re-take the exam in a few months. As a condition of his scholarship for graduate study, Chatri was required to return to Thailand as a professor after completing his doctoral degree.
At Midwest University, Chatri worked in a lab with a group of nine others, including a professor, two postdoctoral researchers, and several other graduate students. In the year before my study, Chatri worked on an interdisciplinary project related to American Sign Language (ASL), in which his role was to develop computer vision for ASL. When the project’s funding was not renewed, Chatri joined the others in his lab working on a project funded by a car manufacturing company. Chatri’s work in this project focused specifically on the use of robot vision in assembly lines. As an RA, Chatri was required to submit monthly reports to the project supervisor, a postdoctoral student in his lab. Reports from each research team member were then integrated into a monthly report by the project supervisor and sent to the sponsor. During the fifth month of my study, Chatri began looking for a dissertation topic in his lab work. Much of his time during his fifth semester was spent reading research reports and looking for possible approaches to apply to the research problem that he was working on.
Prior to enrolling in WCGS, Chatri had taken only one writing course—an academic writing course that was a component of an English intensive course taken just before coming to the U.S. In this course, he had learned to make rather detailed outlines before writing a complete draft, and he utilized this writing process for several of the writing tasks he engaged in during my study, both in and out of the WCGS classroom. Chatri had also had many professional writing experiences as part of his work in Thailand, co-authoring three papers in English and two in Thai. As he wrote in his first writing assignment for WCGS:
I started to use writing in the real world when I worked as a research assistant in a national research center in Thailand. I had to write electronic mail to contact many foreigners. I also wrote three publications in English submitted to international conferences. At that time, I realized that how important of English for my job. At the same time, I also realized how weak my English skill were especially the writing that I felt uncomfortably when I wrote the publication. (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002)
Perhaps because he had had experience writing professional papers in his native language, Chatri was able to speak quite specifically about differences that he experienced. Though Thai was his first language, he explained that “somehow I think it’s more difficult to write in Thai than in English, because sometimes in English, there is only one word or one sentence to explain that idea. But in Thai, there are many” (September 13, 2002). He also felt that Thai tended to be more informal than English. He said he found it easier to write more formally in English, because “you can use another vocabulary to make it more formal” (September 13, 2002).
At the start of the study, he described grammar as posing the most difficulty for him when writing. He felt that he tended to use simple sentences and had difficulty connecting sentences in a meaningful way. He had also received negative feedback from professors of his doctoral courses, particularly about grammar and sentence phrasing. While he hoped to make improvements in his writing during the WCGS course, his expectations were not high. He knew that writing development was a long-term process that took time and practice, but he still seemed quite uncomfortable with his writing. In his Writer’s Autobiography assignment for WCGS, he wrote that:
. . . I still feel very uncomfortably when I have to write no matter it is a short or long paragraph. I know myself that my writing is difficult to understand because I tend to write the awkward sentences. I think that if I do not improve the writing skill, it can cause me trouble when I write the preliminary report and dissertation, and I hope that WCGS will make my writing skill better. (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002)
This discomfort with his writing ability was evident in most of my discussions with Chatri, though over time his conception of writing seemed to shift somewhat. In the later months of my study, Chatri began to speak of writing in a more complex way. He described it as including the articulation of thoughts into sentences, then organizing those sentences into paragraphs, and convincing the reader that the ideas are important; Chatri felt that he was weak in all of these areas.
Yoshi
A first-year master’s student in ECE, Yoshi arrived in the U.S. just days before WCGS began. Despite the major adjustments he was making—as a newcomer to the U.S. and to American graduate school education, with his wife and newborn baby back in Japan—he graciously agreed to participate in this study. During our regular discussions, Yoshi spoke slowly and articulately about his writing and his professional experiences in his field.
When asked how his research interests had developed, Yoshi explained that his first experiences using a PC in middle school had sparked his interest in computers. While completing his bachelor’s degree in Japan, he decided to study information technology as a mechanical engineering major. He continued directly through school with a master’s degree in logical designing and then began working at a major Japanese computer company. In this company, his specialty was design automation development. As part of his work there, he needed to gain additional knowledge in the fields of electromagnetics and optics, which would be his area of focus at Midwest University. Now in his early 30s, Yoshi’s long-term goal was to be a general manager at his company, so he saw English as a necessary skill. When I first met Yoshi, he explained, “At this point, I felt it difficult to study or work in English, so I have to practice English speaking and writing skills” (September 11, 2002).
His nine years as an engineer in Japan had lent him the type of valuable experience and knowledge that many graduate students lack. In addition to writing regular experimental reports, a bachelor’s thesis, and a master’s thesis, Yoshi had written internal research reports, specification documents, project proposals, and patents. Although most of his academic and professional work was conducted in Japanese, he had nevertheless been required to do a fair amount of reading in English. In our first interview and in his Writer’s Autobiography for WCGS, Yoshi distinguished between his confidence in writing in academic/professional genres versus “essay” writing, which he found particularly difficult. He owed this to “shying away from practices about writing an essay in English” (Writer’s Autobiography, September 2002). During my study, however, Yoshi seized opportunities to practice English speaking, reading, or writing. In his second semester of graduate school, Yoshi enrolled in a non-university English speaking course to improve his oral skills, and he began reading English newspapers on a daily basis, checking his comprehension by later referring to the same news reported in Japanese. As a non-thesis student, Yoshi (like John) was not a member of a research group and did not complete any major independent research projects during the study.
At the beginning of my study and the start of WCGS, Yoshi was also trying out a new process for composing, forcing himself to “think in English” when writing, rather than thinking and writing in Japanese and then translating into English. Yoshi also generally made use of multiple dictionaries because of the advice of a previous English teacher who had told him not to trust one